Astro Fans Chat With General Manager Jeff Luhnow

Not fan chat but was on Astroline Radio

[rQUOTEr]Astros GM Jeff Luhnow made an appearance on Astroline Radio yesterday, discussing a variety of topics about the team. You can listen to the interview here, though Astros' senior director of social media Alyson Footer provided a partial transcript. Here are the highlights...

<>"[Our] plan involves us building from within, developing a system that can be productive and allow us to compete year in and year out," said the GM. "How long it takes until we’re competing year in and year out, I don’t know at this point."

<>Luhnow said they will "be a small market team for a few years" as they rebuild, meaning they will avoid big free agent contracts.

<>The Houston market is big enough that the Astros can support a large payroll, but the team has "milestones along the way that [they're] going to need to hit" if they want to approach $100MM.

<>The team plans to emphasize both scouting and statistical analysis to make the best decisions as they move forward.

<>Luhnow does not plan to trade right-hander Bud Norris. "He is a critical part of the plan moving forward," said the GM[/rQUOTEr]

 

Excellent! No need for any Carlos Lee type of situations.

 

I love this because it's honest. I might not like where we are...but I love that the management is trying to fool themselves or anyone else about it. That's how you improve and keep from making decisions that aren't pointed at the target.

 

Seriously if you look at all the big contracts spread around MLB over the last decade 9 out of every 10 are disasters.

Astros can build a highly productive and deep farm system and avoid all of that and not even be handcuffed to resign such and such player if there is someone waiting in his wings ala The Tampa Rays.

I know Luhnow and his staff are going to make it happen and it's going to be very exciting watching these young guys grow up and develop right in front of our eyes.

 

The Carlos Lee contract was awful, everybody knew it the day it was signed, but there is nothing wrong with re-signing your own guys.

Berkman, Oswalt, Biggio, Bagwell you wanna keep stars around, thats what could seperate us from Tampa. If one of our guys develops into an all-star, we can keep him. If the Astros start winnig again there will be plenty of revenue streams.

I like the moneyball system to an extent, but we have more money than Oakland are Tampa, and we better spend it. Not in the Yankee or Red sox territory, but in a couple of years our payroll should be top 15.

Build through the farm, but spend some money when you have to.

 

Brad Mills and Jeff Luhnow on 1560

Brad Mills

Spoiler

Lowrie everyday SS?

We'll look at him there first. Coming into camp, a guy we'll look at SS first and then go from there.

A lot of spots up for grab, no?

There is. A good thing. Anytime you get competition, it brings out the best in everybody. As we go into ST, it sure will be nice to see the guys battle.

Some guys brought in like Cust, Hernandez, Snyder, a little bit older but you're a rebuilding team. Gotta play young guys but also have these vets that could possibly make the club.

In ST, what it allows us to do is utilize the DH. We'll be able to get a extra hitter in the lineup like Cust. He can get some bats at DH. When we play him in the OF or at 1B, we can play that guy at DH to get them some at bats. Hernandez, a guy who has been able to be a big competitor where ever he's at. He brings experience and brings an opportunity for us to get a lot of innings out of our starting pitching. Anytime you can get innings out of a vet like that is huge. Snyder, right now we have the 4 catchers in camp, it wont be difficult to get playing time.

If you're having the type of year you want to have, it starts with _____? What does it start with with the Astros?

With everyone doing everything they absolutely can to help this team win. Starts with the competition for those positions. We'll get guys will come to camp and battle for those positions. We need to keep the mindset that we'll keep battling for those positions but also, battling to score runs, battling to win games, battling to get outs, battling to make plays. Thats what we need to get across to these guys. Start with competition for positions.

Talk about Jimmy Paredes.

Extremely athletic. Hits from both sides. Definite pop from both sides. His ability to play different positions. He runs really well. A guy with a lot of ability. He'll come into camp and we'll see if he's ready to step in as a full-time major league player. We'll see how that pans out.

This is Richard. How are you doing?

Hey, ha, good Richard.

Where do you stand with Brett Wallace? What does he need to do, what did you want him to work on, what were his problems last year?

The adjustment period for Brett was there. He got off to a good start swinging the bat. He has no problem with his eye at the plate. Being able to make the adjustment when pitchers adjust to him, when he got off to that good start, he was driving the ball, getting base hits, then all of a sudden, adjustments were made to him. Its an adjustment period for everyone. When someone has success, they'll try something different. He has the ability to do it. Hopefully he can.

How important is HRs with him?

You have run creators and run producers. Wally is a run producer. When you look at run producers, he has ability to reach the seats and we need him to do that as a run producer.

Same for Chris JOhnson. What was your mandate to him? What did you want him to work on? Where does he stand in your eyes?

Here's a guy who came in and battled hard 2 years ago in ST. Opened everyone's eyes. MAde the team when Berkman got hurt. When Lance came back, he was sent to AAA. Didnt hang his head. Played well there and when he came up here he played well. You look at last year for him, you kinda wonder if he thought the game was going to be that easy. He found out it wasnt. That is the type of maturing everyone has to go through. Everyone is humbled every now and then. We're looking for him to come to camp and ready to fight for a position and go from there. So far, he has done everything you could ask. Looks like everything is in the right position, right where it should be.

Jose Altuve, just 5 walks in 221 at bats. Can you change a guy at the major league level to start taking pitches?

I dont know if you can change a guy but you can continue to work on it and continue to get better. Thats what we are. A lot of that comes from experience and confidence. He wants to make an impression up here and he did. He plays the game well and hard. But as he matures and gets confidence at the major league, you gotta think he'll learn that strike zone a little better and have confidence that if he lets this strike go by, he'll hit the next one.

Where do you see Carlos Lee's place on this team on the field and in the clubhouse?

Carlos, his best position for me and I think we could see last year, is at 1B. We see him at 1B. Carlos did a good job at 1B. Thats where he'll play this year. In the clubhouse, we want him to just be professional. He doesnt have to be real vocal but he has to do the right things as a guy that people can see, hey, this guy has been in the major leagues for a long time. After talking to Carlos, he relishes that position. We'll see how it is moving forward and as he comes to camp.

Does that mean Wallace will take balls at third or?

We'll have him take balls at third, no doubt. We'll see where he lies. He played 3B in college and some in the low minors I think and then they moved him to 1B. Heres a guy who has hit everywhere he's been except here right now. If we can get another solid left handed bat and run producer in our lineup, and turns out he can play 3B, all the better. We'll give him work at 3rd this Spring and see where we're at.

Is RF Bogu's to lose?

I think Bogey, the impression he made last year, and how he works, this guy is impressive. Got an impressive body, impressive bat speed, his athleticism, we'd like to see him mature into the player that his capabilities with the skills he has. Saying that, as long as he keeps improving and does what he can, yes, he'll have an opportunity to play RF.

Talk about the process of getting on the same page as a new GM.

Communication is what goes into it and working together. From my point of view, I enjoy talking to Jeff. We've talked many times. He came to Cali and I was able to talk to him for almost a full day, getting able to chat. We talked this morning a little bit. You keep those communication lines open and as far as Im concerned, its a great relationship.

Zach Duke the addition. He could come out of the pen?

We'll look at this guy. This guy was a starter and a few years ago an all-star. Hopefully he can get some of those things back. An experienced left hander is nice to have. If we have to use him in the bullpen, we'll see how that works. Maybe he develops as a starter.

What did you tell Bud NOrris after the season?

Ive been spending a lot of time with Bud. #1, coming to camp healthy and continue to stay strong. This guy was pretty good last year. We want him to be able to go deeper into ball games and thats where conditioning and strength comes in.

How difficult is it for you, you got a new owner and there is a new attitude. There are a lot of guys with contracts up in the air. How do you handle that throughout the season?

I dont know exactly who you are talking about but we will handle each guy a little bit different than the next guy but, again, we want these guys to work together to what we're trying to do to get better as a ballclub and organization. Thats what JEff wants to do, thats what ownership wants, he wants this city to be proud of this ball club and be able to compete as quickly as we can. We'll bring a lot of guys to camp for competition. We'll treat everyone along those same lines. If you can play and show some things, you'll stay here and be able to help us win and compete.

Did you tell Bud to come out of his shell a little bit?

(laughing)Thanks Richard.

Looking at your team, you got Martinez in the OF and Bogey and Schafer, you got competition, it must be exciting to see the number of guys who have a chance to play.

ANytime you get in a situation where you'll have competition for those jobs. Angel Sanchez lets say, this guy has been in here in January 1. in here working out because he knows he'll have to play hard to make a position. Chris JOhnson I mentioned him, Brett Wallace, Jason Castro, he was hurt all last year, hes gonna come to camp proving hes healthy and proving to himself he's ready to play. Those type of things makes it exciting. Now, anytime you have competition, hopefully it brings out the best in each individual.

Coming from Boston where you won so much and then coming here, with what you've gone through, how difficult is it for you to lose this many games and keep that attitude up? Just yourself, forget your team, just you.

You keep the focus on what we're trying to accomplish, number one. To sit here and say its easy or whatever, theres nobody like that. What this ballclub and the guys who were here last year, thats what we want to rally around. Nobody liked it. You're talking to a guy who takes responsbility for that. Im not happy with it. One reason we're bringing so many guys to camp to have that competition is because of that. To try and develop that attitude of these guys working together to stay away from something like last year. If we can do that, everybody will enjoy that and that keeps everyone focused in the right direction.

http://www.1560thegame.com/audio/brad-mills-gave-his-outlook-on-the-potential-25-man-roster-3326/

Jeff Luhnow

Spoiler

-Exciting time for baseball fans.

-Matt Slater is a good guy. A lot of respect for him and everyone in STL. They do a good job there. I think we're going to be on the right path here quickly and think they'll be lucky we're getting out of the division.

-With Beltran, Holliday and Berkman, they have a lot of great player. They're team to beat in the NL. I dont have concerns about the culture of the Cardinals.

-We havent lost any games since I took over. Reality is when you lose 106 games, its a combo of things that went wrong. No one person's fault. A lot of great people in this organization. Getting to know people I didnt know before, I'm bullish on the Astros. How quickly we are competing for division titles, I dont know. I do want the best product on the field on opening day and want to compete as soon as possible. Our plan is to build this for the long haul. Any decision will be considered of that strategy.

-Doesnt expect another 100 loss season. The team is on the rise. We'll show marked improvement on the field. Have 61 players coming to camp. We need to choose 25 then. A lot of competition and young players. 21 rookies last year that debuted. Those young players will start to form the foundation that will be around for awhile. Last time the Astros had that many rookies was 1991. The team that emerged from that was guys like Biggio, Bagwell, Schilling, Luis Gonzalez, Finley and so on that went on to be the core of the Astros that went on to make the playoffs 6 of 9 years. Not saying it will be an immediate thing but those rookies will have more experience. Added vets where we could. Expecting better outcome this year than last year.

-A lot of consideration into choosing a team(mediocre vs bad). The city and market was the thing for me. Will be fun to watch it go from where it was last year to competing year in and year out and competing for division titles & championships. That's the goal. Much more satisfying when we get this thing there. I'm energized about it and hope our fans are as well.

-Brad is a good baseball man. Level headed. Understands where we are and what it takes to win. Has experience in both leagues. Doesnt mind letting the young guys play. Knows what he is doing. Didnt take long for me to come to that decision that Brad was the right guy. There are a lot of good things happening in Houston. A lot went wrong to get where the team got to last year but optimism about the future and a lot of pieces in place that make sense. We're excited about where we're going from here.

-Where gonna put the best 25 men on the field. Carlos is in that group. We'll also be looking throughout the year at ways to improve ourselves for the long term. Wont say anyone is untouchable, wont say anyone is on the market. We'll be looking at making moves throughout the year that can improve our team in the medium to long term without sacrificing too much short term. A lot of talk about guys who will be moved but we're gonna put the best 25 on the field, try and win as many as we can, and we'll evaluate each opportunity as it comes up with respects to trades or signings for the future. (Sounds a lot like another GM in town ; ))

http://www.1560thegame.com/audio/as...he-nl-landscape-turning-around-his-team-3331/

 

Luhnow on 610 earlier today.

Spoiler

(13-15 start; chances of remaining at that kind of level competitively for the entire season?): Team has really played well. One thing I look at and a lot of people look at is how many runs you score and allow. We call that run differential. We've scored 14 more runs than we've allowed so far this season. That's been going on for a while--all year actually. Typically teams that score more than they give up end up having winning records. Either our offense is a false positive and not as good as they've been showing or maybe our record is a little light compared to the quality of this team. That's what I'm hoping. We're about a .500 team right now, a little under, but we've been competing with everybody. Having the Cardinals come in was a good test for us and taking 2 of 3 is a testament to what these guys have been able to do so far. Our work gets harder. Marlins come in, who have won 5 straight and goes from there. Not an easy road. I'm proud of the way the guys have played and I think we have a chance to sustain this and maybe even improve upon it.

(People talk about Wandy, Myers, and maybe having great value at the deadline, how close in the race do you have to be to think lets keep this group together and see if they can make a run): A couple of things go into it. Obviously where we are, realistically what our chances are of making it into the playoffs, and then what clubs are talking about - what they'll offer us. We'll look at every opportunity to improve. We don't want to give up a lot of future value to maintain a little present value if it doesn't make sense. We'll look on a case by case basis. Doesn't make sense a team in our situation to say we won't return phone calls or won't talk to clubs about any of our players. Hard to say at this point. We're happy with the group we have. They're competing and vets have been a part of that and taking them out of it would change the team and we'll have to be cognitive of that in anything we do.

(Your background is a business background educationally but obviously ended up in a spot where it's more of the baseball side than business side. How did you end up in the baseball side?): I had 3 careers before baseball. When I got into baseball, I started immediately on the baseball side with STL in '03 and ultimately took over the scouting department and player development department as well as international, so I was overseeing the entire inbound player pipeline for the last 8 years. That really provided me with a real good feel and depth and understanding of how this industry works and what the key success factors are and how to build an organization, at any point but certainly one that needs more in-plans(?) to win by developing it's own players. There is a lot in baseball that you can bring from other industries, whether a lawyer, business person or doctor even, just having a certain capability and mindset and discipline in how you make decisions can really apply in baseball as well but you have to have the experience to be able to do a role like this. Having done it for 8 years with STL, I felt like I was ready for it. We see different combos of experience in and out of the industry. I like my set of experiences because I'm still open minded to new ideas but I've been in the industry long enough to know why things are done the way they are done.

(Who's idea was it to put saber-metrics on the scoreboard?): That was our idea to do that. We wanted to make it an interesting feature for the fans. It's something we'll be utilizing and making decisions going forward and a lot of teams do and thought it would something fun for our fans to get accustomed to. We're familiar with looking at batting averages, RBIs, there are other ways to evaluate players and ways to evaluate situations that are more sophisticated. We want to start communicating some of those to our fans to get them more involved. Hopefully its a fun feature and not too intimidating.

(Do you think the average fan that looks at that and understands it?): Kinda fun to play with. Those are the probabilities/odds. What you do will have a different outcome because each individual outcome is different but its the aggregate of all of those that leads to those odds.

(The book 'Moneyball', is it a bible to guys like you or does it go to the Bill James era?): 'Moneyball' was a fun entertaining book and movie but did not really tell the whole story. If people are interested in saber-metrics, there are about 10-12 books I would give them to read. 'Moneyball' is entertaining but doesn't really tell you how to do this stuff or what it means. It's become a whole discipline, whole area of study. It's because baseball lends itself to that. We all grew up looking at baseball cards on the back, and this is taking it to a new level.

(Best saber-metrics book, the one you need to look at?): There is a book called 'The Book'. It's written by a couple of saber-metricians who are relatively young, in the mold of Bill James maybe 20 years ago. Written by MGL and Tango, called 'The Book'. That's a fun one to look at, especially when analyzing in-game strategies and trying to understand what's happening within the context of a particular game. There are a lot of websites out there. Baseball Prospectus is a very good website. Type in saber-metrics in google search and you'll get a ton of good stuff.

(A particular measurement in saber-metrics that you like more than another?): I do but it's our internal metric. It's all in a fraction or runs. We have our own way of determining how many runs each play is worth, how many runs each player is worth but it's a propriety, very sophisticated metric. For your average fan coming to the ballpark, some of the things you're talking about, runs above replacement and wins above replacement, those are two fairly simple measures. You understand what a run and win is. A player that is a win above replacement is a whole win better than a guy you can just get off another team that is freely available. I also think for fans, I'm not a big believer in base % by itself, what I believe in, if you're gonna look at one number on the board, on base + slugging which mathematically doesn't make a whole lot of sense how it's derived but turns out to be a really good measure of how well a player is doing. OPS is what I look at. Any player that has an OPS over 800 is doing very well. Guys that have over 900 are having really good, all-star type seasons. I would say Albert Pujols OPS right now is way low compared to what he is expected to do and what he'll probably do.

(You were brought in to rebuild an organization, not only at the MLB level, that has had some down years producing MLB talent. Update on how things are going there?): Some trades made last year brought in some interesting talent. That has upgraded the depth of our organization. I do think there are a lot of prospects in our farm system that are going to be MLB players, either now, you know within the next 2 years or 5 years. That bodes well for us but we have the first pick in the draft this year. One of the things I learned in STL, in terms of developing a good minor league organization, you can never have too much depth and have to constantly build the organization. When we traded for Matt Holliday, we traded away a lot of good players and had to sorta rely on the guys we had left. You don't want to have one trade gut your system. We feel like this draft will give us a good opportunity. We'll be aggressive internationally. You can't take any time off. You have to continue to build your system and that gives the GM an opportunity to make trades and/or bring guys up as necessary. It's a process. It's not something that can be cured in one year but something we certainly have at the top of our list of things that we want to accomplish.

(When Crane took over, he instituted some budget cuts, some cutting of some corners he felt necessary to make in order for this team to move forward, with the long term goals of a winning a championship in mind, you mentioned the #1 pick, any doubt in your mind that the money will be there to sign that guy?): We have the biggest budget in baseball for the draft this year. Not only that, the biggest ability to spend because of the new CBA. There are some pretty punitive penalties for overspending. I feel pretty good that we'll be able to get a great crop of players from this draft, we'll invest heavily in it and its going to pay its return because it's something we need, that infusion of talent, and something that will definitely help us in the long term.

(When people watch 'Moneyball' or hear the story about saber-metrics, doing more with less and all this, and then win a lot of regular season games but never made it to the WS and never won a WS, and you see the Red Sox in '04 and '07 who spent a lot of money, the Cardinals, who have a high payroll and Yankees clearly are, does that speak poorly about saber-metrics and what it means, because you see these teams, they might compete using this system but the WS title still goes to the teams that spend the money): Yeah, I don't really buy into that. During all those years Oakland was doing innovative things, they had a terrific winning %, made the playoffs, they did not win the WS, winning the WS is difficult to do, but the best example I can give you of a team that is applying a lot of these principles and is having success is the Cardinals. Yes the Cardinals have a bigger payroll than Oakland does but the Astros used to have a bigger payroll than the Cardinals do. You can look at it and say, if you can combine the modern thinking with a decent size payroll, that gives you the best chance of actually winning the WS and the Cardinals are proof that it can happen.

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