In your joy and your elation and your delirium, suck on that. He could not have been proven more right about the deals he did and did not make, when he made them, and what he gave up when he did. He was right. Even Francisco F. Liriano ended up contributing in G7 *exactly* what he was acquired to contribute in the most important moment. Suck it, all you championship-drunk bastards. Hope the Rangers are still offended by our offers for Yu.
Arod straight up said how a big difference was dodgers trading for yu and astros trading for verlander
I was just so thrilled when the Astros smoked the rangers in that last series at rangers ballpark. They did something that hadn't been done in over a hundred years beating opponents by 9 plus runs in 4 straight games.The mangy rangers got payback for not trading series and we made sure they had no chance for playoffs that last series.
I don't think Crane pushed it through harder than Luhnow. Luhnow just isn't in a position to tell Jim Crane what to do with his money. Ultimately it's Crane's decision, and Luhnow is beholden to that. In fact, from everything I've read, Luhnow was chasing Verlander starting in June.
I bet if we do get Darvish, we fix him. How come Dodgers didn't see he didn't have his stuff or that he was tipping his pitches. Roberts manages by rote, not by what happens in the game.
And I am so glad that none of the people on this BBS are the manager or general manager of the Astros.
I think the one thing that Luhnow deserves a lot of credit for is just starting pitching depth. We basically had 7 starting pitchers at the end of the season. Peacock and Morton were instrumental in getting this done. It just doesn't happen without them playing huge.
Morey just retweeted this Here's the interview in the link Q&A: Astros GM Jeff Luhnow on Analytics, Communication, Leverage, and More We kick off our series of Q&A’s leading up to the 2015 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference with a two-time SSAC panelist who has built one of the most analytically focused front offices in baseball. Jeff Luhnow was hired as general manager of the Houston Astros in November 2011 with an unusual path to the front office. He received his MBA from Northwestern University and worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, was an online entrepreneur during the dot-com boom and is an inventor with patents on file. He joined the St. Louis Cardinals front office a decade ago in somewhat of a consulting role and eventually held the top jobs both in scouting and player development. When the Astros hired him, Luhnow brought in former NASA scientist Sig Mejdal for the newly created position of Director of Decision Sciences. He also hired three writers from Baseball Prospectus and an economist in building his diverse front office. Luhnow’s first three years on the job have been challenging, with the worst record in baseball in two of those, and often controversial. The front office got lots of pushback from the players in implementing defensive shifts, something Luhnow acknowledges as a failure in communication. They’ve also taken heat for the way they exert their leverage on players who are pre-arbitration and in some cases pre-major-league-debut to try to get favorable long-term deals. This year alone, the Astros failed to sign their No. 1 draft pick after a contentious negotiation that centered on a reported malformation of an elbow ligament, had a leak of records of their trade talks and fired their manager over a clash of personalities. Luhnow spoke with 2nd-year MIT Sloan MBA student and Baseball Prospectus author Zachary Levine at the Saber Seminar in Boston in late August, prior to the dismissal of Astros manager Bo Porter. Some of the questions and answers have been edited slightly for clarity. Q: When you took your job as Astros general manager, I know one of your goals was to bring in people from different perspectives. With the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference being a lot of people who aren’t on the inside and trying to get in, what do you think a person from the outside can bring that someone who’s grown up in it would appreciate? A: I think a unique perspective and a different skill set that may not be inside the organization. That’s important – more and more opportunities are arising for people with varied backgrounds, and it’s not just in being able to do math and statistical analysis. It’s also in being able to understand the economics of the game, being able to understand the medical area – I think that’s an area that’s going to continue to evolve and grow – and the psychological aspects of the game. There are all these different disciplines that I think any front office has to deal with in one way, shape or form, and they can either do it by accessing external resources – like a psychologist or doctor or economist who works with the organization – or they can try to bring those skills in house. More and more organizations are trying to bring some of those skills in house. That element is every bit as valuable as someone who has spent 20 years on the field. You need both, of course, and the combination of the two is valuable. Q: Early in your career, you went to the Caribbean and learned scouting from some of the Cardinals’ most respected scouts. How do you recommend someone who is coming in from the outside learn scouting, or in other sports learn the x’s and o’s, to really learn the game? A: It takes time and it takes dedication. The first thing it takes is realizing no matter how much you do, if you haven’t been doing it your whole life, you haven’t played the game, you’re never going to get to the point of the people who have been doing it for their entire careers. So you have to be respectful of what they have built and ask a lot of questions and spend time with people who are doing those jobs. You can go to any Division I college baseball game and you’re going to see scouts behind home plate. Sit down and talk to them, without bothering them from doing their jobs, you can get to know them and ask them how they do their jobs. I think a lot of people try to network at the highest levels, trying to get to the general manager or the scouting director, and those are people who have the least amount of time to spend with prospective baseball people. But an area scout or even a part-time scout who’s out there all the time, or a college coach or a high school coach, there are so many people on the front lines of our industry who are willing to share their knowledge with people who want to learn. Those are the people you need to spend time with. And then quite frankly, watch the game. Don’t be looking at your computer while you’re watching the game, but watch the game. Q: Why did you think an economist was an important position to add? A: So much emphasis has been put on player evaluation and trying to prognosticate what a player is going to do in the future, and it’s been left in the lap of the general manager to figure out how you take that prediction of performance on the field and turn that into dollars and cents. How much does it make sense to offer a prospect who’s in his first year in the big leagues? Should we try to offer a multi-year deal to a player going into arbitration? How much is it worth to bid on a Cuban free agent or a major league free agent? All of those are economic decisions that I think people that are trained in understanding economics and business can bring some structure to and do a lot of the work that we have to end up doing quickly or in our heads as general managers. Q: You’ve taken a lot of criticism for negotiating hard with players who have never signed a big contract or signed a contract at all. Is there a distinction between using leverage and squeezing an 18-year-old kid who doesn’t have the money or bargaining power? A: That’s always going to be the challenge if you’re a good negotiator for your club. There’s going to be some natural negative reaction that you’ve taken advantage of somebody. All of the deals that we’ve done and the deals that get done require two sides to agree that it’s the right deal. Ultimately, you’re not going to hit on all of them – you have to have a better batting average than the next team to gain any sort of competitive advantage. But we’re still in a limited-resource environment and the way to maximize our effectiveness in a limited-resource environment is to do a good job valuing and negotiating. If you didn’t do anything that you regret and feel good about the process you went through, you can’t really second-guess yourself.
-cont Q: How long did it take you to ramp up your data science structure to where you wanted it to be, or if it’s not where you want it to be, what do you think still has to be done? A: We put a lot of resources against that immediately in 2012 and got it to a point where we felt we weren’t at a competitive disadvantage. Now we’re starting to get to a point where we think we might have an edge over other clubs as far as how we analyze information and use information. There are so many new streams of information available every year that we have to continue to stay on it, and I don’t ever foresee us turning down the level of resources we’re pointing toward it. I think it’s only going to go up. It’s not just Trackman and PITCHf/x, but there are so many things happening, and some of it is even coming from other sports – sensors on the equipment and stuff like that. As we generate more and more data, we’re going to need to have people to analyze it and a way to put it together and help the decision makers. That continues. I will say we have a much more secure website now than we used to. Q: How are you preparing for the new MLBAM Statcast player tracking technology that was unveiled at the Sloan conference last year? A: That was amazing to see and we’re excited for it. We’ve been trying to solve the puzzle to a certain extent on our own, and having centralized resources dedicated to it is really going to help a lot. I can’t wait to see how (Astros outfielder) Jake Marisnick grades out on some of that stuff. Q: When I look at you and the Tampa Bay Rays, two of the more statistically advanced teams, the obvious difference is that the Rays are totally closed-mouthed. You guys tend to talk about it a lot more than they do. What made you want to go with this approach of using this as part of your marketing? A: It was really a philosophy that (owner) Jim Crane and I agreed upon back in December of 2011 that we were going to be as open as we possibly could be and as transparent as we possibly could be. We felt like our fans had gone through a decline from the 2005 World Series to where they were in 2011 and we know there were still some rough years ahead and we wanted to get them excited about the future. So bringing them along for the ride meant to a certain extent sharing with them our strategy of some of the ways we’re planning to implement our strategy. Part of that is the analytics. So while we’re careful not to disclose anything that is proprietary, we have put ourselves out there to a certain extent and opened the kimono to having people understand what we’re doing. I don’t think it’s hurt us, but as we start to have more and more success with wins and losses in the major leagues, we’ll probably turn that down and turn the focus more on the players and some of the other things that are happening. Q: What did you learn about the importance of communication from the first two years of struggling to implement the defensive shifts? A: The best message in the world is going to get lost if you don’t communicate it properly. You have to take the time to not just talk, but to listen and to figure out a way to effectively communicate to different audiences. Not everybody responds to the same things. Some people can watch a presentation and get it, some people need to see it, some people need to experience it. Just like there’s no swing that works for all hitters, you have to be ready to adapt how you influence people in your communications approach. Sometimes it’s going out for beers with somebody, and sometimes it’s handing them a five-page Excel spreadsheet. Q: We often hear about the importance of process-based rather than outcome-based decision making, but in practice, what does an extended period of losing do to a team that thinks it’s doing everything right? A: It’s been challenging for our players, for our staff and for our front office, but all along we’ve maintained the notion that we’re on the right path and we’re demonstrating progress toward the ultimate goal. You need to keep reiterating that short-term solutions to eke out a few more wins today come at the expense of what we’re trying to accomplish and it’s not necessarily a good idea. The goal is the same: to get to competitiveness as soon as possible, and we think we’re going about it the right way. That doesn’t mean trying to lose. It means trying to win as many games as you possibly can while tending to that future and making sure that you’re preparing everything for that time because that time is coming. The more you spend resources on it, the quicker it’s going to come. Q: The Astros have had the worst record in baseball three years in a row and the No. 1 pick in three drafts in a row. It’s more of an issue in the NBA, but what do you think about the talk of leagues toning down some of the incentives for losing teams? A: It’s a double-edged sword because you want competitive balance and there is a disparity in the resources available to different teams, and resources lead to success. When you balance all that, you realize that if you don’t give the teams with low resources who might not be able to have the same level of success some advantage, they may not be able to compete. Having said that, we have achieved good parity in this league – there are a lot of different teams that end up in the playoffs every year. So I think the current system seems to be working. I wouldn’t advocate for changing it for that reason.
How Each Player on the Astros' World Series Roster Joined the Team By Daniel Rapaport October 27, 2017 The Astros have been building this team for years. It wasn't a painless building process, as Houston averaged 104 losses from 2011-14. But there was always a plan, a plan that inspired a certain magazine to publish a 5,000-word piece, the thesis of which was that the Houston Astros would win the 2017 World Series. Houston's rebuild has culminated this season, as the Astros eased to the AL Central title with a 101-win season paced by MVP favorite Jose Altuve. In the playoffs, Houston went through two AL East Giants—the Yankees and the Red Sox—to make it back to the World Series for the first time since 2005, when they were swept by the White Sox. How exactly did each member of this Astros team join the organization? Here's a player-by-player breakdown of how each player on Houston's World Series roster became an Astro. STARTING PITCHERS Dallas Keuchel - The ace of this staff and 2015 Cy Young Award was drafted by the Astros in the seventh round of the 2009 draft out of the University of Arkansas. Keuchel, 29, made his major league debut in 2012 as a 24-year-old. Justin Verlander - The likely future Hall of Famer spent the first decade of his career with the Tigers, who drafted him second overall in the 2004 draft out of Old Dominion. In Detroit, Verlander established himself as one of the league's best pitchers—in 2011, he became the first pitcher in nearly 20 years to win an MVP award—but Detroit traded him to the Astros before this year's deadline to clear salary and rebuild. In exchange for Verlander, the Astros sent minor leaguers Daz Cameron, Franklin Perez, Jake Rogers and Juan Ramirez. Lance McCullers Jr. - McCullers Jr., still just 23 years old, was drafted in the first round (41st overall) of the 2012 draft by the Astros out of high school. He made his debut in 2015 as a 21-year-old and was named to his first All-Star team this year before injuries slowed him down in the second half. Charlie Morton - Morton was drafted by the Braves in the third round of the 2002 draft out of high school. After stints with the Pirates and Phillies, Morton joined the Astros in free agency shortly after the end of last season. RELIEF PITCHERS Chris Devenski - Devenski was the player-to-be-named-later in a 2012 between the White Sox and Astros. Chicago sent two players who have yet to make the majors—Matt Heidenreich and Blair Walters—along with a player-to-be-named-later (Devenski) in exchange for Brett Myers and cash. Ken Giles - The closer was taken in the seventh round of the 2011 draft by the Phillies out of a community college. Philadelphia traded Giles and minor leaguer Jonathan Arauz to the Astros for Brett Oberholtzer, Vince Velasquez and minor leaguers Mark Appel, Harold Arauz and Thomas Eshelman. Luke Gregerson - The Cardinals selected Gregerson in the 28th round of the 2006 draft out of St. Xavier University. He made his major league debut with the Padres before being traded to the Athletics. Gregerson signed with the Astros as as a free agent before the 2015 season. Will Harris - Harris was selected by the Rockies in the ninth round of the 2006 draft out of LSU. He was three times—once each by the Rockies, A's and Diamondbacks—before signing with Houston in free agency shortly after the 2014 season. Francisco Liriano - Liriano, who is Dominican, signed as an international free agent with the Giants as a 16-year-old in 2000. He was then traded to the Twins, where he emerged as one of the league's best young pitchers, finishing third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2006. Lirino eventually ended up with the Blue Jays, who traded him to the Astros before this year's deadline in exchange for Norichika Aoki and Teoscar Hernandez. Collin McHugh - The Mets selected McHugh in the 18th round of the 2008 draft out of Berry College. McHugh was traded to the Rockies in 2013 for Eric Young, and the Astros picked him up after the Rockies put him on Waivers after the 2013 season. Joe Musgrove - Musgrove was selected by the Blue Jays in the first round (46th overall) in the 2011 draft. Musgrove was part of a nine-player trade between Toronto and Houston in 2012—the Blue Jays sent Musgrove, Francisco Cordero, Ben Francisco, Carlos Perez, David Rollins, Asher Wojciechowski and Kevin Cosmer to Houston for J.A. Happ, David Carpenter and Brandon Lyon. Brad Peacock - Peacock was drafted by the Nationals in the 41st round of the 2006 draft. He was traded to the A's after the 2011 season and then traded again, this time before the 2013 season, as Oakland sent him to Houston along with Chris Carter and Max Stassi in exchange for Jed Lowrie and Fernando Rodriguez. CATCHERS Brian McCann - The seven-time All-Star and six-time Silver Slugger signed a big free-agent deal with the Yankees before the 2014 season. But the emergence of young catcher Gary Sanchez made McCann expendable, and New York traded McCann to the Astros for promising minor leaguers Jorge Guzman and Albert Abreu. Evan Gattis - Gattis was selected by the Braves in the 23rd round of the 2010 draft. In 2015, Atlanta traded him and James Hoyt to the Astros for Andrew Thurman, Mike Foltynewicz and Rio Ruiz. Juan Centeno - Centeno, who is Puerto Rican, was drafted by the Mets in the 32nd round of the 2007 draft. He made his major league debut with the Mets and had brief stints with the Brewers and and Twins before signing with the Astros as a free agent in December 2016. INFIELDERS Jose Altuve - The 5'6'' Venezuelan is the favorite to win the MVP this season. He signed with the Astros as a free agent in March 2007 and made his major league debut in 2011 as a 21-year-old. He's been an All-Star each of the past four seasons and has a strong case as being the best player in baseball. Alex Bregman - The Astros picked the third baseman second overall out of LSU in the 2015 draft. Bregman made his major league debut after the All-Star break in 2016 and established himself as the everyday starter this season. Carlos Correa - The Astros selected Correa, who is from Puerto Rico, with the first overall pick in the 2012 draft. Correa made his debut as a 20-year-old in 2015 and won the Rookie of the Year award that season. Marwin Gonzalez - Gonzalez, who is Venezuelan, signed with the Cubs as an international free agent in 2005. After spending five years in the minors, Gonzalez was drafted by the Red Sox in the 2011 Rule 5 draft. Boston then traded Gonzalez to the Astros for minor leaguer Marco Duarte after the 2011 season. Yuli Gurriel - Gurriel defected from Cuba in 2016 when he was 31 years old and joined the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of the Japanese Central League. He then signed a five-year deal with the Astros as a free agent last July. OUTFIELDERS Carlos Beltran - The Royals selected Beltran in the second round all the way back in 1995. The 40-year-old has played for seven teams—including a brief stint with the Astros in 2004—and most recently joined Houston as a free agent shortly after last season. Derek Fisher - Fisher was selected by the Astros in the first round (37th overall) of the 2014 draft. He made his major league debut in June at the age of 23. Cameron Maybin - The Tigers took Maybin with tenth overall pick of the 2005 draft. Houston signed him off waivers on Aug. 31, and the Astros are the sixth major league team Maybin has played for. Josh Reddick - The Red Sox selected Reddick in the 17th round of the 2006 draft. He was traded twice—once from the Red Sox to the A's, then from the A's to the Astors' opponent in the World Series, the Dodgers. Houston signed Reddick in free agency before this season. George Springer - Houston drafted Springer with the 11th overall pick in the 2011 draft out of UConn. Springer, who hit 34 home runs this year, made his debut as a 24-year-old in 2014. In summation, the Astros drafted just six of the 25 players on the World Series roster. Nine were acquired via trade, six via traditional free agency and four signed as international free agents.
Wow... Luhnow knows how to rehabilitate players... The Future Star Who Got Away From Each MLB Team https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2019/...ot-away-corey-kluber-max-muncy-fernando-tatis This list is littered with current Astros: Will Harris: Alvarez: McHugh There's also a mention of Ryan Pressly. Then of course, a former Astro: Charlie Morton Also a mention of Marwin Gonzales. The biggest knock on the Astros on who they let go... JD Martinez and Ramon Laureano
This is also consistent with the Astros always targeting Yordan Alvarez.... and using the Dodgers to get him for them.
Hader, Martinez, and Laureano are the guys who have gone on to be stars. Hader is really the only one I blame Luhnow for. Nobody guessed Martinez was going to transform and Laureano had no pedigree and wasn’t that great in the minors. JD Davis, Mike Foltynewicz, Colin Moran, Brett Phillips, Jake Rogers, Daniel Mengden, Nick Tropeano, Jake Nottingham, Domingo Santana, Adrian Houser, Michael Feliz, Trent Thornton, Rio Ruiz, Josh Rojas, Teoscar Hernandez, and Derek Fisher have all been useful major leaguers. Quite a few of those guys appear to be everyday caliber players and a few may end up becoming stars. Jorge Alcala, Daz Cameron, Franklin Perez, Albert Abreu, Jorge Guzman, Gilberto Celestino, JB Bukauskas, Corbin Martin, Seth Beer, and Hector Perez are still in the minors. I’m amazed at how high the % of prospects that Luhnow has traded away have reached the majors. Very few busts (Paulino, Thurman, who else?)
Well I was an irrational JD Martinez fan since he got the game with 3 doubles. His consistency was the only troublesome aspect. I saw him more as a doubles hitter with a strong contact tool more than anything else though.
