2020 astros offseason

[henrygandorf 29189]

31 minutes ago, Zwylde said:

In 2017, the Houston Astros stopped striking out. That wasn’t the only reason why the team went from 84 wins to 101 and catapulted from finishing third in the American League West in 2016 to winning the 2017 World Series.

i haven't read this whole article yet, but this sentence pissed me off right at the beginning.  they're obviously trying to create the narrative that we started cheating in 2017 which is why we had such a drastic turnaround.  "catapulted" from third place, etc.

by all accounts, we choked our way out of an alcs appearance, if not more, in 2015.  2016 was the outlier here, in the 5 year stretch.

[HtownHorn 14674]

4 minutes ago, RGBIII said:

Disagree entirely. Front office disruption will be fixed well before 2022, payroll is solid and Crane is willing to spend, Farm is struggling but that can turn around quickly with the right evaluation team. Losing 4 draft picks is nowhere near a death sentence, that’s very dramatic. Braves lost 13 international signings when their shit happened and that’s barely a footnote now. Who knows what will happen years from now but if the Astros struggle it won’t be because of the loss of 4 minor leaguers

Is your friend getting caught up in any of this?

[HtownHorn 14674]

Just now, henrygandorf said:

i haven't read this whole article yet, but this sentence pissed me off right at the beginning.  they're obviously trying to create the narrative that we started cheating in 2017 which is why we had such a drastic turnaround.  "catapulted" from third place, etc.

by all accounts, we choked our way out of an alcs appearance, if not more, in 2015.  2016 was the outlier here, in the 5 year stretch.

We also choked a 2nd half lead away in 2016.

[EastTexan 662]

30 minutes ago, Saint Tacky said:

So, how do you explain the Astros hitting better on the road with no "system" and when they didn't know what was coming?

Yea. Just saw MLB Network do a comparison. Cheating fuckers.

[henrygandorf 29189]

1 minute ago, UTexasFight said:

Just saying we lost 4 minor leaguers is also very dramatic

It’s your top two draft picks two years in a row, which with the previous regime in place virtually meant 4 major leaguers.

No, it’s not a death sentence, but you basically just cut 4 future major leaguers from the Astros.
 

considering how young we are on offense, it should hit us softer than it would other teams.  also the fact that the picks will likely be in the bottom 5.

we gotta be smart with international signings, and make sure picks 3-10 count.  i would assume more college guys, hitters that are ready to make an impact or get traded.

go look at how we drafted (and signed/didn't sign) guys from 2001-2011 for what the bottom really looks like. 

it sucks, but it's not the end of the world.

[Asithappens 974]

38 minutes ago, Zwylde said:

https://newrepublic.com/article/155863/houston-astros-cheaters-2017-world-series-mckinsey-problem?utm_content=buffercc56d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

In 2017, the Houston Astros stopped striking out. That wasn’t the only reason why the team went from 84 wins to 101 and catapulted from finishing third in the American League West in 2016 to winning the 2017 World Series. They upgraded the lineup at a few crucial spots: Franchise cornerstone Alex Bregman took over at third base and certified competent baseball guy Yuli Gurriel at first, and they ground their way from subcromulent to perfectly cromulent at catcher. Justin Verlander, acquired in the last seconds before the trade deadline, pitched like a vengeful demigod from the moment he arrived; other starting pitchers ably filled gaps in the bullpen during the playoffs; and all the hitters in the lineup who mattered hit a bit better than they had before. The Astros looked like not just the best team in baseball but one that might fill that role for another half-decade or so.

That success seemed all the more remarkable in light of how bad the Astros had been just a few years earlier. The abjectly terrible Astros teams of the early 2010s were bad by design, but any team that loses two out of every three games for three straight seasons tends to stick in the mind. General manager Jeff Luhnow, a former McKinsey consultant whom the Astros poached from the Cardinals back in 2012, had efficiently torched the middling and mid-priced roster he inherited while painstakingly putting together a years-long effort to remake the team’s farm system. What emerged after those years of meticulous and intentional awfulness was something like the perfect contemporary baseball roster—deep and talented and anchored by veteran stars who stubbornly refused to decline, but primarily built around and upon young players the team drafted during its years at the bottom. Those players would for years continue to be wildly underpaid relative to their production, thanks to the way MLB’s salary structure works. That last cost-saving data point is the sort of thing that baseball fans have been conditioned during the arbitrage-obsessed Moneyball era to regard as an objective good; executives and owners tend to use words like “flexibility” or “sustainability” to describe this approach, and many fans have come to adopt the same market-savvy argot. Prioritizing that sort of thing and using that sort of language were things that Luhnow did very well.

Luhnow was a true McKinsey consultant’s consultant, which is to say that he was secretive and a little smug. He reliably kept outsiders—a group that included, for years of his tenure, even the players in his employ—on a need-to-know basis when it came to the work that he and a “decision sciences” team were doing as they collected and parsed every available bead of data that the game could provide. He was so devoted to efficiency that he engaged consultants from McKinsey to audit the organization (and, inevitably, to disrupt the org chart) every year. The collective mission was to ensure that the Astros brand of Moneyball would stay artfully (yet efficiently!) poised on the bleeding edge of managerially minded innovation.

All perfectly bloodless in the management consulting way, then, but not without some carnage. There were stories that the front office culture Luhnow had created in Houston was not just cutthroat and paranoid, but increasingly high-handed and stridently amoral. Luhnow overruled junior staffers and acquired a talented young closer at a discount while that pitcher served a 75-game suspension for domestic violence; he pushed unsuccessfully to sign Luke Heimlich, a college pitcher whose prospect status evaporated when it was revealed that he was a convicted sex offender who preyed on minors. But the results spoke for themselves.

 

---

Take that strikeout thing, for instance. In 2016, an improving but not yet great Astros team struck out 1,452 times. That was a whole lot—roughly one out of every three outs the team made that year came by strikeout, and only three big league teams struck out more often. Seven of the nine players who most frequently filled out the team’s lineup card struck out at least 100 times. Jake Marisnick, the team’s reliably damp-looking top reserve, struck out 83 times in just 311 plate appearances. Trends in the game had normalized this to an extent, if not necessarily at this scale; strikeouts were fine, so long as there were a sufficient number of home runs built into the deal. In 2016, the team hit 198.

During the team’s championship season a year later, Marisnick was even more whiff-prone—he struck out an astonishing 90 times in just 259 plate appearances—but everything else changed. Only five other players on the roster struck out more than that, and only two of those reached triple digits in whiffs. As a whole, the team struck out just 1,087 times, while walking slightly less often—509 walks, as compared to 543—than they had the year before. The Astros had hit .247 and reached base at a .319 clip in 2016; in 2017, those numbers leaped to .282 and .346, respectively. The World Champion Astros hit 40 more homers than the Third Place but Spunky Astros had the year before.  is not evidence of anything in particular, let alone anything sinister, that a World Series champion would hit better than a team that finished in third place. Players improve, and lineups change, and both of those things happened here. But it’s no more surprising to learn, given the dramatic shift in the numbers, that it later turned out that the Astros were cheating: videotaping the opposing catchers’ pitch signals and then using a trash can near the team dugout to pound out, semaphore-style, a message to the hitter about the pitch about to arrive. Given the combination of reverence and fear with which the rest of the sport regarded Luhnow and his McKinsey-fied team of weaponized quants—which was unforgivably dickish but undeniably ahead of the curve, already deftly working angles and analyzing data that other teams couldn’t even see yet—the overt oafishness of the Astros’ 2017 cheating scheme came as no small shock.

 

To see how shabby it all was, you can watch the team’s 2017 championship video, which shows star shortstop Carlos Correa skipping back up the clubhouse tunnel in triumph. He dances right past a folding table with a laptop on it, and past a gray plastic garbage can. Reporting by The Athletic last week revealed that whenever the Astros were at bat during home games in 2017, a team employee sat at that table, staring at that screen—and would signal the news that an off-speed pitch was coming by having at that garbage can with a bat, loud enough that the hitter could hear it and change his approach accordingly. Baseball is still very difficult, and this bit of foreknowledge makes it only a little bit easier. But a pitch that would once have been a third strike might instead be fouled off. It’s a small advantage, but a real one—another chance not to strike out, at the very least.

 

“We now have so much technology around the ballpark and information about the trajectory of the ball, the physics of the bat swing, the physics and the biomechanics of the pitcher’s delivery,” Luhnow told McKinsey Quarterly in a two-part interview back in 2018. “So many components now that advanced sciences have worked into our game. It’s, quite frankly, overwhelming in terms of the amount of information that we have access to and intimidating to figure out how to analyze all that information, work through it, and come up with the takeaways.”

McKinsey is a powerful and profitable global force, largely because the organization is very good at solving problems in a very particular way.

If you approach the 2017 scandal with this data-driven model of team success in mind—without any of the folklore or culture or other subjectivities of the game in the mix—Luhnow’s job in Houston becomes just another McKinsey engagement. It’s one more in a long global roster of company makeovers, with management bringing in the smartest and best-credentialed people available to find an organizational solution to a dynamic and difficult set of problems for a client. The other stuff, the culture and tradition or whatever, is other stuff, and so, by definition, well outside the scope of the engagement. McKinsey is a powerful and profitable global force, largely because the organization is very good at solving problems in a very particular way. Management consultants work for management, after all, and solve problems in ways that benefit the people paying them.

But the McKinsey way has become so influential in global management circles as much for what it overlooks as for what it includes: It refuses to sweat anything it chooses to regard as the other stuff. The long list of howlingly malign global players that have benefited from McKinsey’s work, from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Enron to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, is a testament to how adept it is at both targeted troubleshooting and selective omission. The idea is to solve the problem, and that is the job even when the problem is Dissidents Keep Tweeting Rude Things About Our Royal Family, or Laws Make It Difficult to Obtain Money at Our Desired Volume.

“McKinsey is capitalism distilled,” an anonymous former consultant for the firm wrote in a scathing essay for Current Affairs:

 

And as capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires.

It’s easy to see how this focus, and the larger worldview informing it, appeals to well-heeled establishment types of every political stripe. The allure runs deeper than the conditioned boardroom response to a team of Ivy types bearing proprietary intellectual property. McKinsey presents itself as the most luxurious and state-of-the-art solution to the ancient business problem of squeezing the maximum return out of people at the minimum cost: Like other such companies that advertise in airport terminals, the brand’s broader vibe is both coolly sensible and steeply expensive. That is to say, the elegant McKinsey finessing maneuver is to carry out remorselessly brutal work that bears a real human cost, but in such a way that it doesn’t look brutal. In this sense, McKinsey sells not just solutions but a certain sleek aesthetic. This, too, arrives as a suite of solutions duly outfitted with its own patois: Luhnow and the former McKinsey consultant Pete Buttigieg use the same totemic catchphrases—big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, counterinsurgency—to describe the respective futures of running a competitive baseball team and a moderately sized American city.

It is striking, but not really surprising, that all this well-credentialed cleverness and machine-tooled efficiency tends to deliver the same solution, which amounts to more for the client and less for everyone else; that is the goal, after all. So it will likely not surprise you that Luhnow’s Astros have been credited with originating MLB’s recently announced plans to eliminate 42 of 160 minor league baseball teams, most of them in smaller cities. MLB currently faces several lawsuits concerning the appalling pay and conditions in the minor leagues. That’s a problem that could be solved with comparatively small expenditures—or by simply eliminating a whole lot of jobs. Which would you expect to be a consultant’s preferred recommendation?

It is still true that no organization in baseball works harder to gather more data, or parse it more effectively, than the Astros. They are likely to receive a fairly severe punishment, by MLB standards, for the cheating they’ve done. Still, the organization itself and the values it has evinced—in the absence of what are conventionally understood to be values—seem unlikely to change. The people in charge will continue to work on solving the problems they care about and continue not caring about the rest. There’s no reckoning coming, but there is something perversely satisfying and darkly apropos about seeing where all those McKinsey-scented insights and learnings (to use another corporate consultancy term of art) wound up. All those merciless cullings and endless organizational refinements, all that data and all the brilliant minds and machines working it over, all resolving to some underpaid grunt in a folding chair whaling away on a garbage can because the members of the team’s brain trust of thoroughbred data nerds simply took it for granted that they could get away with it. All that data, all those numbers, all those shifting variables continually delivered the same answer: What are you going to do, stop us?

tl:dr

Luhnow is a cheating piece of shit.

[RGBIII 22838]

1 minute ago, UTexasFight said:

Just saying we lost 4 minor leaguers is also very dramatic

It’s your top two draft picks two years in a row, which with the previous regime in place virtually meant 4 major leaguers.

No, it’s not a death sentence, but you basically just cut 4 future major leaguers from the Astros.
 

There are no guarantees on those guys...y’all forget about Brady Aiken and Mark Appel quickly.
 

Tucker hasn’t established himself yet (he will), Dax Cameron isn’t lighting the world on fire in Detroit, Whitley struggles last year, Bukauskas and Beer both have the jury’s still out on them. Correa and Bregman (springer was Ed Wade)were luhnow guys, the rest haven’t made an impact on the big leagues yet.

 

I’m not trying to say that this wasn’t a big loss, of course it is, but to call it a death sentence when we have full international bonus money and an owner willing to go to the luxury tax plus an already great Major League team with core guys locked up to long term deals is wildly dramatic. Draft picks, especially ones at the back end of the round are nowhere near guarantees and while they are a loss, they are nowhere near franchise ruinous like y’all are acting

[Rockethorn1978 6072]

Does this mean we will actually sign someone now?

[RGBIII 22838]

9 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

Is your friend getting caught up in any of this?

Nah he’s not with the team

[Saint Tacky 1614]

14 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

This is two completely different things. Cora was on the Astros in 2017 when the Red Sox and Yankees got popped for using smart watches, which lead to Manfred's original statement to all teams. Cora brought the system with him in 2018. The Red Sox are going to hammered at the same level the Astros did, and Cora is likely getting a lifetime ban.

I phrased it poorly.  My bad.  I still maintain that had the Red Sox received the penalty for using smart watches and technology to steal signs that the Astros just received, we would not be sitting here in the midst of this fiasco.   But, they didn't get the same penalty because they were the Red Sox.  

[MonkeyDoughnut 10232]

23 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Report said that it would be too difficult to determine the level of involvement to assess fair penalties to each player, and several players play for different teams now anyways.

Wow, so if enough of them are cheating they are safe as long as they stick together.

[Beau Vine 54209]

6 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

Just saying we lost 4 minor leaguers is also very dramatic

It’s your top two draft picks two years in a row, which with the previous regime in place virtually meant 4 major leaguers.

No, it’s not a death sentence, but you basically just cut 4 future major leaguers from the Astros.
 

Well, it did when they were tanking and drafting at the top of the round.  Last year they drafted low and got a college catcher who OPSed 730 in the NY-Penn league and a college SS who slugged .294 in the Midwest League.  In 2018, they got Beer and a HS pitcher who made it to the MWLeague last season and has a career WHIP of over 2. 

I will eat my hat if those three have significant ML careers. 

When you're at the bottom of the draft, there's very little chance of getting a superstar.  That's why not having international money taken away was such a big deal -- that's where the really good teams are able to get future superstars. 

[MAROON 445]

2 hours ago, Iceman said:

LOLz.  It took Jerry Jones 5 years to fire a coach who didn't do jack shit on the won-loss column.  

 I meant more along the lines of Jerry Jones thinking he could fire Jimmy Johnson and the championships would keep on coming for years.  Sure he got one with a place holder but he's never been able to admit the Jimmy was the brains and the franchise has been shit for 20 years.  Well Lunhow is the brains, and he's not easily replaced.

[Beau Vine 54209]

15 minutes ago, Mo Horn said:

So, we shouldn't expect any off-season trades or moves? 

MIght as well sign some free agents and push those draft pick penalties further into the future...

<checks list of remaining free agents>

Yeesh, never mind.

[JimmyHoffa 1188]

8 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

Never mind the Astros improved at C, 1B, 3B, RF, and DH between 2016 and 2017.

 

Look, I get it your favorite team got busted, but the amount of evidence that was found and the fact that all teams were warned about it and they continued to do it into the playoffs, sorry there isn't an excuse they were just greedy assumed they wouldn't get caught and said fuck it. 

Well they got caught. 

 

 

 

[RGBIII 22838]

2 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Well, it did when they were tanking and drafting at the top of the round.  Last year they drafted low and got a college catcher who OPSed 730 in the NY-Penn league and a college SS who slugged .294 in the Midwest League.  In 2018, they got Beer and a HS pitcher who made it to the MWLeague last season and has a career WHIP of over 2. 

I will eat my hat if those three have significant ML careers. 

When you're at the bottom of the draft, there's very little chance of getting a superstar.  That's why not having international money taken away was such a big deal -- that's where the really good teams are able to get future superstars. 

Hell even the top of the round is a crap shoot, for every Correa and Bregman there is an Appel and Aiken. Baseball draft is the biggest crapshoot there is, there’s just no predicting it. Sure it hurts that we don’t get four scratch off lotto tickets, I’d rather have a chance to win but they are still lottery tickets

[David Dennison 18851]

1 minute ago, JimmyHoffa said:

 

Look, I get it your favorite team got busted, but the amount of evidence that was found and the fact that all teams were warned about it and they continued to do it into the playoffs, sorry there isn't an excuse they were just greedy assumed they wouldn't get caught and said fuck it. 

Well they got caught. 

 

 

 

Yep. Got caught.

Still World Series champions. Always will be.

[thetruth 149]

https://twitter.com/jareddiamond/status/1216849225864138754?s=20

Luhnow saying he had nothing to do with it, and the bench coach orchestrated all of it. So long Cora. 

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

 

[clapclapclap 9000]

^^^  Luhnow is so FOS.

Anyways...

Hey visiting Rangers fans, while you're here, a quick question:  2011 was Luhnow's final year with the Cardinals, do you think David Freese knew what pitch was coming?

Edited January 13, 2020 by clapclapclap

[JimmyHoffa 1188]

3 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Yep. Got caught.

Still World Series champions. Always will be.

 

100%. And for fans and players I am sure they don't give a shit about their GM and Manager being fired, and losing 4 draft picks, who cares! 

[Rockethorn1978 6072]

I hope crane findS a great GM soon. 

[Guadaloopy 10960]

How about Bochy comes out of retirement for the chance at managing the current roster?  That’ll ease the sting for me.  Get a well-respected guy and proven winner. 

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

1 minute ago, Guadaloopy said:

How about Bochy comes out of retirement for the chance at managing the current roster?  That’ll ease the sting for me.  Get a well-respected guy and proven winner. 

And he's a former Astro

[Pimphand 5735]

Bruce Bochy was always my stretch goal for Astros manager.

Fuck we'd have won the 2019 World Series no questions asked or at least Gerritt Cole would have lost it for us but we wouldn't be in this purgatory shitbox we are currently in.

[henrygandorf 29189]

when was the last time a new manager took over a 107 win world-series team?  or a new gm?

i want names.  i want them now or i want them eventually.

[Beau Vine 54209]

31 minutes ago, Seasick Sailor said:

 

He is a lying sack of shit. 

"The efforts involving the replay review room staff were mentioned in at least two emails sent to Luhnow." -- from the report.

Mr. "Zero Tolerance" knows nothing about integrity.

[Guadaloopy 10960]

When is Fiers’ presser where he gives back his ring and playoff share?

[runthebone 7967]

They'll never pry 2017 from my cold, dead kung fu grip

[TexArcher 37771]

47 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

How about Bochy comes out of retirement for the chance at managing the current roster?  That’ll ease the sting for me.  Get a well-respected guy and proven winner. 

Yes, please.

[Js1 85300]

19 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

He is a lying sack of shit. 

"The efforts involving the replay review room staff were mentioned in at least two emails sent to Luhnow." -- from the report.

Mr. "Zero Tolerance" knows nothing about integrity.

I don’t read my emails either 

[runthebone 7967]

Yes, New Republic--always my #1 baseball source.

[yoladu 4093]

probably been posted elsewhere..

 

but you can hear the trash can banging here.

 

Edited January 13, 2020 by yoladu

[Rockethorn1978 6072]

1 hour ago, HtownHorn said:

Is your friend getting caught up in any of this?

So does this mean the Correa trade is dead or??

[GHOSTUSER 361]

36 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

He is a lying sack of shit. 

"The efforts involving the replay review room staff were mentioned in at least two emails sent to Luhnow." -- from the report.

Mr. "Zero Tolerance" knows nothing about integrity.

I will take Luhnow’s word over that agenda driven dreck from the commissioner’s office. He will bounce back and lead another team to a championship. One of the smartest men in all of sports who got absolutely railroaded.

[Rockethorn1978 6072]

I can’t believe they thought banging a trash can wouldn’t get picked up on haha. So dumb.

[Pasken 1309]

1 hour ago, RGBIII said:

There are no guarantees on those guys...y’all forget about Brady Aiken and Mark Appel quickly.
 

Um, the Brady Aiken pick became Alex Bregman when the Astros didn't sign Aiken. In 5 years, the Astros drafted Springer, Correa and Bregman in the 1st round. It's hard to imagine this team without those players. They also got Tucker in the 1st the same year as Bregman.

[hookem48 4687]

1 hour ago, clapclapclap said:

^^^  Luhnow is so FOS.

Anyways...

Hey visiting Rangers fans, while you're here, a quick question:  2011 was Luhnow's final year with the Cardinals, do you think David Freese knew what pitch was coming?

everyone knew what pitch was coming 

[RGBIII 22838]

13 minutes ago, Pasken said:

Um, the Brady Aiken pick became Alex Bregman when the Astros didn't sign Aiken. In 5 years, the Astros drafted Springer, Correa and Bregman in the 1st round. It's hard to imagine this team without those players. They also got Tucker in the 1st the same year as Bregman.

So they had 4 chances at top 2 picks and got 2 right...imagine the hit ratio on 4 chances at picks ranging between 26-60 

[Asithappens 974]

29 minutes ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

I will take Luhnow’s word over that agenda driven dreck from the commissioner’s office. He will bounce back and lead another team to a championship. One of the smartest men in all of sports who got absolutely railroaded.

How do you know that Luhnow got railroaded? 

I mean, is this along the lines of evidence showing that Iran was going to bomb 4 embassies?

[Beau Vine 54209]

51 minutes ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

I will take Luhnow’s word over that agenda driven dreck from the commissioner’s office. He will bounce back and lead another team to a championship. One of the smartest men in all of sports who got absolutely railroaded.

Well, you've already amply demonstrated that you have zero sense and make horrific decisions, so your willingness to take his word for it isn't surprising in the least.  

Edited January 14, 2020 by Beau Vine

[Beau Vine 54209]

1 hour ago, Js1 said:

I don’t read my emails either 

If you chose not to be informed, you have still been informed.  

I believe that's in a Rush song.

[Pasken 1309]

40 minutes ago, RGBIII said:

So they had 4 chances at top 2 picks and got 2 right...imagine the hit ratio on 4 chances at picks ranging between 26-60 

3 and they hit on 2. If you don't sign someone then you get a compensation pick 1 spot lower the following year. You also had Springer who they grabbed with the 11th pick. In 2015, you also picked up Kyle Tucker at #5 who had 100 RBIs and 34 HR in AAA last year and Daz Cameron at 37 who the Astros used to get Verlander. 

Edited January 14, 2020 by Pasken

[DaysOff 7947]

The MLB penalties should have been more severe.
This was organized, sophisticated, electronically-based cheating on a scale way, way beyond "normal" sign stealing. Which, I think most would say, wink wink nudge nudge, is a part of the game. But when you start going way beyond with shit like the Astros (and it looks like other teams) were doing? No. 

It was dumbasses guessing and banging on a trash can. Calm down Ranger.

[RGBIII 22838]

23 minutes ago, Pasken said:

3 and they hit on 2. If you don't sign someone then you get a compensation pick 1 spot lower the following year. You also had Springer who they grabbed with the 11th pick. In 2015, you also picked up Kyle Tucker at #5 who had 100 RBIs and 34 HR in AAA last year and Daz Cameron at 37 who the Astros used to get Verlander. 

Wade drafted and signed Springer. And they still took Aiken #1, I know the rule. It’s still a miss. Either way my point is that draft picks aren’t close to guaranteed

[Beau Vine 54209]

Top 10 picks have had an extremely low bust rate in the last decade plus.  

It's outside of that where it's a huge crapshoot... and that's where these Astros picks would have been. 

[NowThis 931]

have any players confirmed this?  Does 2017 get a * from fans outside of Houston? Does this thread have the technical breakdown of hwo it was done?

[Rockethorn1978 6072]

8 minutes ago, NowThis said:

have any players confirmed this?  Does 2017 get a * from fans outside of Houston? Does this thread have the technical breakdown of hwo it was done?

I don’t give a fuck what rangerette and other fans think lol.

[WBT 20561]

Quote

In 2017, the Houston Astros stopped striking out. That wasn’t the only reason why the team went from 84 wins to 101 and catapulted from finishing third in the American League West in 2016 to winning the 2017 World Series.

To add to HG's post...It must have been the same players in 2017 as in 2016 too.  Must have been cheating.  No one could have seen that coming.

Wait, from Jan 2017:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-astros-have-a-completely-new-look/

Quote

As the Astros have built a better order, there’s also been a rather significant side effect. I can’t tell you whether it’s been intentional, or whether it’s been a coincidence. But if you can believe it, the Astros are going to make contact. In fact, they project to be very nearly the best contact-hitting lineup in the game.

This is something that fell out of my research on the Royals Monday afternoon. I looked at all the team projections because I wanted to see where the Royals would rank in various stats, but that same process allowed me to evaluate all the other clubs. I already knew the Astros had made a number of offseason changes, but this particular change hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t normally associate the Astros with putting the ball in play.

My stat of choice here is non-pitcher strikeout rate. Shouldn’t be anything controversial about that, and it lets me put AL and NL teams on the same scale. For some background, Jeff Luhnow took over the Astros following the 2011 season. In 2012, the Astros had the second-highest team strikeout rate in baseball. In 2013, their rate was the highest, and in 2014, it was the highest again. In 2015, it went back to second-highest, and then in 2016, it was fourth-highest. That was their best contact-hitting lineup in years. In terms of making contact, on a relative scale, it sucked.

And 2017? Again, I looked at everyone. Again, I considered the Steamer projections. The Astros’ team strikeout rate projects to be the second-lowest. They’re actually more or less tied with the Red Sox for first place. 

Getting rid of Jason Castro, Colby Rasmus, and Carlos Gomez will do that.

Edited January 14, 2020 by WBT

[Murfdogg21 4412]

14 minutes ago, NowThis said:

 Does this thread have the technical breakdown of hwo it was done?

The Taco Caballo fatties in sombreros by the gas pump in center use binoculars, then radioed the sign to Orbit, who wrote the pitch on a hotdog he rolled down the tunnel to Beltran. Not a fast ball = he banged the trashcan. Fastball = he ate the hot dog.