This has been such a roller coaster ride but man there was no fire this weekend, and let's be honest, the Mariners are just the better team, I tip my cap to them. At this point, it will be cool if we can get in but the were playing, we will get bounced..............this sucks, 2 thing this off season, what will they do with Framber and was the Cam Smith experiment worth it? He had some flashes, but he sure hit a wall
Losing the 2 - 1st Round Picks, 2 - 2nd Round Picks due to Cheating Scandal, Rob Manfred got his revenge. Astros haven't recovered, literally in injuries and lack of Talent. Christian Walker for a Draft Pick will hurt later on. 4 Players that could be Star or Solid Players would be on this team right now.
They also just weren’t able to add star talent picking later in the draft. They went from adding Springer, Correa, Bregman, McCullers, and Tucker over the course of 5 drafts to…Whitley, Bukauskas, Beer, and Lee. And they compounded the sign stealing penalty by signing Hader and Walker which cost them 2 additional 2nd round picks. All that said, if Alvarez is healthy all season, they’re almost certainly still in 1st place in the division and they almost certainly don’t get swept by Seattle last weekend.
They had first and second round picks in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 and none of them turned into solid or star players. What makes you think 2020 or 2021 would have been different?
I have no worries about Cam. He has superstar written all over him. People forget how little experience he has. His defense is going to be amazing. Just a little lift and he’ll be a double machine and approaching 30 home runs next year. Framber is an enigma. We really need his inning eater ability. I think he has successfully cost himself the mega contract. The Astros have a lot more information than we do. Maybe they can get him for a reasonable 3 year contract. I don’t think there is any way they go more years than that, especially with the young studs they have coming up.
There’s plenty of reason to be very skeptical that Cam Smith has “superstar written all over him”. He got 480 pa of major league time and was a below average hitter, and his defense even seemed to regress as the season went on. He carried a pretty high k rate underpinned by a higher than normal swinging strike rate. I am still bullish on him as an everyday player; his defense is likely to be very good in RF and he may even be able to handle CF, and his power is unquestioned. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if he tops out as a 1.5-2.5 win player who strikes out quite a bit and doesn’t hit very many HR. In fairness, it wouldn’t shock me if he does pan out into a star level player, because when you factor in his youth and inexperience, his season was actually fairly impressive. In hindsight I think it would have been much better for him to have started the season in AA and not been brought up until he’d worked on his launch angle and swing and miss, even if it meant rolling with somebody like Cooper Hummel or Chas for most of the season.
