I also wonder how many guys participated. Max Holy making a leap from non-prospect to a fringe guy would be a nice little story.
Even though he was an older UDFA and k’ed >30% last year, he clearly has some tools. He stole 40 bases last season, posted very high walk rates, and was played mostly at SS. I assume power just isn’t a part of his game, but if he can lower the amount of strikes he takes looking he might end up as a decent backup SS who can be used as a pinch runner.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47684209/top-100-mlb-prospects-2026-kiley-mcdaniel-101-200-rankings-superlatives# ESPN released their top 200 prospects. Houston only had 3 on the list, all outside the top 100: 109. Brice Matthews 178. Walker Janek 185. Xavier Neyens ESPN has been notoriously low on the Astros farm for going on a decade. AL West prospects on the list: 5. SS Walcott TEX 6. 2B Emerson SEA 11. SS DeVries A’s 16 P Anderson SEA 24. P Sloan SEA 42. P Jump A’s 55. P Bremner LAA 60. P Arnold A’s 62, 2B Arroyo SEA 95. P Cijntje SEA 99. P Scarborough TEX 105. SS Celesten SEA 108. OF Monte’s SEA 112. SS Guzman LAA 116. P Corniell TEX 119. OF Farmelo SEA 141. P Santos TEX 147. P Klassem LAA 149. P Johnson LAA 160. OF Rada LAA If you allow Cam Smith to be counted as a prospect, I’d take Houston’s farm system over every AL West team except Seattle.
Outside of the top 100 prospects in baseball, where the implication is they will probably be good and the top 5 where they have super star potential. I truly believe it’s all a crap shoot, it’s an impossible task to truly stack rank these players given the sheer volume and levels in play. You can’t expect most national guys had knew who Zach Cole was before last season, but Nook was in here saying Astros think he had crazy potential. Not necessarily saying he’ll break out, but there’s too many examples of these iournalist severely under ranking players who performed better than most prospects ahead of them.
One thing I think is very highly correlated to farm system quality is how many 1st and 2nd rd picks it has. Fangraphs released their Angels list today and I found it interesting that they only have ONE 1st rd pick and 3 2nd rd picks in their list. The average system has 4-5 1st rounders and 3-4 2nd rounders. Houston should have 3 1st rounders and 1-3 2nd rounders (depending on if Alex Santos and Andrew Taylor make the cut). The Mariners had 6 1st rounders and 2 2nd rounders on their list. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/los-angeles-angels-top-36-prospects/
Yes and that is important context. Similarly, if Cam Smith hadn’t graduated last season Houston’s farm would probably be rated significantly higher.
Feeling a little disheartened about Houston’s outlook this week and thinking about a potential forthcoming rebuild led me to analyze the last rebuild. That led me to go back and look at all the MLB Pipeline Top 100 lists over the last 15 years. From 2011 to 2022 Houston had 27 Top 100 prospects. This is where they came from: Draft (18): Springer, Brown, C Martin, James, Bukauskas, Whitley, Fisher, Cameron, Tucker, Phillips, Bregman, Velasquez, Deshields, Folty, McCullers, Appel, Correa, Springer Int’l (1): F Perez Trade (8): Yordan, Paulino, Martes, Santana, Moran, Cosart, Marisnick, Singleton The draftees were split between high picks (Correa, Bregman, Appel, Tucker), mid/late first and 2nd rounders (Bukauskas, Whitley, DeShields, Folty, Springer, McCullers, Fisher, Martin, Cameron), and sleepers (Brown, James, Phillips). Just kind of surprising how little Houston actually got from trades (nothing to speak of outside of Yordan) and just how much of the value came out of the draft, and so much of that was from 4 guys picked in the top 5 picks in the draft. If the Astros were to rebuild again the hope would be that they’d get a LOT more out of trades this time which would shorten the rebuild to 1-2 years. If they are out of contention at the deadline then trading Brown, Pena, Diaz, Paredes, Abreu, and Imai should give them a massive head start on rebuilding.
Don't forget that Luhnow was a genius, since reasons Your list is missing Luis Garcia Framber Valdez There also some waiver wire signings like Collin McHugh More credit to Luhnow.
Garcia, McHugh, and Valdez were never Top 100 prospects, which is why I didn’t list them. The other note was that Houston managed to get a hall of fame 2B who was never on a top 100 list. Same thing for a cy young winner (Keuchel). I remain convinced that Luhnow wasn’t actually overly gifted at talent evaluation or development. His real genius was selling Crane on a full complete rebuild that allowed him to get 4 consecutive years of having a top 5 overall draft pick (with 3 consecutive years of drafting #1 overall). But that might be more of a credit to Crane than Luhnow.
I actually think Luhnow's willingness to look outside the box and buck conventional ideas along with his ability to identify and hire smart people - and accept their ideas was his real genius.
I don’t think there’s much proof of that. If you look at his transactional history as GM (draft picks, trading, international signings, free agent signings, waiver claims), he was about average. He’s probably the only GM in history to completely whiff on 2 #1 overall picks (Appel and Aiken). When you take away his extremely high picks (Correa, Bregman, and Tucker), his drafts weren’t overly productive. His free agent signings were a mixed bag. So were his trades. Even on waiver claims he gave as much as he got (McHugh vs JD Martinez). The real key to his success was obtaining overwhelming draft resources in a very short period of time. He only did that by overseeing the worst 3-4 year stretch in baseball history. I liked Luhnow and think he was a good executive. But genius is too strong a word.
Lug now is the greatest GM the MLB has ever seen. There is no doubt about that in my mind. We are six years after his departure here and the core of the team is still Jeff Luhnow and even as of last year he was still producing prospects for us. There have been a multitude of other franchises that have lost year after year after year that never pieces together the dominant decade long stretch that Luhnow was the brains behind here. We won 100 games or more in 4 out of 5 seasons. We only truly had three high draft picks in there. The Reds have had 4 or 5 top 7 picks in the last 8 years with I believe three of those being #2 overall and haven't done anything.
Meh. You’re minimizing the difference in value between the #1 overall pick and the #7 pick. You’re also conveniently ignoring the first half of Luhnow’s tenure, where he oversaw the worst stretch of baseball in history. He was 737-691 as GM. Luhnow was good not great in terms of transactional leadership. He was genius/innovative at convincing his owner that the only surefire way to the top was to tank completely.
I'm not sure about proof. My understanding (without having sources to verify anything) is that he significantly forwarded the use of science and technology in baseball. He was the first to bring in high speed cameras to use in player development and used metrics in game planning long before it was widely used. The shift and pitch usage were two things that have been mentioned most option for a decade now.
He was definitely not the first to bring in high speed cameras or to use metrics in gameplanning. The Astros had a lot of success under Luhnow in getting pitchers to pitch up in the zone (not necessarily a novel idea but not something most teams were doing) and maximizing spin rates (this was fairly novel but the Astros were one of a number of teams doing that). Most of Luhnow’s transactional successes were attributed to luck or to hiring Brent Strom. Later in his tenure he was focused on injury prevention and load management but clearly didn’t leave a lasting legacy of innovation there, although I am definitely curious what he could have accomplished in that arena if given more time, since I agreed with him that health management is the next competitive advantage to be had.
Thanks for the info. I was much more casual in my Astros and baseball Fandom at the time and paid little attention to anything off the field. Cheers.
luhnow was a pioneer in international scouting. That was were he was ahead of everyone. That and his success in player development is what setup the Astros for unprecedented success. His scouting was pretty average.
"...where he oversaw the worst stretch of baseball in history" I don't think this was the case Or maybe it was?
