2018-2019 Astros Offseason Thread

Seasick Sailor · March 20, 2019

Astros Pay Alex Bregman Now to Avoid Paying Him Later

by Craig Edwards

Coming on the heels of Mike Trout’s humongous contract extension, news broke that Alex Bregman and the Astros had agreed to an extension of their own worth $100 million, with Mark Berman first to report the deal. While the Trout contract is the biggest of all time, the Bregman deal is not without intrigue. Bregman, who was still a full year away from arbitration, is the first star-level player to sign a pre-arb contract extension in nearly five years. The last player at or above Bregman’s level of production to sign a contract like this was Trout, who signed his six-year, $144.5 million contract back in 2014.

Since 2014, the number of contract extensions buying out free agent years has decreased. When Luis Severino signed his deal earlier this offseason, Jeff Sullivan ran the numbers on the quantity of extensions by offseason, providing this graph.

In the five years leading up to the 2014 season, there were about 25 or so extensions per season, and in the five years since, the numbers have dropped in half. Since Severino signed, we have had Jose Leclerc, and now Alex Bregman, but those extension figures aren’t going up a ton this year. It isn’t just that the number of extensions have gone down; the quality of players signing those extensions has declined as well. We saw Trout’s big deal ahead of the 2014 season; the year before, Buster Posey, who was Super-2 arbitration eligible, signed an even bigger contract covering more seasons. It was Andrew McCutchen the year before Posey. Matt Carpenter and Jason Kipnis, who were several years older than Bregman but also coming off very good years, signed six-year deals with options guaranteeing themselves around $50 million each.

We haven’t seen these types of extensions as much in the past five years. Two years ago, Dave Cameron wondered if the early extensions for stars were a dying breed.

Since the end of the World Series, eight players in the “0-3” service time bucket — meaning pre-arbitration players and Super-Two guys, all of whom are at least four years from free agency — have signed long-term extensions with their current teams. Piscotty rounded out the group, which also includes Rougned Odor, Jose Ramirez, Roberto Perez, Tim Anderson, Kevin Kiermaier, Ender Inciarte, and Odubel Herrera.

…

This group is a mix of players with a decent amount of risk (Odor, Anderson, Herrera), guys who weren’t going to get paid for their skills in arbitration anyway (Kiermaier, Inciarte, Perez), and perceived lower-upside types who have performed well but aren’t seen as future stars (Piscotty, Ramirez). Kiermaier is the only one who could currently be seen as a legitimate franchise player, and he’s a defense-first guy who has had injury problems, so his market value might not be a great match for his overall value.

Jose Ramirez has become a star, but he wasn’t one when he signed his deal guaranteeing him only around $25 million. The year before the article, the early extensions were limited to Kolten Wong and Gregory Polanco, while back in 2015, Juan Lagares, Adam Eaton, and pre-stardom Christian Yelich signed long-term deals. Last year, Felipe Vazquez, Paul DeJong, Scott Kingery, and Ketel Marte meant another star-less extension season, and so far this year, Jorge Polanco, Max Kepler, Whit Merrifield, Leclerc, and Brandon Lowe are signing early extensions.

The Alex Bregman deal not only keeps his current salary the same and helps the Astros for competitive balance tax purposes this season, but it provides Bregman a $10 million signing bonus to get him more money now, then covers three years of arbitration from 2020 through 2022 plus two free agent years in 2023 and 2024. The star-level early extension might not be extinct, but $100 million is a high price to pay to lock up just two free agent seasons.

Bregman’s rise to stardom has been rather sudden. He was taken with the No. 2 overall pick in 2015 and had just a few hundred minor league plate appearances before appearing on prospect lists, with Keith Law ranking him the highest at 19th. A power surge in the first half of 2016 caused Law to make him the top prospectin the minors by midseason, while our own Eric Longenhagen gave him a 65 future value at the time, making him one of the five best prospects in baseball. There’s not much time to build up hype for a prospect who hits the majors 13 months after his debut, but Bregman was immediately above-average and had another very good 3.5-WAR season in 2017 as the Astros won the World Series. Last year, he took another step forward with more walks than strikeouts, a near .400 OBP, a 157 wRC+, and 7.5 WAR in a campaign that would see him finish fifth in the MVP voting.

He turns 25 years old at the end of this month and his 5.5 WAR projection is fifth among all position players, trailing only Trout, Mookie Betts, Ramirez, and Francisco Lindor. Bregman is a star and one of the very best players in the game, but it is still unusual for the Astros to commit so much money for two free agent seasons. If we look at Betts’ first-year arbitration salary from a year ago at $10.5 million as a comp, unless Bregman wins MVP, he’s probably looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million for three years of arbitration. If Bregman were to win MVP in the next couple seasons, that figure could escalate to as high as $60 million or $70 million from 2020 through 2022. That means Houston is paying $25 million to $30 million per season for those free agent years, which won’t even begin until four years from now.

Bregman probably wasn’t desperate for money before this deal, having received $6 million to sign with the Astros a little over three years ago. Houston needed to come up with a guarantee that would change his life, and they did. Bregman is giving away one less year of free agency than Trout did in the deal he signed five years ago, but he now won’t be a free agent until after he turns 30, which could significantly reduce his long-term earnings. Houston is making a large bet on Bregman, but they no longer have to worry about missing any of the young star’s prime seasons. They won’t have to decide after Bregman’s age-28 season whether to offer him a 10-year contract and have pushed that decision down the road. The Astros aren’t just paying $100 million, including $60 million for two free agent seasons, they are paying that guarantee so as not to pay another $200 million for a potential Bregman decline in his 30s. The guaranteed cost is large, but they are locking in a star for his prime without taking on the risk of his decline.

Johnny Sack · March 20, 2019

20 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

The negative vibes. Why not say he could perform so well that contract value will look like chicken feed when all is said and done?

That's the most likely outcome. By far. But there is some risk he just avoided in taking $100 million guaranteed.

Scraps · March 20, 2019

So there is like a 100mph wind blowing in today and i think our guys have a bet going to see who(if anyone) can hit it out. All are launching shit but none coming close. About 3 of them would probably been gone on a regular day

Correa wins the pot

Fudge Nuggets · March 20, 2019

Team looked pretty darn good today. The guys had a lot of well hit balls that didn’t fall either due to wind, unfortunate player positioning or just bad luck.

tx 3 putt · March 20, 2019

Miley looks ready

henrygandorf · March 20, 2019

1 hour ago, Johnny Sack said:

That's the most likely outcome. By far. But there is some risk he just avoided in taking $100 million guaranteed.

i enjoyed the post because i felt like you listed the potential negative outcomes in order of horribleness. death was 3rd, but "the yips" was 4th.

the math checks out.

Slacks · March 20, 2019

So... If Correa is healthy and plays all star level this season, do the Astros lock him in now? I'd think it's going to take a 6x$35mm per, or more, to get him to sign early vs 2021 FA.

Or am I making shit up?

henrygandorf · March 20, 2019

9 minutes ago, Snacks said:

So... If Correa is healthy and plays all star level this season, do the Astros lock him in now? I'd think it's going to take a 6x$35mm per, or more, to get him to sign early vs 2021 FA.

Or am I making shit up?

the timing is tricky, because of his health. if he's healthy and kicks ass, he'll have leverage. if he isn't and doesn't, we may not want to spend on him.

the real question is whether he wants to stay with this core knowing that tuve and bregs are locked up for over half a decade. if winning is important, that should factor in.

tx 3 putt · March 20, 2019

Springer / Cole / Verlander / Correa

damn, some tough decisions ahead

UTexasFight · March 21, 2019

Specifics on Pressly’s option year (2022)

Pressly’s contract will pay him $8.75 million in each of the 2020 and 2021 seasons. If he makes 60 appearances in each of those seasons, he will automatically trigger a $10-million option for 2022. If he doesn’t, it becomes a club option that’s based on his number of appearances in 2021. The option would be valued at $10 million if he pitched in 40 or more games in ’21, $9 million if 35 to 39 games, $8 million if 30 to 34 games and $7 million if 29 or fewer.

patrickdrinksbeer · March 21, 2019

I'd think it's going to take a 6x$35mm per, or more, to get him to sign early vs 2021 FA.

Or am I making shit up?

If he went .330/50/150 this season, he wouldn’t get a 6x$35M offer

formermav43 · March 21, 2019

1 hour ago, tx 3 putt said:

Springer / Cole / Verlander / Correa

damn, some tough decisions ahead

I let Springer walk, and it’s not that tough a call, IMO.. Unless he’s willing to sign a REALLY team friendly deal.

Edited March 21, 2019 by formermav43

texashorne · March 21, 2019

3 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

I let Springer walk, and it’s not that tough a call, IMO.. Unless he’s willing to sign a REALLY team friendly deal.

So much riding on Tucker and if he lives up to expectations..

runthebone · March 21, 2019

3 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

Springer / Cole / Verlander / Correa

damn, some tough decisions ahead

Not really, it's not our money. Pay them all!

UTexasFight · March 21, 2019

Specifics on Pressly’s option year (2022)

Pressly’s contract will pay him $8.75 million in each of the 2020 and 2021 seasons. If he makes 60 appearances in each of those seasons, he will automatically trigger a $10-million option for 2022. If he doesn’t, it becomes a club option that’s based on his number of appearances in 2021. The option would be valued at $10 million if he pitched in 40 or more games in ’21, $9 million if 35 to 39 games, $8 million if 30 to 34 games and $7 million if 29 or fewer.

And regarding that option year, Rosenthal pointing out this:
Pressly’s deal, according to The Athletic’s Jake Kaplan, also includes a $10 million vesting option that – if he pitches in 60 games in each of the 2020 and ‘21 seasons – would take him beyond Adam Ottavino’s three-year, $27 million free-agent contract.

And had this on Breg’s deal (the 2 F.A. years valued at $28.5M/year per source):

The future market for Bregman
Like all players who agree to extensions, Bregman, 24, signed at something of a discount, giving up two free-agent years in exchange for long-term security. But if the All-Star third baseman outperforms his contract, the Astros could do for him what the Angels did with Trout, ripping up his deal for an even bigger one.

Trout, like Bregman, was a two-plus player when he signed his first extension for $144.5 million. He then received $360 million in his second while still two years away from free agency. Still, even if Bregman does not get a second deal, the idea of him hitting the open market entering his age 31 season is perhaps not as daunting as it might appear.

By that time – we’re talking about the 2024-25 offseason – a number of other players might re-set the market for free agents at a similar age. J.D. Martinez and Paul Goldschmidt each could hit the market this offseason entering their age 32 seasons. Arenado, Giancarlo Stanton and Manny Machado all have opt-outs entering their age 31 campaigns, and George Springer and Aaron Judge both will become free agents at that age.

At the very least, a shorter-term, higher-dollar deal would not be out of the question for Bregman – and again, that’s assuming the Astros even allow him to reach the market. The two free-agent years covered by his deal each are valued at $28.5 million, according to a source. Any new contract likely would be below the $36 million AAV in Trout’s new deal.

Many on the players’ side expect the Trout contract to serve almost as a “soft cap” for other stars going forward. For a player such as Betts to beat Trout’s AAV, he might need to accept a shorter term and/or find a team with significant room under the luxury-tax threshold.

Fudge Nuggets · March 21, 2019

4 hours ago, UTexasFight said:

Specifics on Pressly’s option year (2022)

Pressly’s contract will pay him $8.75 million in each of the 2020 and 2021 seasons. If he makes 60 appearances in each of those seasons, he will automatically trigger a $10-million option for 2022. If he doesn’t, it becomes a club option that’s based on his number of appearances in 2021. The option would be valued at $10 million if he pitched in 40 or more games in ’21, $9 million if 35 to 39 games, $8 million if 30 to 34 games and $7 million if 29 or fewer.

So he can get $10 million if he appears in 60 games two years straight, or he can get the same amount of money for appearing in less games for just one year? I don’t get it.

patrickdrinksbeer · March 21, 2019

first scenario is automatic third year, the second scenario is club option

formermav43 · March 21, 2019

6 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

So he can get $10 million if he appears in 60 games two years straight, or he can get the same amount of money for appearing in less games for just one year? I don’t get it.

One is automatic, the other is the club’s decision.

Mez2 · March 21, 2019

Breggy article from Ben Reiter

his story appears in the March 25, 2019, issue of Sports Illustrated. For more great storytelling and in-depth analysis, subscribe to the magazine—and get up to 94% off the cover price. Click here for more.

The portion of the Torah known as Tazria-Metzora describes the ancient rituals God commanded Jewish people to undertake were they afflicted with a variety of unfortunate ailments, including scabrous skin infections, eruptive plague and penile discharge. It’s a little awkward, to say the least, for most of the 13-year-olds who discover that this is the passage they must chant and explain to their gathered families—and, even worse, to their also 13-year-old friends (penile discharge!)—at their bar or bat mitzvah service.

But if the boy assigned that portion by the Hebrew calendar wished he had gotten one involving, say, Moses and the Red Sea instead, he didn’t show it at Congregation Albert in Albuquerque on April 21, 2007. “We all need to realize that there are people out there who may be suffering and we all need to try to do our part to relieve that suffering when we can,” the 13-year-old, wearing a pin-striped suit, confidently read from his six-page, double-spaced speech. Two pages later, in a section on top of which he’d scrawled SLOWLY, he reached the heart of his message.

“When I think about the future and how I can make a difference in the world, I want to be able to use my love of the game of baseball to be a good example and a good person,” he said. “I want to be a professional athlete who plays for the love of the game, never quits trying to give my best and is a good role model for all of the kids who look up to baseball players.”

The congregants must have smiled. It was a dream harbored by millions of boys at that optimistic age, just before hard realities arrive for almost all of them, Jewish or not. This particular one stood a head shorter than his mother, who herself was only 5' 4", and he struggled to hold the Torah’s moderately heavy scroll. But Alexander David Bregman was completely unabashed about his intentions. “There never was a Plan B,” he says.

To fulfill Plan A, Bregman came to rely on a more modern text. One day, when he was in high school, he happened upon the YouTube video How Bad Do You Want It? (Success). It depicted a punishing workout performed by running back Giavanni Ruffin, set to rousing music and an oration delivered by a motivational speaker named Eric Thomas, also known as ET The Hip-Hop Preacher.

Bregman was enthralled. The video now has 45 million views, many thousands of which belong to him. He watched it every school day before going out at 5 a.m. to run up sand dunes until he puked, then viewed it again after returning home at 10 p.m. with bloody palms from the many hours of batting practice he’d taken. He’d recite the Hip-Hop Preacher’s sermon to push himself through his adolescent exhaustion. When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful. And, You gotta want to be successful so bad that you forget to eat. And, If you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful.

Just 12 years after his bar mitzvah, and though he has only grown to 5' 10" (maybe 5' 9"), Bregman has already come through on most of the improbable promises he made at Congregation Albert. He is the third baseman for the Astros. He has won a World Series ring, earned an All-Star Game MVP award and finished fifth in last season’s AL MVP voting and, on Mar. 18 signed a six-year, $100 million deal. At 24, he is, says Houston manager A.J. Hinch, “a monster within the game.”

In other words, Alex Bregman is already a star. Now, though, he wants to become famous. In baseball in 2019, those are no longer the same thing—which would have been a surprise to his 13-year-old self, who vowed to not just be a major leaguer but an influential one. “How do we make baseball as marketable as the NBA and NFL?” Bregman asks today. “How do we blow this game up and make our stars huge?”

That’s the problem Bregman is trying to solve via the digitally savvy methods of not only basketball and football players, but of the Hip-Hop Preacher too. He wants nothing less than to captivate a new generation of fans, securing the future of the sport he loves. The effort starts at his dining table.

There’s no fire pole, no trampoline and no free vending machine, but in most other ways Bregman’s five-story townhouse in Houston is exactly the type of residence that any 13-year-old boy would fantasize about owning were he to become a pro athlete. It is stuffed with trophies, jerseys and small-batch sneakers. The garage shelters a Range Rover. One room is entirely reserved for watching football and playing Fortnite on its many screens. A private chef, Chef Lauren, prepares three meals a day—none of them featuring seafood, which Bregman loathes.

The best part, though, is that Bregman lives with his three best friends: the Boys. He ran up Albuquerque’s sand dunes next to Tyler Straub, a former Royals minor leaguer; played travel ball with Blair Beck, who’s now in the independent Frontier League with Straub; and attended LSU with Mike Papierski, a switch-hitting catcher with the Astros’ Class A club. Despite their varying levels of accomplishment, they have much in common, including passions for football and Fortnite, of course, as well as for working out and the word dece, which is short for decent but actually means pretty damn good. Much about their lives is dece.

This winter the quartet began each day at 10:15 by drinking a delicious beets-based juice fresh squeezed by Chef Lauren. As they assembled around the only piece of furniture that Bregman picked out himself—the dining table, which is fashioned out of Jack Daniel’s barrels—they immediately assumed different roles: that of Bregman’s co-stars.

That’s because another thing Bregman and the Boys share is their love for athletes who document their lives and connect with their fans online: LeBron James, Conor McGregor, Odell Beckham Jr. and especially the one they refer to only by his first name, JuJu.

He is JuJu Smith-Schuster, the Steelers’ 22-year-old wideout. “He has the No. 1–selling jersey in the NFL,” Bregman says, which seems farfetched but is only slightly so. JuJu’s jersey finished 10th in the league’s official sales in 2018, impressive for a second-year player who was at best only the third-most traditionally famous player on his own team—neither Ben Roethlisberger nor Antonio Brown made the list—and surprising unless you are, say, one of the nearly 750,000 people who subscribe to his YouTube channel. Smith-Schuster is a lot more influential and beloved than most people think. This offseason, Bregman resolved to become MLB’s answer to Juju.

Arranged around the Jack Daniel’s table were lights and cameras overseen by the fifth member of Bregman’s off-season household: Alex Scoffield—Sco, to the Boys—who is the younger brother of Bregman’s agent, Brodie Scoffield, and serves as Bregman’s full-time social media producer. Since launching his YouTube channel last Halloween, Breg and the Boys have posted nearly 80 videos, about four a week. They drove around Houston giving $100 tips to unsuspecting drive-through workers. They worked out with Alex Rodriguez in California. They went undercover as awful umpires in a youth baseball game, whose players happily swarmed them—at least, happily swarmed one of them—when they finally removed their masks.

That last one garnered 700,000 views. In fact, the whole enterprise worked. According to opendorse, an athlete marketing platform, Bregman earned 4.3 million social engagements between late October and mid-February, nearly 21⁄2 times as many as baseball’s second-most engaging player, Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman. Still, Bregman’s total would have put him just 18th in the NFL (JuJu was third, behind Beckham and Tom Brady) and 25th in the NBA, trailing the Lakers’ zero-time All-Star Brandon Ingram. The NBA’s top draw—James, naturally—had almost 85 million engagements, five times more than MLB’s top 10 combined.

This last fact underlines baseball’s biggest problem: its difficulty connecting with and inspiring Bregman’s generation, one that views digital life not as distinct from reality, but fully integrated into it. According to Sports Business Journal, as of 2016 the average MLB fan was 57, seven years older than that of the NFL and 15 than that of the NBA. Baseball has not developed the crossover stars—authentic, cool and intensely competitive in an old way but brashly playful in a new one—who dot rival leagues. Bregman believes there are a number of reasons for that failure, among them apathy by both MLB and its players as well as a fear of upsetting the gatekeepers of what remains a culturally hidebound sport.

But Bregman has never been lazy—“What else would I be doing with my downtime, sitting here reading a book or whatever other people do?” he asks—and he is unafraid. “I think you have to have this thing called feel,” he says. “You can do whatever you want to do if you have a feel for the situation. At the end of the day, I know I’m a good person, so I’m not worried about anything bad that could happen on the Internet.”

Bregman’s league and club are generally supportive. “I like it—for him,” says Hinch, a former Stanford psychology major. “As long as he controls it, his perspectives haven’t changed, and it hasn’t become more show than substance. I think time will test if he can maintain that.”

Bregman has no doubt that he can, and that his off-the-field activities will only further allow him to do all the other things he once promised Congregation Albert he would: to make a difference in the world, to be a role model not just to kids but to a new breed of baseball stars. His efforts are also fun and, he admits, profitable—if modestly, so far.

Even so, he knows that no one will care about any of it unless he—like LeBron and JuJu—continues to be more than dece when and where it really counts.

Bregman is only about to turn 25, but he already has the most important walkoff hit in the Astros’ 57-season history. It was the two-out single he lashed off Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen’s first pitch to him in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, the one that tilted the matchup to Houston. “He continually slows his heartbeat down when the rest of the building is jumping out of their seats,” Hinch says. Bregman is able to do that because he has prepared himself to do it.

The night before Game 5, lying in his bed in his townhouse after Los Angeles had knotted the Series, he had visualized the contours of his next at bat against Jansen. Hours earlier he had homered off the All-Star, although it hadn’t been quite enough to prevent a Houston loss. Jansen had thrown him a slider. “In my head, I’m like, ‘No chance he throws me a slider again. I’m looking for a cutter,’ Bregman recalls thinking. Jansen’s first pitch was a cutter.

In many ways Bregman had been destined for such a moment. “The whole family, generation after generation, has been obsessed with the game of baseball,” says Sam, Alex’s father. Sam’s dad, Stan, was the general counsel for the Washington Senators and later on, in 1973, represented the slugger Dick Allen in negotiations that resulted in the game’s largest-ever contract: three years and $750,000. Both Sam and his brother, Ben, played at New Mexico, but they went no further; Sam ended up opening up a successful law firm with his wife, Jackie, whom he had met at law school. It didn’t take them long to realize that the first of their three children was different from all other Bregmans.

Alex was the kid who, in games of touch football with older boys, would dive headfirst onto the concrete of the cul de sac to haul in a pass. When a big trial meant that Sam was too busy to play catch, Alex would hurl a baseball at the same spot on a cinder-block wall in the backyard until, after five years, he broke through it. “I was thrilled,” Sam says. “His mother wasn’t.”

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Sam never pushed him—he didn’t have to—but when Alex was 10 he introduced him to the family credo: TTFU. Toughen the F--- Up. “I might not be the greatest parent when it comes to language,” Sam says.

Sam didn’t have to remind his son of the motto often, but he did after a pregame grounder one game into Alex’s senior season at Albuquerque Academy. Bregman had promised LSU that he would play there unless he was a first-round pick, but a bad hop shattered that possibility along with his throwing hand’s middle finger. TTFU. When the Diamondbacks called to tell him they were considering taking him in the second round, Bregman told them not to waste their time—that he was going to college, and that he hoped their first-rounder worked out. He chose number 30 for his freshman year at LSU to reflect the number of MLB teams that had passed on him.

Three years later Arizona had the No. 1 pick and another chance to draft Bregman, an All-America shortstop with more extra-base hits than strikeouts. The D-Backs took Vanderbilt shortstop Dansby Swanson instead, leaving Bregman for Houston. The Astros believed in Bregman so deeply that they moved him up in the batting order after he began his major league career by going 1 for 32. (TTFU, texted Sam.) Last season Bregman led the team in home runs (31), RBIs (103), OPS (.926) and almost everything else, while ranking as one of the 12 toughest hitters in the league to strike out.

He also came fairly close to leading them to another World Series. When he stepped to the plate against Craig Kimbrel with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of Game 4 of the ALCS, he had the night before visualized how he would swing at a first-pitch rising fastball from the Red Sox’ closer and drive it to left for another walk-off. “Off the bat, I thought it was déjà vu from the World Series,” he says.

In leftfield, though, Andrew Benintendi was playing shallow. He laid out to snag the ball with the fingertips of his glove, denying a series-tying hit. Boston sent Houston home the following evening.

TTFU, texted Sam. The next day Bregman was in the gym, preparing for 2019 with a new set of goals: “Win a World Series. Win a World Series MVP. Have the best year of my life on the field. And then blow up off it.”

It was Monday in January, a few weeks before he would report for spring training in West Palm Beach, and Bregman had a packed schedule. He and the Boys were up early to shoot a boxing-themed music video for a song the Houston hip-hop artist Paul Wall had written for him. At 10:15, they gathered around the Jack Daniel’s table to record a video podcast while sipping Chef Lauren’s beet juice.

At noon he drove the Range Rover to Minute Maid Park to continue rehabbing from the surgery he’d had earlier in the month to remove bone chips from his throwing elbow, a periodically painful condition that he’d refused to divulge to anyone for three years until he woke up in December and found the joint locked at a 90-degree angle. “We probably had the most public surgery in the history of baseball,” Bregman says. Sco had documented everything but the procedure itself for YouTube, including Bregman’s drug-addled post-op stupor in which he promised to win 14 straight MVPs. “Maybe I meant 14 straight All-Star appearances,” he says. “Mike Trout’s still in our league.” Anyway, the intimate video—Breg and The Boys Ep. 8—has now been viewed 60,000 times, and Bregman recovered quickly enough to hit a home run in his second spring training game.

After his rehab and a workout, it was time to produce more content—or footie, as he calls it, as in footage—this time at the request of the Astros. Reid Ryan, the club’s president, had asked if Bregman might be up for popping into the ticket office. Of course he was. He bounded in, to the obvious delight of the staff members, many of whom kept replicas of his jersey in their cubicles, and jumped on the phone. “Jim Crane”—the Astros’ owner—“told me he’s not gonna give me a contract extension unless you buy a full season,” he pitched one customer, successfully (editor's note: on Tuesday, Bregman reportedly signed a six-year, $100 million extension). “I feel like the Wolf of Wall Street right now!” he shouted, drawing laughs.

Before leaving, he was shown a mockup of the team’s new media guide. The cover featured a photo of him with his arms crossed, filtered in such a way to make their vasculature pop, beneath this year’s slogan: TAKE IT BACK, as in the title. “Forearms look dece,” Bregman said, approvingly, to more laughs.

That eagerness to connect with others—online or IRL—is often on full display inside the clubhouse. When first baseman Yuli Gurriel, having recently arrived from Cuba not knowing a word of English, entered it for the first time in 2016, he was surprised to be immediately greeted by a much younger rookie with a twinkle in his eye. “Cómo está, mi hijo!” Bregman shouted, using the sometimes butchered Spanish that was the only subject in which he usually earned A’s in high school, because it was the only one he thought could help him as a major leaguer. Now the two are inseparable, chattering all day as they help each other improve in their respective languages. Gurriel says Bregman particularly likes learning all the malas palabras—the bad words.

Bregman believes that a more closely bonded team is a better one. There was also a hidden motivation behind the Instagram story he posted before Game 3 of the ALCS in October. He titled it lil pregame video work, and it showed himself, centerfielder George Springer and second -baseman José Altuve hitting back-to-back-to-back homers earlier in the season off Nathan Eovaldi, who happened to be Boston’s Game 3 starter. He did it for three reasons. One, he was trying to gin up the narrative as athletes in other sports do—say, McGregor vs. Mayweather—but is not yet quite welcome in baseball. Two, he was trying to get into Eovaldi’s head. Three, he was publicly laying down a gauntlet for himself: I did this, now I have to back it up.

He only backed it up partway. While he went 2-for-2 with an RBI double and a walk against Eovaldi in Game 3, the righty blew him away with a 101-mph fastball in the eighth inning of Game 5. “Post that!” Red Sox starter David Price screamed from the opposing dugout, which Bregman didn’t mind. “I’ll say all that stuff, but if you get me after I do it, I’ll be the first to say: You got me,” he says. “That was some serious cheddar. He got me.”

FTEN, Bregman’s use of social media is much quieter. In December, for instance, a relative of a 36-year-old Astros fan, the father of two young children, messaged Bregman on Instagram to say that the fan was dying of Stage 4 brain cancer, and that he’d asked to be buried in Bregman’s jersey. “A signed note or jersey would make his entire life,” the relative wrote. Bregman asked for his address. That weekend Bregman and the Boys, leaving their cameras behind, drove up to the man’s house and spent an hour at his bedside, surrounded by his family.

Two days later Bregman received another message from the relative. “He died this morning,” she wrote. “We are so grateful you saw him and made him laugh before he made his way home.”

It’s a lot of power for a 24-year-old to have, but Bregman has long sought it out. It’s what he meant when he told Congregation Albert that he wanted to use his love of baseball to be a good example. It was also a reminder that there is more to life than footie.

Another came near the end of last May. Bregman and Justin Verlander, the Astros’ 36-year-old ace, were drinking coffee together in the clubhouse when Verlander stared into his eyes. “Dude, you look tired today,” he said. “How much do you sleep?”

The Hip Hop Preacher’s YouTube wisdom (If you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful) echoed in Bregman’s head. In high school he had permitted himself perhaps six hours a night, but now he was up to seven or eight. Verlander was stunned. “Bro, you have to be sleeping 10 to 12 hours,” he said. “Eight’s for normal people who don’t tear their body down as much as you do.”

Bregman began turning in at midnight and setting his alarm clock for 10. While he had begun June with just five home runs, he ended the month with 16. “Verlander knew what he was talking about,” Bregman says.

The right influencer can make all the difference.

Edited March 21, 2019 by Mez2

texashorne · March 21, 2019

Good article on the WSJ about the Orioles rebuild, with former Astros brass Elias and Mejdal..

Quote

Baseball’s Worst Team Is Finally Joining the 21st Century

During a 115-loss season in 2018, the Baltimore Orioles were far behind other teams in analytics. They are now taking steps to catch up.

Baltimore Orioles players line up before a recent spring training game. PHOTO: GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By
Jared Diamond

March 21, 2019 8:00 a.m. ET

SARASOTA, Fla.—Mike Elias, the new general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, understands the difficulty of reconstructing a baseball franchise from scratch. He joined the Houston Astros, pioneers of the full-blown-teardown-to-achieve-success model, at the beginning of their process, ultimately rising to the role of GM Jeff Luhnow’s top deputy. He knows what it takes to transform a mess into a perennial contender.

But not even the Astros’ dramatic rebuild can totally prepare Elias for the challenge he now faces. The Orioles went 47-115 last season, piling up more losses than all but three teams since 1900. The Astros, even after intentionally bottoming-out their roster, never finished with a record worse than 51-111.

Help won’t arrive anytime soon, either. The Orioles’ farm system ranks among the worst in the sport, lacking both in top-level prospects and significant depth. The Astros already controlled a future MVP in José Altuve, a future World Series MVP in George Springer and a future Cy Young winner in Dallas Keuchel when Elias arrived in Houston.

Elias also inherited an organizational infrastructure embarrassingly behind their competitors’. When he showed up, the Orioles’ entire analytics department consisted of one web developer. They had virtually no international scouting presence in place. They still owe Chris Davis, the first baseman who compiled a historically miserable campaign in 2018, $92 million through 2022. Oh, and they play in a division with two powerhouses in the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

In other words, Elias walked into a disastrous situation, tasked with an almost impossibly daunting job: trying to fix it.

“The Orioles hadn’t quite made that turn” into analytics, Elias said. “We’ve obviously made an organizational strategical decision to go all-in with it and push the speed-up button.”

Mike Elias inherited an organizational infrastructure embarrassingly behind their competitors’. PHOTO: PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Given that, despite an entire mountain range of responsibilities on his plate the first time he sat down at his desk, Elias immediately recognized his most urgent priority. He needed to create the foundation of a data department that eventually could rival that of his former employer, perhaps the most technologically sophisticated club in the majors.

To do that, the Orioles quickly hired Sig Mejdal as their assistant GM for analytics. Mejdal, one of the most respected quants in the game, worked alongside Elias with the Astros since 2012. Very quickly, Mejdal says he learned that in Baltimore “the utilization of the data-driven decision-making tool was not a priority here whatsoever.”

Mejdal worked under Luhnow for all of his 14 seasons in baseball, first with St. Louis, then in Houston. After the Astros won the World Series in 2017, Mejdal felt restless. He missed the start-up environment of the Astros in the early days and believed he could recapture it with the Orioles.

Indeed, Mejdal has already added a handful of analysts and developers to his burgeoning group, but not nearly enough to compete with the rest of the industry. For now, his team must build databases and video storage systems required for modern player evaluation.

“You’re very aware of what you don’t have,” Mejdal said.

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Elias and Mejdal also turned their attention to the question of who would replace Buck Showalter, the Orioles’ manager since 2010. That search lasted about a month before they landed on Brandon Hyde, a first-time skipper also intimately familiar with the pain of complete reset.

Hyde came from the Chicago Cubs, where he enjoyed four consecutive playoff appearances and a championship in 2016. In Hyde, Elias and Mejdal saw somebody willing to act as a partner as the Orioles prioritized development over anything else, probably for several years. In Elias and Mejdal, Hyde saw leaders capable of fulfilling their promises.

“Both of us got good pretty quick,” Hyde said of the Cubs and Astros. “We have the same vision for how that’s supposed to happen.”

Orioles starting pitcher Alex Cobb, left, chats with manager Brandon Hyde. PHOTO: BUTCH DILL/REUTERS

With Hyde installed, the final major piece of the first wave fell into place in early January, when the Orioles named Koby Perez their senior director of international scouting. The Orioles mostly neglected the Latin American market under former executive Dan Duquette. Perez boasted five seasons of experience with the Cleveland Indians, most recently as their director of Latin American baseball operations, and years as a scout before that.

He, Mejdal and Elias comprise the trio in charge of returning the Orioles to prominence. Though Elias intends to continue to add to the head count, nothing could happen without robust, self-sustaining scouting and analytics departments. Everything else flows from those.

“That is the key to unlocking improvement across all areas, and we’re getting that going as quickly as we can,” Elias said.

Until the last two seasons, the Orioles had enjoyed some success despite their old-fashioned ways. From 2012 through 2016, no team in the American League won more games, and they reached the postseason three times during that span.

Their failure to adapt to the modern era finally caught up with them last season, prompting this overhaul—a shift in direction brought about by in part by a change in the organization’s hierarchy. Longtime owner Peter Angelos, who will celebrate his 90th birthday in July, has largely ceded control to his sons, John and Louis. Advancing the Orioles into the 21st Century emerged as a top consideration for the younger Angelos brothers.

The players already detect a difference. Veteran starter Alex Cobb said that members of the new regime “are bringing a lot of technology to our attention” that the Orioles didn’t have last year, like high-speed cameras to help pitchers with their mechanics.

Baltimore Orioles players watch from the dugout during a spring training game. PHOTO: JOE ROBBINS/GETTY IMAGES

It’s the first step toward making the Orioles more like the Astros, though they realize even that won’t be enough. When Luhnow, Mejdal and Elias repaired the Astros, their commitment to data and tech far outclassed their peers. They were playing Fortnite when everybody else was just figuring out Pong. Now, Luhnow said, Elias and Mejdal “have the disadvantage of the fact that the rest of the industry has caught up to a lot of the things we did back then that are no longer available as advantages to them now.”

Therein lies the real mission for the Orioles. Just catching the Astros won’t cut it. They have to figure out a way to surpass them.

“We need to repeat the best practices and the state-of-the-art Astros system,” Mejdal said. “The second part is much more challenging: How do we then bust through and then become state-of-the-art in 2020?”

Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com

henrygandorf · March 21, 2019

33 minutes ago, Mez2 said:

Breggy article from Ben Reiter

Reveal hidden contents

his story appears in the March 25, 2019, issue of Sports Illustrated. For more great storytelling and in-depth analysis, subscribe to the magazine—and get up to 94% off the cover price. Click here for more.

The portion of the Torah known as Tazria-Metzora describes the ancient rituals God commanded Jewish people to undertake were they afflicted with a variety of unfortunate ailments, including scabrous skin infections, eruptive plague and penile discharge. It’s a little awkward, to say the least, for most of the 13-year-olds who discover that this is the passage they must chant and explain to their gathered families—and, even worse, to their also 13-year-old friends (penile discharge!)—at their bar or bat mitzvah service.

But if the boy assigned that portion by the Hebrew calendar wished he had gotten one involving, say, Moses and the Red Sea instead, he didn’t show it at Congregation Albert in Albuquerque on April 21, 2007. “We all need to realize that there are people out there who may be suffering and we all need to try to do our part to relieve that suffering when we can,” the 13-year-old, wearing a pin-striped suit, confidently read from his six-page, double-spaced speech. Two pages later, in a section on top of which he’d scrawled SLOWLY, he reached the heart of his message.

“When I think about the future and how I can make a difference in the world, I want to be able to use my love of the game of baseball to be a good example and a good person,” he said. “I want to be a professional athlete who plays for the love of the game, never quits trying to give my best and is a good role model for all of the kids who look up to baseball players.”

The congregants must have smiled. It was a dream harbored by millions of boys at that optimistic age, just before hard realities arrive for almost all of them, Jewish or not. This particular one stood a head shorter than his mother, who herself was only 5' 4", and he struggled to hold the Torah’s moderately heavy scroll. But Alexander David Bregman was completely unabashed about his intentions. “There never was a Plan B,” he says.

To fulfill Plan A, Bregman came to rely on a more modern text. One day, when he was in high school, he happened upon the YouTube video How Bad Do You Want It? (Success). It depicted a punishing workout performed by running back Giavanni Ruffin, set to rousing music and an oration delivered by a motivational speaker named Eric Thomas, also known as ET The Hip-Hop Preacher.

Bregman was enthralled. The video now has 45 million views, many thousands of which belong to him. He watched it every school day before going out at 5 a.m. to run up sand dunes until he puked, then viewed it again after returning home at 10 p.m. with bloody palms from the many hours of batting practice he’d taken. He’d recite the Hip-Hop Preacher’s sermon to push himself through his adolescent exhaustion. When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful. And, You gotta want to be successful so bad that you forget to eat. And, If you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful.

Just 12 years after his bar mitzvah, and though he has only grown to 5' 10" (maybe 5' 9"), Bregman has already come through on most of the improbable promises he made at Congregation Albert. He is the third baseman for the Astros. He has won a World Series ring, earned an All-Star Game MVP award and finished fifth in last season’s AL MVP voting and, on Mar. 18 signed a six-year, $100 million deal. At 24, he is, says Houston manager A.J. Hinch, “a monster within the game.”

In other words, Alex Bregman is already a star. Now, though, he wants to become famous. In baseball in 2019, those are no longer the same thing—which would have been a surprise to his 13-year-old self, who vowed to not just be a major leaguer but an influential one. “How do we make baseball as marketable as the NBA and NFL?” Bregman asks today. “How do we blow this game up and make our stars huge?”

That’s the problem Bregman is trying to solve via the digitally savvy methods of not only basketball and football players, but of the Hip-Hop Preacher too. He wants nothing less than to captivate a new generation of fans, securing the future of the sport he loves. The effort starts at his dining table.

There’s no fire pole, no trampoline and no free vending machine, but in most other ways Bregman’s five-story townhouse in Houston is exactly the type of residence that any 13-year-old boy would fantasize about owning were he to become a pro athlete. It is stuffed with trophies, jerseys and small-batch sneakers. The garage shelters a Range Rover. One room is entirely reserved for watching football and playing Fortnite on its many screens. A private chef, Chef Lauren, prepares three meals a day—none of them featuring seafood, which Bregman loathes.

The best part, though, is that Bregman lives with his three best friends: the Boys. He ran up Albuquerque’s sand dunes next to Tyler Straub, a former Royals minor leaguer; played travel ball with Blair Beck, who’s now in the independent Frontier League with Straub; and attended LSU with Mike Papierski, a switch-hitting catcher with the Astros’ Class A club. Despite their varying levels of accomplishment, they have much in common, including passions for football and Fortnite, of course, as well as for working out and the word dece, which is short for decent but actually means pretty damn good. Much about their lives is dece.

This winter the quartet began each day at 10:15 by drinking a delicious beets-based juice fresh squeezed by Chef Lauren. As they assembled around the only piece of furniture that Bregman picked out himself—the dining table, which is fashioned out of Jack Daniel’s barrels—they immediately assumed different roles: that of Bregman’s co-stars.

That’s because another thing Bregman and the Boys share is their love for athletes who document their lives and connect with their fans online: LeBron James, Conor McGregor, Odell Beckham Jr. and especially the one they refer to only by his first name, JuJu.

He is JuJu Smith-Schuster, the Steelers’ 22-year-old wideout. “He has the No. 1–selling jersey in the NFL,” Bregman says, which seems farfetched but is only slightly so. JuJu’s jersey finished 10th in the league’s official sales in 2018, impressive for a second-year player who was at best only the third-most traditionally famous player on his own team—neither Ben Roethlisberger nor Antonio Brown made the list—and surprising unless you are, say, one of the nearly 750,000 people who subscribe to his YouTube channel. Smith-Schuster is a lot more influential and beloved than most people think. This offseason, Bregman resolved to become MLB’s answer to Juju.

Arranged around the Jack Daniel’s table were lights and cameras overseen by the fifth member of Bregman’s off-season household: Alex Scoffield—Sco, to the Boys—who is the younger brother of Bregman’s agent, Brodie Scoffield, and serves as Bregman’s full-time social media producer. Since launching his YouTube channel last Halloween, Breg and the Boys have posted nearly 80 videos, about four a week. They drove around Houston giving $100 tips to unsuspecting drive-through workers. They worked out with Alex Rodriguez in California. They went undercover as awful umpires in a youth baseball game, whose players happily swarmed them—at least, happily swarmed one of them—when they finally removed their masks.

That last one garnered 700,000 views. In fact, the whole enterprise worked. According to opendorse, an athlete marketing platform, Bregman earned 4.3 million social engagements between late October and mid-February, nearly 21⁄2 times as many as baseball’s second-most engaging player, Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman. Still, Bregman’s total would have put him just 18th in the NFL (JuJu was third, behind Beckham and Tom Brady) and 25th in the NBA, trailing the Lakers’ zero-time All-Star Brandon Ingram. The NBA’s top draw—James, naturally—had almost 85 million engagements, five times more than MLB’s top 10 combined.

This last fact underlines baseball’s biggest problem: its difficulty connecting with and inspiring Bregman’s generation, one that views digital life not as distinct from reality, but fully integrated into it. According to Sports Business Journal, as of 2016 the average MLB fan was 57, seven years older than that of the NFL and 15 than that of the NBA. Baseball has not developed the crossover stars—authentic, cool and intensely competitive in an old way but brashly playful in a new one—who dot rival leagues. Bregman believes there are a number of reasons for that failure, among them apathy by both MLB and its players as well as a fear of upsetting the gatekeepers of what remains a culturally hidebound sport.

But Bregman has never been lazy—“What else would I be doing with my downtime, sitting here reading a book or whatever other people do?” he asks—and he is unafraid. “I think you have to have this thing called feel,” he says. “You can do whatever you want to do if you have a feel for the situation. At the end of the day, I know I’m a good person, so I’m not worried about anything bad that could happen on the Internet.”

Bregman’s league and club are generally supportive. “I like it—for him,” says Hinch, a former Stanford psychology major. “As long as he controls it, his perspectives haven’t changed, and it hasn’t become more show than substance. I think time will test if he can maintain that.”

Bregman has no doubt that he can, and that his off-the-field activities will only further allow him to do all the other things he once promised Congregation Albert he would: to make a difference in the world, to be a role model not just to kids but to a new breed of baseball stars. His efforts are also fun and, he admits, profitable—if modestly, so far.

Even so, he knows that no one will care about any of it unless he—like LeBron and JuJu—continues to be more than dece when and where it really counts.

Bregman is only about to turn 25, but he already has the most important walkoff hit in the Astros’ 57-season history. It was the two-out single he lashed off Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen’s first pitch to him in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, the one that tilted the matchup to Houston. “He continually slows his heartbeat down when the rest of the building is jumping out of their seats,” Hinch says. Bregman is able to do that because he has prepared himself to do it.

The night before Game 5, lying in his bed in his townhouse after Los Angeles had knotted the Series, he had visualized the contours of his next at bat against Jansen. Hours earlier he had homered off the All-Star, although it hadn’t been quite enough to prevent a Houston loss. Jansen had thrown him a slider. “In my head, I’m like, ‘No chance he throws me a slider again. I’m looking for a cutter,’ Bregman recalls thinking. Jansen’s first pitch was a cutter.

In many ways Bregman had been destined for such a moment. “The whole family, generation after generation, has been obsessed with the game of baseball,” says Sam, Alex’s father. Sam’s dad, Stan, was the general counsel for the Washington Senators and later on, in 1973, represented the slugger Dick Allen in negotiations that resulted in the game’s largest-ever contract: three years and $750,000. Both Sam and his brother, Ben, played at New Mexico, but they went no further; Sam ended up opening up a successful law firm with his wife, Jackie, whom he had met at law school. It didn’t take them long to realize that the first of their three children was different from all other Bregmans.

Alex was the kid who, in games of touch football with older boys, would dive headfirst onto the concrete of the cul de sac to haul in a pass. When a big trial meant that Sam was too busy to play catch, Alex would hurl a baseball at the same spot on a cinder-block wall in the backyard until, after five years, he broke through it. “I was thrilled,” Sam says. “His mother wasn’t.”

Sam never pushed him—he didn’t have to—but when Alex was 10 he introduced him to the family credo: TTFU. Toughen the F--- Up. “I might not be the greatest parent when it comes to language,” Sam says.

Sam didn’t have to remind his son of the motto often, but he did after a pregame grounder one game into Alex’s senior season at Albuquerque Academy. Bregman had promised LSU that he would play there unless he was a first-round pick, but a bad hop shattered that possibility along with his throwing hand’s middle finger. TTFU. When the Diamondbacks called to tell him they were considering taking him in the second round, Bregman told them not to waste their time—that he was going to college, and that he hoped their first-rounder worked out. He chose number 30 for his freshman year at LSU to reflect the number of MLB teams that had passed on him.

Three years later Arizona had the No. 1 pick and another chance to draft Bregman, an All-America shortstop with more extra-base hits than strikeouts. The D-Backs took Vanderbilt shortstop Dansby Swanson instead, leaving Bregman for Houston. The Astros believed in Bregman so deeply that they moved him up in the batting order after he began his major league career by going 1 for 32. (TTFU, texted Sam.) Last season Bregman led the team in home runs (31), RBIs (103), OPS (.926) and almost everything else, while ranking as one of the 12 toughest hitters in the league to strike out.

He also came fairly close to leading them to another World Series. When he stepped to the plate against Craig Kimbrel with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of Game 4 of the ALCS, he had the night before visualized how he would swing at a first-pitch rising fastball from the Red Sox’ closer and drive it to left for another walk-off. “Off the bat, I thought it was déjà vu from the World Series,” he says.

In leftfield, though, Andrew Benintendi was playing shallow. He laid out to snag the ball with the fingertips of his glove, denying a series-tying hit. Boston sent Houston home the following evening.

TTFU, texted Sam. The next day Bregman was in the gym, preparing for 2019 with a new set of goals: “Win a World Series. Win a World Series MVP. Have the best year of my life on the field. And then blow up off it.”

It was Monday in January, a few weeks before he would report for spring training in West Palm Beach, and Bregman had a packed schedule. He and the Boys were up early to shoot a boxing-themed music video for a song the Houston hip-hop artist Paul Wall had written for him. At 10:15, they gathered around the Jack Daniel’s table to record a video podcast while sipping Chef Lauren’s beet juice.

At noon he drove the Range Rover to Minute Maid Park to continue rehabbing from the surgery he’d had earlier in the month to remove bone chips from his throwing elbow, a periodically painful condition that he’d refused to divulge to anyone for three years until he woke up in December and found the joint locked at a 90-degree angle. “We probably had the most public surgery in the history of baseball,” Bregman says. Sco had documented everything but the procedure itself for YouTube, including Bregman’s drug-addled post-op stupor in which he promised to win 14 straight MVPs. “Maybe I meant 14 straight All-Star appearances,” he says. “Mike Trout’s still in our league.” Anyway, the intimate video—Breg and The Boys Ep. 8—has now been viewed 60,000 times, and Bregman recovered quickly enough to hit a home run in his second spring training game.

After his rehab and a workout, it was time to produce more content—or footie, as he calls it, as in footage—this time at the request of the Astros. Reid Ryan, the club’s president, had asked if Bregman might be up for popping into the ticket office. Of course he was. He bounded in, to the obvious delight of the staff members, many of whom kept replicas of his jersey in their cubicles, and jumped on the phone. “Jim Crane”—the Astros’ owner—“told me he’s not gonna give me a contract extension unless you buy a full season,” he pitched one customer, successfully (editor's note: on Tuesday, Bregman reportedly signed a six-year, $100 million extension). “I feel like the Wolf of Wall Street right now!” he shouted, drawing laughs.

Before leaving, he was shown a mockup of the team’s new media guide. The cover featured a photo of him with his arms crossed, filtered in such a way to make their vasculature pop, beneath this year’s slogan: TAKE IT BACK, as in the title. “Forearms look dece,” Bregman said, approvingly, to more laughs.

That eagerness to connect with others—online or IRL—is often on full display inside the clubhouse. When first baseman Yuli Gurriel, having recently arrived from Cuba not knowing a word of English, entered it for the first time in 2016, he was surprised to be immediately greeted by a much younger rookie with a twinkle in his eye. “Cómo está, mi hijo!” Bregman shouted, using the sometimes butchered Spanish that was the only subject in which he usually earned A’s in high school, because it was the only one he thought could help him as a major leaguer. Now the two are inseparable, chattering all day as they help each other improve in their respective languages. Gurriel says Bregman particularly likes learning all the malas palabras—the bad words.

Bregman believes that a more closely bonded team is a better one. There was also a hidden motivation behind the Instagram story he posted before Game 3 of the ALCS in October. He titled it lil pregame video work, and it showed himself, centerfielder George Springer and second -baseman José Altuve hitting back-to-back-to-back homers earlier in the season off Nathan Eovaldi, who happened to be Boston’s Game 3 starter. He did it for three reasons. One, he was trying to gin up the narrative as athletes in other sports do—say, McGregor vs. Mayweather—but is not yet quite welcome in baseball. Two, he was trying to get into Eovaldi’s head. Three, he was publicly laying down a gauntlet for himself: I did this, now I have to back it up.

He only backed it up partway. While he went 2-for-2 with an RBI double and a walk against Eovaldi in Game 3, the righty blew him away with a 101-mph fastball in the eighth inning of Game 5. “Post that!” Red Sox starter David Price screamed from the opposing dugout, which Bregman didn’t mind. “I’ll say all that stuff, but if you get me after I do it, I’ll be the first to say: You got me,” he says. “That was some serious cheddar. He got me.”

FTEN, Bregman’s use of social media is much quieter. In December, for instance, a relative of a 36-year-old Astros fan, the father of two young children, messaged Bregman on Instagram to say that the fan was dying of Stage 4 brain cancer, and that he’d asked to be buried in Bregman’s jersey. “A signed note or jersey would make his entire life,” the relative wrote. Bregman asked for his address. That weekend Bregman and the Boys, leaving their cameras behind, drove up to the man’s house and spent an hour at his bedside, surrounded by his family.

Two days later Bregman received another message from the relative. “He died this morning,” she wrote. “We are so grateful you saw him and made him laugh before he made his way home.”

It’s a lot of power for a 24-year-old to have, but Bregman has long sought it out. It’s what he meant when he told Congregation Albert that he wanted to use his love of baseball to be a good example. It was also a reminder that there is more to life than footie.

Another came near the end of last May. Bregman and Justin Verlander, the Astros’ 36-year-old ace, were drinking coffee together in the clubhouse when Verlander stared into his eyes. “Dude, you look tired today,” he said. “How much do you sleep?”

The Hip Hop Preacher’s YouTube wisdom (If you go to sleep, you might miss the opportunity to be successful) echoed in Bregman’s head. In high school he had permitted himself perhaps six hours a night, but now he was up to seven or eight. Verlander was stunned. “Bro, you have to be sleeping 10 to 12 hours,” he said. “Eight’s for normal people who don’t tear their body down as much as you do.”

Bregman began turning in at midnight and setting his alarm clock for 10. While he had begun June with just five home runs, he ended the month with 16. “Verlander knew what he was talking about,” Bregman says.

The right influencer can make all the difference.

yeah, my torah portion was unfortunate as well.

so bregman and i are basically the same person, is what i'm saying.

Jshep34 · March 21, 2019

Im ready . Lets go Stros and take it back. Baseball back at mmp monday and tuesday. In 7 days it starts in Tampa Bay!!!!

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

thetruth · March 21, 2019

Chandler Rome‏ @Chandler_Rome 2h2 hours ago

More

Yordan Alvarez has been scratched from the Astros' lineup. The Astros say he did not make the trip to Lakeland but, according to a spokesman, "it is not related to injury or disciplinary reasons."

...... Trade?

henrygandorf · March 21, 2019

i had the game on mute while on a call and it looked like fisher got hurt diving in center. anything on the twitters?

Guadaloopy · March 21, 2019

2 hours ago, texashorne said:

Good article on the WSJ about the Orioles rebuild, with former Astros brass Elias and Mejdal..

Hated to lose Sig, but not concerned about the progress he will make there while hamstrung by the Angelos family.

kevwun · March 21, 2019

I'm sure he'll come up with lots of good deals that they will squash at the last minute.

Seasick Sailor · March 21, 2019

29 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

i had the game on mute while on a call and it looked like fisher got hurt diving in center. anything on the twitters?

Mez2 · March 21, 2019

fisher was quietly having a nice spring. hope all is good with cerrano. may need some more rum

MAROON · March 21, 2019

Rays sign Blake Snell to five years - $50mil. That seems like a decent deal for the Rays. I bet Keuchel puckered up upon hearing that.

henrygandorf · March 21, 2019

1 minute ago, MAROON said:

Rays sign Blake Snell to five years - $50mil. That seems like a decent deal for the Rays. I bet Keuchel puckered up upon hearing that.

this is the way the whole system is moving. will be interesting to see what happens with mookie, but we'll likely never see another free-agent season like the harper/machado one we just experienced.

tx 3 putt · March 21, 2019

will keuchel sign before opening day ?

runthebone · March 21, 2019

46 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

will keuchel sign before opening day ?

Which one?

henrygandorf · March 21, 2019

question finally answered officially, from a 3/7 excerpt on mlbtraderumors:

Whether his lofty asking price has dropped to the point where the Astros would consider re-signing their homegrown lefty still isn’t clear, though recent talks between the two sides suggest that Houston is hardly closed off to the general concept. Re-signing Keuchel wouldn’t cost the Astros a current draft pick, but it’d prevent them from receiving the compensatory draft selection they’d receive if they allowed him to sign with another club.

Fudge Nuggets · March 22, 2019

Offer him the league minimum.

Seasick Sailor · March 22, 2019

Any Athletic subscriber care to summarize the "uphill battle" we face in resigning Cole and JV?

Edited March 22, 2019 by Seasick Sailor

patrickdrinksbeer · March 22, 2019

Any Athletic subscriber care to summarize the "uphill battle" we face in resigning Cole and JV?

While Cole’s agent, Scott Boras, negotiated a seven-year, $163.5 million extension with the Astros for second baseman José Altuve last spring, Boras generally prefers his clients to establish their values on the open market. For Cole, who is eligible to hit the open market at the end of the season, Boras almost certainly would want a deal in excess of the largest contract awarded a free-agent starting pitcher this offseason — six years, $140 million to left-hander Patrick Corbin.

Cole, like Corbin, would reach free agency entering his age-29 season. And while lefties are a rarer commodity than righties, Cole is the more accomplished pitcher, and not by a small margin. His ERA, when adjusted for league and ballpark, is 17 percent better than the league average; Corbin’s is nine percent. In virtually every statistical category — strikeout rate, strikeout-to-walk rate, fielding independent pitching — Cole holds a substantial edge.

A short-term, high-dollar extension for Verlander, who will pitch at 37 in 2020, also would appear to be a long shot. The Astros, one of the game’s most analytically driven clubs, are unlikely to pay market value to a pitcher of Verlander’s age. And Verlander, who finished second in the 2018 Cy Young voting, probably would not want to take a pay cut from his current salary of $28 million.

UTexasFight · March 22, 2019

Also threw stroman’s name out there again as a potential trade target:

The Astros’ desire to keep Cole and/or Verlander stems not only from the two players’ respective abilities but also from the uncertain state of the team’s rotation in 2020 and beyond. Two other Astros starting pitchers — righty Collin McHugh and lefty Wade Miley — also are potential free agents.

Right-hander Forrest Whitley, the fifth-best prospect in the sport according to Baseball America, is likely to be part of the 2020 rotation, and righty Lance McCullers is expected to return at the start of the ’20 season from Tommy John surgery as well. But at some point, the Astros might increase their efforts to trade for a starting pitcher who is under control at least through ’20. Blue Jays right-hander Marcus Stroman would qualify, and he is among the pitchers in whom the Astros showed interest earlier this offseason, sources said.

formermav43 · March 22, 2019

I’d say a short term extension with Verlander is much more likely than signing Cole, despite what Rosenthal says. Those same analytics tell them that not all 37 year olds are created equal, and I think they’d rather have him for 2-3 more years than have to give Cole a big money long term deal.

kevwun · March 22, 2019

If Cole pitches like he did last year again, I think they need to spend the money on him because the kind of filth he showed last year is a rare thing.

Mez2 · March 22, 2019

i could definitely see us adding someone like stroman, i would endorse that for a trade come july.

my thoughts are we offer a short term extension - 2,3 years for Verlander. and offer a short term, high AAV contract for Cole. Something like 5 year, 130 million, assuming he follows up this year like he did last. this is all just random guessing and not really knowing what we are on the books for outside of Altuve/AB. With that said, we will likely let Correa walk when time comes around.

The Astros are discussing extensions with right-handers Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander, according to major-league sources. Of course they are. Seemingly every team is discussing an extension with seemingly every good player, and 16 such agreements already have been reached in 2019, four for $100 million or more, according to MLBTradeRumors.com.

Two of those deals went to Astros — third baseman Alex Bregman signed for six years and $100 million, reliever Ryan Pressly for two years and $17.5 million. Cole and Verlander, however, figure to be more difficult to lock down, and it would be an upset if they became the latest entries in Extension Extravaganza 2019. (An average of 14 players reached extensions from Jan. 1 through mid-April the past three seasons, but only one of those deals was for $100 million or more.)

While Cole’s agent, Scott Boras, negotiated a seven-year, $163.5 million extension with the Astros for second baseman José Altuve last spring, Boras generally prefers his clients to establish their values on the open market. For Cole, who is eligible to hit the open market at the end of the season, Boras almost certainly would want a deal in excess of the largest contract awarded a free-agent starting pitcher this offseason — six years, $140 million to left-hander Patrick Corbin.

Cole, like Corbin, would reach free agency entering his age-29 season. And while lefties are a rarer commodity than righties, Cole is the more accomplished pitcher, and not by a small margin. His ERA, when adjusted for league and ballpark, is 17 percent better than the league average; Corbin’s is nine percent. In virtually every statistical category — strikeout rate, strikeout-to-walk rate, fielding independent pitching — Cole holds a substantial edge.

A short-term, high-dollar extension for Verlander, who will pitch at 37 in 2020, also would appear to be a long shot. The Astros, one of the game’s most analytically driven clubs, are unlikely to pay market value to a pitcher of Verlander’s age. And Verlander, who finished second in the 2018 Cy Young voting, probably would not want to take a pay cut from his current salary of $28 million.

As extension talks around the game continue, the quality of the 2019-20 free-agent class keeps diminishing. Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado, Yankees outfielder Aaron Hicks, Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and Cardinals righty Miles Mikolas all are off the market, and Red Sox lefty Chris Sale and Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon are among the others who still could agree to deals before Opening Day.

Rendon, like Cole, is represented by Boras, as are two other potential members of the class, Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts and designated hitter J.D. Martinez. So Boras, coming off a hit-and-miss offseason, is in position to all but control next winter’s market. Cole and Red Sox righty Rick Porcello presently would be the best right-handed starters available, Sale and the Giants’ Madison Bumgarner the best lefties.

The Astros’ desire to keep Cole and/or Verlander stems not only from the two players’ respective abilities but also from the uncertain state of the team’s rotation in 2020 and beyond. Two other Astros starting pitchers — righty Collin McHugh and lefty Wade Miley — also are potential free agents.

Right-hander Forrest Whitley, the fifth-best prospect in the sport according to Baseball America, is likely to be part of the 2020 rotation, and righty Lance McCullers is expected to return at the start of the ’20 season from Tommy John surgery as well. But at some point, the Astros might increase their efforts to trade for a starting pitcher who is under control at least through ’20. Blue Jays right-hander Marcus Stroman would qualify, and he is among the pitchers in whom the Astros showed interest earlier this offseason, sources said.

henrygandorf · March 22, 2019

it's a little misleading. "uphill battle" implies both players would reject it. it sounds like cole might (or at the very least, his agent would recommend rejecting it), but on verlander's side, i think the implication is that the hesitation will be on our side.

i think the reason "astroball" is different, is because it takes analytics and mixes in a human element. i think we realize what verlander is and means to this club, and i think we're much more likely to offer a 2-60 type of deal, with a potential 3rd year option than we would offer some 6+ year deal to anyone at any position. the age thing is silly. we didn't avoid dk because he's 31, it was a talent/ability issue (if not attitude as well).

unfortunately, cole might come down to what he wants, and he would likely have to take less money to stay with us, either in an extension or in the offseason. this current free-agency cycle has to been an eye-opener for some of these players though. even the ones that got paid didn't seem to have a particularly comfortable time in the process. maybe he gets offered 6-140 from some other club, and we only offer 5-125, i have no idea. he's 29, so this needs to be his big one, and the money needs to be right. we turned him from a possible eventual bust to a front-line ace, so hopefully there's a sense of loyalty.

locking up bregs and tuve can't hurt either.

FondrenRoad · March 22, 2019

16 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

it's a little misleading. "uphill battle" implies both players would reject it. it sounds like cole might (or at the very least, his agent would recommend rejecting it), but on verlander's side, i think the implication is that the hesitation will be on our side.

i think the reason "astroball" is different, is because it takes analytics and mixes in a human element. i think we realize what verlander is and means to this club, and i think we're much more likely to offer a 2-60 type of deal, with a potential 3rd year option than we would offer some 6+ year deal to anyone at any position. the age thing is silly. we didn't avoid dk because he's 31, it was a talent/ability issue (if not attitude as well).

unfortunately, cole might come down to what he wants, and he would likely have to take less money to stay with us, either in an extension or in the offseason. this current free-agency cycle has to been an eye-opener for some of these players though. even the ones that got paid didn't seem to have a particularly comfortable time in the process. maybe he gets offered 6-140 from some other club, and we only offer 5-125, i have no idea. he's 29, so this needs to be his big one, and the money needs to be right. we turned him from a possible eventual bust to a front-line ace, so hopefully there's a sense of loyalty.

locking up bregs and tuve can't hurt either.

I think the human element in Astroball is undervalued. When you watch the Astros play the last few years, most of them are having fun out there and seem to have great camaraderie. You really don't see that from a lot of other teams. In 2017, Beltran's presence helped with the WS win even though he barely played. And the guys that upgrade their game with Astros analytics manage to do so because they are willing to listen and are "team" guys. For that reason, I think you keep JV around as long as he wants to be and can still play, and you try to do the same with Cole, but no hard feelings if Cole goes elsewhere for a bigger paycheck. I think Keuchel adds negative energy. Don't think they should resign him. Didn't want Osuna last year for the same reason. Still don't want Osuna.

Edited March 22, 2019 by FondrenRoad

Seasick Sailor · March 22, 2019

Could be also an indication of what Cole would expect along with the Corbin deal:

henrygandorf · March 22, 2019

by all accounts, we got a steal with bregman, and internally, they know what they're thinking on correa. we have 2 of our core locked until 2024. a cole extension would cover that same time period and ensure that a cole/whitley front end would be a nasty 1-2 for the bulk of that time (whether jv is on board or not). just those 4 guys (tuve, bregs, cole, whitley) makes you competitive. i think this is what they're looking at, extend the window.

Jshep34 · March 22, 2019

Have 2 tickets to both exhibitions game next week. Free

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

henrygandorf · March 22, 2019

looks like rosenthal is walking back his earlier story, when he called a potential deal a "longshot".

Wrote today that an extension for Verlander with #Astros would appear to be a long shot. Sources today indicating a two-year deal for more than $60M is at least possible. Verlander earning $28M in 2019 and would want to approach Greinke’s record $34.4M AAV for a starting pitcher.

Latest On Extension Talks Between Justin Verlander, Astros

By Jeff Todd | March 22, 2019 at 2:50pm CDT

The Astros are currently discussing potential extension scenarios with both Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole — a development that The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal downplayed even as he reported it earlier today. In a follow-up tweet, though, Rosenthal says that deal with Verlander “is at least possible.”

That characterization seems to nudge up the likelihood of a deal. The plausibility is boosted further by the fact that Rosenthal puts out some numbers. It seems there’s some discussion and potential for a two-year extension worth over $60MM.

Verlander will turn 37 years of age before he throws a competitive pitch in the 2020 season. At that phase of a player’s career, lengthy commitments generally can’t be achieved. We’ve seen hefty two-year deals for superior performers, though not at the kind of top-of-the-market rates that seem to be under contemplation here.

It’s hard to argue that Verlander is worthy anything less than top dollar. He has been fantastic since landing in Houston late in the 2017 season, throwing 248 innings in 39 starts and compiling a 2.32 ERA with 12.1 K/9 against 1.5 BB/9. Even for a pitcher as great as Verlander, that’s a dizzying level of output.

Verlander has indicated that he’d like to keep pitching well into his forties. For now, he’ll have to decide whether to lock in two more years in Houston or instead wait to see what the open market offers next winter. As for the Astros, Rosenthal suggests they may need to dangle something approaching the current record average annual value for a starter (Zack Greinke’s $34.4MM) to secure a deal.

Seasick Sailor · March 22, 2019

thetruth · March 22, 2019

They going to broadcast the Bregman extension?

kevwun · March 22, 2019

Mark Berman is the Astros' conduit when they want to get a story out and that's not until it's a done deal. Wonder where Rosenthal heard this?

Edited March 22, 2019 by kevwun

thetruth · March 22, 2019

16 minutes ago, thetruth said:

They going to broadcast the Bregman extension?

Announcement is live on Facebook if anyone is interested.

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