So hoping Dana can be as successful as Luhnow was at the trade deadline and calling him out when he's not is beating a dead horse?
I think Crane gave Luhnow more latitude than he did Click and Brown. However, the way Luhnow was going towards the end, he likely would have traded more assets in 2020-2022 than Click. As such, maybe the Astros have another World Series win, maybe they have less if Luhnow had remained GM. I'd guess pretty strongly that the Astros would be rebuilding already in exchange for win-now moves in 2020-2022.
Depends on if you look at the 1st two championships and 4-5 more ALCS in a decade is considered a gold standard. It is the gold standard IMHO. Of course I only care about winning and dont care at all about what the media or really anybody else thinks.
This depends on how successful the trades would've been and how much contractual control would've been gained in those trades. Also would the mining of the Caribbean continued. That was the real secret to the Stros dynasty along with the trades.
Verlander probably shouldn’t be counted as a normal trade-deadline win. He was acquired on Aug. 31 under the old waiver-trade system, after the July deadline. That route doesn’t even exist anymore. Greinke trade, he didn't pitch well in the postseason. If the other notable deadline trade didn't happen, Luhnow is still the GM, POBO, or whatever title he wants from the Astros. I'm not aware of Brown's trade deadlines being worse than getting Luhnow fired.
The success of the trades would likely have traded team control for more short-term talent, similar to the Verlander, Cole, and Greinke trades. The success of the trades would be measured in championships in 2020-2022. Astos won 1. I think 1 is likely what the Astros win 1 if Luhnow was GM as well over that time. Luhnow gave up a ton of unconcentrated future wins to jam as much value as he could in 2015-2019. Luhnow was amazing because he had a ton of prospects to work with, but it was apparent the Astros were promoting and trading talent a lot faster than acquiring and developing the last 2 and a half seasons that Luhnow was GM. I don't think Click changed what was happening in development overnight. The Astros advantage in IFA was the Edgertronic camera. They were made fun of for always showing up with it. By about 2018, about a third of the league was using it. MLB teams are good at copying ideas. I'd much rather have Luhnow at the helm for rebuilding. I just think he would jammed everything the Astros had to win knowing he could rebuild the team.
Pham is 39 years old and sucks at this point in his career. Andujar has negative 0.4 bWAR this season. It 10 seasons he’s compiled a whopping 1.7 bWAR. He sucks. Wade is on the team now so you can quit complaining about him. FYI 29 other teams didn’t offer him a MLB contract this offseason either though. Listen, I’m not saying Dana is perfect. I think if you asked him today that even he would admit he should have figured out a way to get a better OF this offseason. At the time he chose to see what he had in Matthews/Loperfido and clearly Matthews hasn’t worked out. The jury is still out on Loperfido. I’m pretty sure everyone appreciates what Lunhow did for the most part but to act like he did no wrong and to still be talking about him years later is a bit much.
I'm not complaining at all. I'm just telling you that 3 Mendoza level hitters in the everyday OF is on Dana. When it came to acquiring personnel Luhnow did very little wrong and most importantly he understood that prospects are great but championships are better.
I started looking at our first round draft picks, and Brice Matthews is the first player who played in more than a handful of major league games since Kyle Tucker in 2015. How crazy is that? That just shows how rare hitting on Springer, Correa, Bregman, McCullers, and Tucker was in a 5 year window.
I think if you gave Dana Brown truth serum and asked him why his outfield sucks, he would say “because my boss forced a trade for Correa which ate all the money and created a logjam in the lineup. So I had to leave LF open for Yordan in case everybody stayed healthy and I didn’t have any money to upgrade it anyway. Then the guy my boss traded for got hurt and left me with a crummy outfield.”
Without question. He doesn’t have the job security either to just settle on a crappy deal trading Paredes for an OF like Id suggested and risk having that blow up in his face. Especially knowing the injury risk on this team as a collective. Aside from Yordan playing LF more often if necessary, once again you have to give guys like Matthews a shot to see what you have. At the end of the day, if the SP wasn’t the worst in the league for an extended period, the team would be over .500 and winning the division right now even with the OF performance.
On offense probabiy the only realistic thing he could have done was offer Wade enough to sign in the spring. But even then there’s no guarantee Wade performs enough to avoid people talking about how bad the OF is. On the pitching side there were more alternatives to Burrows and Weiss. Brown pegged one of them in Lambert so one mulligan I bet he wish he had is to have put Lambert in the rotation from opening day. But also undo the Burrows trade and Weiss signing and go sign Foster Griffin.
Given that after being released by the Angels he signed a minor league deal with the White Sox over the winter (was released by their AAA team 2 months later, resigned with them and was re-released by their AAA team 2 months after that...) I'd imagine we could have beaten that. But it's weird that Lamont Wade Jr., even though I loved what I saw in a brief time before his injury (4 games), is being viewed as some sort of no-doubt missing piece.
Yeah, he deserves way more flak for what has happened with the rotation. Again, it was tough given the budget he had to work with but he couldn’t afford to miss on the Burrows trade. How he handles McCullers and Javier is going to be huge for me. Those guys better have short leashes. McCullers can be cut and Javier moved to the pen.
ok, so let’s get in our magic Time Machine and go back to the offseason. You are saying Dana should have done what it takes to get a Wade, Pham or Andijar level bat. Is it your position that those dudes would have done much better during the first half of this season if they had been Astros? If so,what’s that based on? What we do know is that those dudes were not productive in real life (not as hypothetical Astros). Instead, the Astros played Matthews, Loperfido, Trammel, Jake Meyers. And they were bad. And now we have an additional half seasons worth of data on them to make decisions. In addition, Dana ended up getting Lamonte Wade, who will hopefully be healthy soon and we will find out if he can be a viable platoon member. *** In both scenarios, we would have gotten bad offensive production from our outfield. In the scenario that actually happened, we have a half seasons worth of data on the kids and we know Matthews is not a MLB player and Loperfido might be, I’m not the biggest critic or fan of Dana Brown. But if you’re gonna be a critic, at least be grounded in some form of reality. Your basic statement that it’s Dana’s fault that our outfield production sounds good. But the very alternatives you identified certainly would not have yielded better results and actually would have left us worse off. Or the sentiment that Dana Brown shoulda come up with SOMETHING to keep our OF production from being trash. Sure, that’s easy to say. I have yet to see anyone come up with a viable suggestion as to what that something could have been given the constraints he was operating under. if you wanna criticize Brown, then point to Imai or Burrows. We spent real capital on those options. We lost Framber and his 190 innings. No question we needed to shore up our starting pitching. Nobody should think otherwise. If those end up being misses, we can and should kill him for those because there were other options available. Or you think he shoulda spent on OF instead of Imai. You’d be on an island, but that’s fine. But we didn’t have enough to do both, and nobody should suggest otherwise.
Javier last pitched Sunday, and would have slotted into Saturdays start if they wanted to. I hope they put Javier in a prove it role - reprise his 2021 role of electric multi inning arm. Let’s see if you can give us that before we bump Teng from the rotation and give you a start. Javier hasnt dominated his rehab starts. Maybe they keep him down for another turn in the rotation. We don’t need Javier, blanco or LMJ to take a rotation spot only to put up unwinnable starts. Not at this juncture when Imai and Burrows may be figuring things out and we are getting competitive to good starts from Teng and Lambert regularly.
