June 20, 2008: Break It Down, Uncle Drayton

At the beginning of the season, I wrote that I didn’t think that the Astros would be a very good ballclub. I was hardly the only one making this prediction. Houston’s expectations were decidedly low for this ballclub at the beginning of the season, and the Astros sub-par play in the first month of the season seemed to confirm that these expectations were well founded.

But then the Astros went on a tear and actually ran their record all the way to eight games over the .500 mark at one point. At one point (and it really wasn’t that long ago) the ‘Stros were within two games of the first place Chicago Cubs. Somewhere along the way, the Houston media and Astro fans started to believe that we were wrong and now that the team has lost 15-18 and finds itself in dead last in the NL Central (12 games back of the Cubs) people who at the beginning of the year expected incompetence now seem shocked and I don’t understand why.

Granted, this particular stretch of losses has been especially awful, even for the Astros, but during the winning streak did we all not expect the Astros to come back to earth? If not, we certainly should have. To use the words of the great Denny Green, the Astros “are what we thought they were.” The Astros success was a statistical anomaly which, over a long period of time, naturally corrected itself. The Astros are an average, about .500 ballclub and by the end of the season, I suspect that is exactly where they will find themselves.

Now that the Astros deficit in the Central has reached double digits, I think it’s time for the decision makers within the Astros organization (so general manager Ed Wade and Uncle Drayton) to take a good hard look at the product they are putting on the field. An objective look at the organization will reveal a terribly depleted farm system along with a baseball squad with no pitching. Brandon Backe might be a great guy, but he is not a very good pitcher, and the rest of the staff with the case of Wandy and Roy is made up of pretty mediocre arms as well. The pitching problem isn’t going away. Wandy will probably be around for the long haul, but Roy is probably either going to retire or go to another team when his contract expires in two years and the rest of the pitchers are either too old or too crappy to be around in the future. Making this problem more frightening is that the Astros have no viable pitching prospects at any level of their minor league system. None. Not even one.

These problems are fairly easy to diagnose, but curing them will be far more difficult. The fans will urge Drayton to spend more money on free agents, particularly arms, but he should resist this urge. The free agent pitching market these days is full of overpriced average pitchers and not a lot of good deals. Teams generally don’t let their aces get away, and on the rare occasion that an ace actually does become available, the Yankees or Red Sox snatch them up. Creating a solid pitching staff must be done from the ground up. To create a good, championship caliber pitching staff (and that should be the goal) the Astros need to stock the minor leagues with quality young arms and they need to develop them. Since the Astros have drafted horribly, this won’t be easy. But the organization needs to start repeating the minor league system right now, and that means putting Roy Oswalt on the trading block. If the Astros play it right, I truly believe that Roy O, even pitching as poorly as he has this season, commands a king’s ransom of prospects. Valverede might also command a few solid prospects if the market is right. If the right offers present themselves, the Astros must pull the trigger and sell, even if the product suffers in the short term. The time has come to break it down. It will be painful because doing so will mean that the Astros won’t be very good for a while, but frankly, the goal should not to be to make the playoffs but to win championships. Through free agency, the ‘Stros might be able to put some band-aids on these problems and put a decent product on the field for the next couple of seasons but as a fan, I would far rather suffer a few bad seasons to create a real, viable contender than continue going down this road of mediocrity. Break it down and rebuild it, Uncle Drayton.