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2019 Houston Astros Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
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My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 3 weeks ago. Tomorrow she starts her treatment. She's been a wreck ever since the diagnosis. I mentioned a few pages back how a friend of the family manage

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Newest Astro fan was born earlier today at 12:09 am Mez3, holla!

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Seasick Sailor

Seasick Sailor 3747

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  • Veteran lefty Dallas Keuchel discussed his never-ending free agency with Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports in an interesting interview. Keuchel says he is anxious to sign but won’t just settle for the lowball offers he has received to this point. He acknowledges that he may need to wait until after this summer’s draft, at which time teams will no longer need to give up draft compensation to add him. Keuchel says he wasn’t looking for this sort of standoff and wasn’t unrealistic in his asking price, noting that “it’s not just the front offices who have all these numbers” when it comes to understanding market value. He says he’d rather be pitching; agent Scott Boras has even advised him to settle and get back on the field. So why is Keuchel still available? “I told [Boras] no on numerous deals because it’s about principle. It’s about fair market value. And I wasn’t getting that.”

Or maybe you've overestimated your fair market value?

Edited by Seasick Sailor
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Hank Chinaski

Hank Chinaski 6310

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"That's not me being greedy. That's just my compensation in the market from what the analytical data is telling me. I didn't come up with this. The front offices came up with this. So now they're trying to tell me I'm less than what the analytical data is saying. How is that possible?"

I'm sure that DK is basing his asking price on something, but it obviously isn't the same "analytical" data that front offices are using. 

Maybe he hasn't updated his "analytical" model since 2012; valuations have changed a bit on 31 year-old players. 

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pacman

pacman 7282

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1. Houston Astros

WIN FORECAST: 97.9 | CHANGE FROM APRIL: +2.9

DIVISION%: 92.4 | PLAYOFF%: 96.6

PENNANT%: 34.1 | TITLE%: 20.2

Biggest fix: As was pointed out in this week's Power Rankings, first base is the closest thing the Astros have to a sore spot. Yuli Gurriel has been the regular there, so this is, in effect, an observation about his play thus far, which has produced a 94 wRC+, according to FanGraphs. He is at 109 for his career, and his forecasts ranged from 103 (ZiPS) to 108 (Steamer), so it's reasonable to expect him to improve. Even if he doesn't, and if the Astros want to give Yordan Alvarez more time, Houston has more than enough depth to get by with a replacement-level Gurriel. However, Gurriel has positional flexibility, and whether it's Alvarez or an outside addition, getting a big-time bat at first base would enable Gurriel to move around the diamond and lessen the need for regular appearances by weak-hitting Aledmys Diaz.

Potential solution: Alvarez

http://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/26686161/mlb-stock-watch-all-30-teams-decide-trade-deadline

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runthebone

runthebone 7914

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23 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

 

 

You can take Keuchel out of Oklahoma (and for that matter, Kimbrel out ofAlabama)...

 

Arkansas, I thought. 

 

I see, you meant he grew up in Oklahoma.  What a combo. 

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kevwun

kevwun 15572

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55 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

I know dallas was offered a big contract after 2015 but he turned it down expecting a huge contract in 2018/2019. Amazing how baseball has changed to determine true value of players.

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He would have still gotten a big deal if he was the same pitcher.  That's the part he doesn't want to understand.

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HtownHorn

HtownHorn 14395

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56 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

I know dallas was offered a big contract after 2015 but he turned it down expecting a huge contract in 2018/2019. Amazing how baseball has changed to determine true value of players.

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He will never get close to the contract he turned down in 2015 either. The game has changed that much in 4 years.

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Llano Estacado

Llano Estacado 1257

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From a DK article in April.

I think it all comes down to age and how he pitches. He may still be calculating only from the major market win numbers. I’d definitely be looking back to 2015 and sure he is too.

Is Keuchel worth around $18 million for a season of work? Seemingly, yeah. Baseball-Reference credits him with 7.2 wins over the past three years -- or about 2.4 per pop. Baseball Prospectus has him down for 10.4 -- or 3.5 per. Split the difference and say he's been a three-win pitcher. Fine? Fine. It's reasonable, then, to expect him to be worth around two wins provided he stays healthy. Using a conservative cost-per-win estimate ($8 million), Keuchel checks in around $16 million. Remember, that's an intentionally sober forecast and estimate. If he's so much as a half win better, he'd be worth an estimated $20 million.
Beyond that, every team should have a different cost-per-win threshold based on their financial means, their competitive chances, and their team needs. The Pittsburgh Pirates have a quality rotation and are a relatively small market -- their reluctance to pay Keuchel $20 million for a year is understandable, but it doesn't mean the Los Angeles Angels should feel the same way.
For whatever it's worth, 23 teams have at least $20 million separating them from the luxury-tax threshold, per Spotrac, with 20 exceeding $30 million. Not all of those teams are serious contenders and/or are in need of pitching help, but teams like the Milwaukee Brewers, Texas Rangers, and Oakland Athletics should at least consider splurging on Keuchel -- provided, anyway, they're serious about upgrading their rotations in pursuit of a playoff spot. And that doesn't include other teams -- like the Angels, New York Mets, and New York Yankees -- who could go after Keuchel even if it means crossing (or further exceeding) the luxury tax.[/Quote]
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Player

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39 minutes ago, DallasGatr said:

 


I don’t know about that. Dallas grew up in Tulsa and that town is a special kind of shitty.


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So, you're telling me that it's possible that Keuchel is not a deranged okie with an artificially inflated sense of self-worth who doesn't realize that he's pissed away nearly 1/4 of the season? That he's merely living on...

 

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UTexasFight

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Article in the wall street journal on astros brain drain. That stat of ~20% of offseason senior FO and coaching openings going to Astros staff is incredible.

A Brain Drain for the Astros

Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow has built a powerhouse. The challenge now is to keep their creative ideas in-house as the rest of baseball tries to pluck their talent
By Jared Diamond



When Jeff Luhnow started as the Houston Astros’ general manager in December 2011, the hardest part of building a sophisticated front office involved convincing top candidates to choose professional sports over other, better-paying industries. He viewed his competitors in the talent acquisition space as not necessarily the other 29 baseball teams, but Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple and Facebook .

That approach resulted in some radical hires for the time—people like Sig Mejdal, who worked previously at Lockheed Martin and NASA, and Mike Fast, a longtime semiconductor engineer. They helped transform the Astros into a powerhouse, with three playoff appearances in the last four years and a World Series championship in 2017. They currently lead the American League West once again.

But now Luhnow faces a new challenge: keeping their creative ideas in-house. The rest of the league this winter treated the Astros like their own personal Walmart on Black Friday, storming the aisles in search of anything they could pull off the shelves.

The Baltimore Orioles plucked Mejdal and former assistant GM Mike Elias to orchestrate their rebuild, while the Atlanta Braves added Fast as a special assistant. Three members of the Astros’ coaching staff received promotions elsewhere, too: Dave Hudgens (Toronto Blue Jays bench coach), Jeff Albert (St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach) and Doug White (Los Angeles Angels pitching coach).

Luhnow said an internal study of personnel outflow concluded that roughly 20% of senior front-office and coaching openings this off-season went to Astros staffers. And that doesn’t even count the three coaches they lost after the 2017 season, including Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora.

In other words, everybody wants a taste of the Astros’ secret sauce, and their brain drain highlights the increasingly high-stakes battle across baseball to land the best and the brightest.

“It’s clearly recognition that the Astros have been doing things right with our development of people,” Luhnow said. “Our success is something that other clubs want to emulate and feel one way to do that is to hire our people.”

It has even changed how the Astros operate internally. Fearing defections, the team tries to limit how many people in the organization know the full scope of the club’s inner workings. The Astros put less in writing than they once did and will, when appropriate, divide information among different people.

Teams throughout history have always looked to fill job openings by poaching from their rivals, no differently than what happens in any other professional environment. Winning organizations expect other organizations to try to raid them.

“Executives are drawn toward success, what has worked and why,” Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins said.

In this data-driven age, however, that natural attrition hurts more than ever. In the past, the concept of a “trade secret” in baseball hardly existed. Coaches generally taught the same way and front offices consisted of just a few people in mostly administrative roles.

Today’s teams practically qualify as technology companies, relying on proprietary systems to assist in all areas of their operation, including scouting, player development and roster construction. Teams covet certain people not only because of their ability, but also because of what they know about the infrastructure of the opposition.

For that reason, Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak called the protection of intellectual property “one of the most difficult parts of running baseball operations now.”

“The flight risk for employees is at an all-time high,” Mozeliak said. “Naturally if your team is good, people have interest in you, but now it’s becoming technology-specific and intellect-specific.”

Luhnow understands that as well as anybody. He has patents in his name and used to work as an engineer at W.L. Gore and Associates, the manufacturing company behind Gore-Tex. There, Luhnow said, “their whole secret sauce was making sure their competitors didn’t know how they did their things.”

Luhnow broke into baseball in 2003 with the Cardinals, where he helped revolutionize how they approached the draft. For a time, St. Louis far outclassed everybody else in that department, consistently finding unheralded amateurs who would emerge as key contributors—picking, for instance, three-time All-Star Matt Carpenter in the 13th round. It gave the Cardinals an advantage at a time when even the slightest leg up can separate a team from the pack. They reached the postseason nine times from 2004 through 2015.

By the time Luhnow arrived in Houston, the rest of the league had caught up to the Cardinals’ strategies and philosophies. Secrets don’t last long in baseball these days. Luhnow even heard of at least one GM who would brag about having a copy of the Cardinals’ secret player development manual on his desk.

So with the Astros, Luhnow looked for a different avenue for innovation, latching onto burgeoning technologies regarding player evaluation and development earlier than most. As recently as just a couple of years ago, the Astros became the first team to use cutting-edge high-speed cameras to capture data about their players’ performance. They tried to prevent that fact from leaking out. Nonetheless, all 30 teams use them now—“a clear indication that any trade secrets that we have are out in the industry by now,” Luhnow said.

“We try to do what we can, but it’s impossible to keep stuff from leaking out,” he added. “It just increases our sense of urgency to be able to innovate. We’re under pressure to find new sources of advantage.”

The most notable baseball scandal of late revolved around the safekeeping of IP. Former Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa received a 46-month prison sentence in 2016 for hacking into the Astros’ confidential database and email systems in 2013 and 2014, after Luhnow left St. Louis for Houston. That represents an extreme—and illegal—case, but the hacking incident shows the value of private information in the current baseball landscape.

Teams typically will allow their employees to interview with other teams for obvious promotions. While the boilerplate language in contracts generally prohibits the sharing of secrets, Luhnow said “actually enforcing that is really challenging.”

Ultimately, though, the Astros know they can’t hide everything, especially as teams snatch up their most valuable assets. They only hope they have created a foundation that can withstand the losses.

“There’s a difference between knowing how a successful organization operates and getting a different organization to operate that way,” Luhnow said. “And it’s almost impossible to change a culture.”

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

 

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