He's probably not good, but I have trouble believing Paredes will be worse than Altuve is at 2B at this point in his career.
The biggest issue I have is that if you are counting on the majority of Paredes' starts to be at 1B, 2B, 3B, or DH when Walker, Altuve, Correa, or Alvarez have days off then you aren't really adding to or deepening the lineup. You are just replacing one of the star hitters with another one and have just as many weak hitters in the lineup. He would be a great insurance policy though. The best way to actually improve the team is find a way for Paredes to play WITH those 4 guys or trade one of those 5 for an outfielder who projects as an above average run producer or TOR SP.
You are deepening the lineup though. If you played all 5 of those guys at once, then in the 120+ games that one of them has a day off or any one of them is injured, you're going to be throwing in some really awful scrub backup like Allen or Whitcomb anyway. I'd rather have an outfield of Cole/Meyers/Smith with Yordan/Altuve able to fill in if there's an injury there vs trading Paredes for an OF and then having a giant infield hole as soon as there's an injury or on every day an infielder needs a day off. During the regular season, the goal is to have good solid lineups every day and having Paredes as your roving backup would do that and eliminate the regular lineup appearances of an awful #9 hitter. The real difference would be during the playoffs when your top players never will get days off. But if the team is good enough to worry about that and everyone manages to be healthy all year, they could always try to move Parades/Walker at the deadline or whatnot and fix the issue then. There's plenty of time to sort out that issue. For now, the lineup flexibility has more value that having one good player at every position. Beyond that, I suspect the hundreds, if not thousand+, posts on this topic will resolve itself by opening day or shortly after when there's a decent chance one of these guys is injured. This seems like much ado about nothing.
After last seaon given his age, there's no reason to assume Walker will be one of our 7 best hitters. The same can be said for all of our current full time OF options, catcher and even the aging Altuve. Even given the extremely optimistic assumption of no significant injuries, this team needs to prioritize making sure we have enough good hitters in this lineup, not worrying about what our best case scenario looks like. If we can get an OF that projects to be as good as him for just Paredes I imagine it would have happened already. While there are guys with potential to be better, Paredes still looks like our 2nd best hitter to me.
in the playoffs, we could put out our best offensive lineup everyday because damn the torpedos. Yordan can play more LF, which opens DH for Paredes or Altuve and the other plays 2B. Or Altuve goes to LF. In any case, all your best bats are in the lineup.
Looking at the 2nd and 3rd tier free agent 1B who has signed this offseason: Arraez $28M//2yrs O’Hearn $29M/2yrs Polanco $40M/2yrs Bell $7M/1yr Goldschmidt $5M/1yr I think it’s safe to say that Walker would fetch more than Bell and Goldschmidt if he were a free agent, and he wouldn’t be able to match Polanco’s $40M/2yrs. There’s an argument that Walker is a better player than O’Hearn and Arraez, but O’Hearn is coming off a much more productive season and has the added value of being able to play the OF, and Arraez has the higher offensive floor and the ability to play 2B. My current guess is that if Walker were a free agent, he’d have gotten something between $22M/2yrs and $32M/2yrs, with something closer to $26M/2yrs probably being most likely. So he’s ~$14M underwater and Houston would likely have to include more than that to entice another team to take him on especially if they wanted to get anything in return. Estimated 2027 fwar needed in order to keep their future contract obligations above water: Hader 1.6 Imai 2.0 Javier 2.0 Walker 2.2 Altuve 2.6 Yordan 3.0 Correa 3.0
Lance will probably get about 6 weeks to show a turnaround on the mound as a starter. If he can't crack it as a starter, it's hard to trust a reliever who doesn't know where his pitches are going 80% of the time. We saw that last year in his limited relief appearances. I think he would get DFA'd and Crane would eat up the remainder of the deal much like Abreu. Fortunately, LMJ is in the final year so it's not as big of a pill to swallow. Those bullpen spots will be even more valuable for the stretches the Stros run a 6-man rotation (1 less reliever).
Assuming Lance doesn't prove to be one of the 6 best starters in spring training, he could play the role of long-reliever in the bullpen until his arm gives out. The Astros have a lot of unknowns on the pitching staff, which means there's a decent chance a lot of them will get blown up occasionally. Lance can be the guy that comes in to fill in 3-4 innings in that role. He won't know exactly when he will pitch, but he'd likely pitch every 4-5 days and when he does, he can eat up a lot of low-pressure innings without hurting the team. His arm stays stretched out and if he excels in that role, he can maybe become a starter when someone else gets injured or proves ineffective.
You would think that but. . . The only changes ( besides health) between the projected position player roster now and last September is: lose Caratini and Dubon and gain Nick Allen. And of players with at least 100 PAs in the 2nd half last year, Walker was 3rd in wRC+ and tied fir 3rd in fWAR.
Grasping at straws thinking Lance is going to be a quality starting pitcher again, let alone stay healthy for any period of time.
Except that role needs to go to a pitcher with options. If a starter goes 2 innings, and then a long reliever comes in for 3, that pitcher is wasted for 3-4 days. With an already short bullpen a fresh guy needs to be brought up.
Teams don't constantly send pitchers up and down for options all season long. The Astros did it later in the season last year when they were running out an endless series of scrubs as starters 3 out of 5 days, but that's not the norm. Beyond that, the team isn't going to constantly rotate long-relievers.
The way I look at it, our OF is pretty bad offensively. If one of our big bats is on the bench to start there is a pretty good chance that they will be needed as a ph when one of those OF comes up late. So even if they don't start they will get action. I think we will end up pinch hitting way more than we have in the past and was another reason why I wanted to keep Caratini.
