Shohei Otani might get grandfathered in. That's good news for the Astros if we make a run at him, but ultimately, I think he ends up with the Yankees. Makes a scary Yankees team even better IMO.
Some blogs hint at the Astros trading for McCutchen, who's in the final year of his deal. Not spending beyond this season keeps an open window for Tucker and $$ for the impending FA's (Keuchel, Morton, etc)
Now it makes more sense for me. I was trying to figure out if Pena was a Moneyball joke or from Pena's memorable Astros career.
Everything right now is just people writing articles because they have to. Get a little closer to the Winter Meetings and then....
Astros have 6 of the top 87 position players in baseball according to Steamers 2018 WAR projections: 6. Correa 5.9 11. Springer 4.9 15. Altuve 4.4 32. Bregman 3.6 73. Reddick 2.4 87. McCann 2.2 Gurriel 1.7 Gattis 1.4 Marwin 1.2; obviously they’re not believers in Marwins 2017 walk rate and power breakouts.
Wow. Their projections for Altuve seem extremely low. 19 HR’s 86 RBI’s and a .306 BA and .846 OPS? Not sure how you can project anything lower than a .320 average and .900 ops.
For some reason all of their WAR projections are really conservative. Trout is the only one over 8 WAR and the rest of the top 10 are anywhere from 5.2 - 6.3. Doesn’t seem realistic at all.
Historically that is accurate. 8 WAR is a really great season. For Fangraphs, only Judge got there in all of baseball last year. I think that is too low on Altuve after back-to-back MVP caliber seasons. I think Bregman will be closer to 5 and Yuli will be closer to 3. Don't see much problem with McCann, Reddick, Springer, or Gattis. Marwin' 2017 is a fluke. I think he made real genuine improvement, but don't see him being an all-star caliber player again.
I certainly don't see him posting a .900 OPS again, a greatly improved batting eye isn't the type of thing that usually goes away. They have his walk rate going back down, his k-rate going up , and his BABIP being the worst it's been in 5 years. I expect his average and power will come back down, but I still expect a .280/.350/.450 type line, which is still really damn good. They have him regressing to results from 2014-2015.