According the writers, our farm has been **** since Tucker and somehow we keep on turning out ROTY candidates and keep on destroying the competition.
The experts are just afraid of looking bad. They all put the same 100 guys more or less and stay sheltered with the ability to say well we were all wrong on that guy. Baseball Prospectus had it right on Pena and that was it. He should have been a unanimous top 25 prospect coming into the year He was a defense first, gold glove caliber shortstop when drafted....everyone agrees to that. Then he hit 9 home runs in AAA in 24 games last September with an OPS of 1.126. You look back now and just have to laugh at what the experts were thinking. It's so obvious he was going to be great.
I'm guessing there is more to the story, but I found it really weird that Oz went from international director to translator in the Astros organization, left for a different team, and found his way back. He seems to have done a great job finding under the radar pitchers, so i'm glad to have him here.
The only reason the Astros Farm system keeps getting dogged on is the fact that all the talent keeps making the majors. Shame Pena won't come out on top in ROY voting, considering he's nearly matched Julio Rodriguez' production in only 2/3rds of the at bats.
Seattle's and Baltimore's farm consistently is in the top 5 and see what good that does for them. Only Tampa is doing it right. The fact they are consistently in the post season with one of the lowest payrolls is a testament to them scouting and developing great talent.
I think there are several factors in national sites ranking Houston’s farm lower than the results would indicate they should’ve been: 1. Pitching prospects are incredibly hard to evaluate and they get hurt so much that even accurate evaluations frequently don’t pan out. Aside from velocity and upper level kk/bb/hr/ev numbers the data is meaningless. If I were a national writer putting together top 100 lists for a living I would probably have 70 position player prospects on average on my list vs 30 pitchers. In Houston’s case not only have they done a superb job at finding int’l teenage arms with ceiling that other teams miss, they develop them better than other teams. 2. The pandemic threw prospect evaluations into chaos. There was basically 15 months where nobody knew what any prospect was doing. If not for the pandemic I believe Pena and Meyers would have gotten massive hype across 2020-2021 as they would have dominated the upper levels. Instead they barely played before busting into the majors. The effects of the pandemic will bleed out over this year and probably the next couple years as well, because teams just didn’t have the same volume of information to evaluate potential draft picks and international signees. We are going to see a lot less correlation of outcomes between bonus/draft position from prospects that were signed from 2020-2022. This also favors Houston, because not only did they draft later (less to lose) but it also means development has a bigger impact since the initial eval wasn’t as accurate. Guys making top 100 lists aren’t accounting for that. 3. Like Tampa, Houston doesn’t **** around once they identify a good prospect. They will promote them thru the system and even graduate them before they have a chance to get the kind of prospect hype that gets guys on top 100 lists. We are seeing that with Yainer Diaz and Korey Lee, and will likely see it with Colin Barber (and Cristian Gonzalez if he starts to take off). So Houston’s farm results only show up in the bottom line (MLB wins, ROY candidates), not in the farm rankings.
Complete agree, and it is why if I were an agent or had a son that was a viable prospect I would push hard for them to be drafted by Hou, LA or TB. I cannot prove it but I firmly do not believe that all of the Astros pitchers would be this successful if they came up in a different organization. None of the Astros young pitchers in the big leagues have the standard measures for successful stuff.
Cleveland seems to be good at churning out pitchers, position players are another story. That, and you last sentence sells the Astros’ pitchers short. All their top guys came in with one MLB level pitch right off the bat (Lance and Framber’s curveball, Javier and Brown’s 4-seam, Garcia’s cutter). Only real exception is Urquidy, who’s made it by never walking anyone, even though statcast would have you believe he’s awful.
Siri with a God like 1.400ops in AAA. Hope they can trade him to a team that needs an outfielder for a solid prospect.
Hunter Brown vs. El Paso: 5 IP, 4 H, 2 R (1 ER), 2 BB, 5 K, 95 pitches (63 strikes) Both runs came in the 3rd on a sac fly (unearned because he committed an error) and a single.
Another strong outing for Christian Mejias: 5 IP, H, 2 BB, 4 K Last 3 appearances: 14.2 IP, 4 H, 4 BB, 15 K
2023 Astros Futures Diaz replaces Brantley at DH to start the season. Brown is an injury call up in June.
