I don't have a good vibe about Ben Sheets. He is much too injury prone. Someone is going to overpay and regret it big time. May as well not be the Astros.
I say do it. The guy played for Ned Yost who was notorious for pitching his starters very late into games even if they had a sizable lead. This is why alot of their starters are always doing stints on the DL and the reason they have ran out of gas at the end of the past two seasons after coming out the gates quick. The Astros don't really like to push their starters too late into games.
Roy Oswalt has averaged a whopping 1/2 pitch per game started less than Sheets over their careers. Yost had been riding Sabbathia, but I don't think he is "notorious" for riding any of their other starters.
If it wasn't for the aging roster and "win now" mentaility, I would have just waited for Peavy, Kazmir, or Halliday in 2010. Some guys we could look at if Sheets and Sabathia price themselves out of our reach: AJ Burnett Ryan Dempster - most likely re-signs with the Cubs Jon Garland Derek Lowe - hmm didn't know he's 35. Brad Penny
Drabek had that Houston curse. A reasonable ERA (3.88) but a 9-18 record his first year. He followed that up with a nice ERA in the 2.80 range and a 12-6 record. His next 2 Houston seasons were not good. I suspect Sheets could go at least 9-18 (provided he was healthy enough to start 27 games)
Penny and Dempster are staying put if they have to be overpaid. Burnett and Garland will be Yankees. Book it! Their overhyped farm guys aren't exactly the new building blocks for a title team other than possibly Jabba. That gives them one farm developed pitcher Brian Cashman can brag about how he saved money while Hughes flopped and ends up in Toronto to help get at least once pitcher now. They're also dying to get Halladay more than AJ, so it just might be a 2 part deal to rip the Yanks so called farm system to shreds. Cabathia is still a mystery to me as it will be a huge silent bidding war between West Coast and East Coast teams and someone other than Boston will get raped. They've overcome their stupidity bidding vs either NY team. Meanwhile Milwaukee is tearing Sabathia's arm to nano shreds like Baker did to Prior and Wood. I think we'll be hearing that reasoning when he goes on the DL at some time next season while making 120 million. A healthy Sheets is our only option to give us a fighting chance for the Wild Card.
Why oh why do Astros fans still believe that this regime has a chance to win it all? Have we developed ANY young pitching lately? What about hitters besides Pence? What was the last team you could think of that did not have an up-and-coming collection of young players that boosted their rotation and bullpen? There's a right way and a wrong way to go about contending people. Look at the Yankees the past 7 years. Their championships in the 90's all came from development with timely acquisitions of (albeit expensive) veterans, but still, they don't do anything without Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte et al coming up the pipeline. Soriano didn't win any championships but he was part of it too. Same with Wang and Cano. Now that their farm system has dried up so has their playoff run. Getting Sheets is the wrong answer. Let's stick to the Rockets until the Astros finally "get it", which I'm afraid may be many years away yet.
There is no right and wrong way to win it, it is a matter of whatever works for any particular situation. Some do it through minor league development, others through free agent acquisitions.... Whatever works. The Astros would be contenders with one more top of the line starting pitcher and one 2nd tier starting pitcher. DD
Possibly, but their offense goes into extended periods of stagnation and it really hurts them. Scoring 5 runs in 5 games (Cubs/Marlins) is not acceptable. The batting order still needs a few kinks to be worked out as well. The Astros were in a ~8 game over .500 position earlier in the season as well and fell into a similar funk, dropping them from 2nd to the BOTTOM of the division.
Wanna maybe give "this regime" at least, I dunno, two drafts before pronouncing them dead? Purpura (and Gerry the Great's last two or three years as well, to be fair) were failures. I wasn't a fan of Ed Wade being hired, but he's here. Let's see what become of his draft picks in the next 2-3 years.
They had just gone through a Hurricane, I think Ike had more to do with a late season slump than anything else. DD
Earlier in the year the offense was indeed stagnant for no apparent reason. After the all-star break, the offense started producing much better. As of that Sunday night in Milwauke, the Astros were essentially tied for the wild card lead (they had the same number of losses as the Brewers and Phillies). Unfortunately, their offense went south for 5 games. There were a lot of contributing factors. Part of it was perhaps the loss of a healthy Lee, Matsui and Wigginton finally caught up to them. Part of it was Berkman's career long slump. Part of it was the pitching getting battered early and putting tremendous pressure on the team in an already pressurized situation (hurricane, travel arrangements, wild card race, family, etc.). Part of it was facing some pretty good pitchers. Part of it was the hurricane and all the ancillary stuff. It is hard to compare their offensive failures of thse 5 games to their offensive failures earlier in the season.
But it is not hard, given the season as a whole, to come to the very plausible conclusion that for whatever different factors at different points in the season, this team is damn streaky. Streaky as hell. Now would be the time for a good 19-gamer.
Yep they have been streaky and during the non-hurricane part of the season (by observation and not any statistical analysis), it seemed to be tied to the top of the order. In hindsight, Cooper batted Bourne at the top of the order way too long. They seemed to do much better when Erstad was there (before he had appeared to wear down). They started winning once they got better OBPs from 1 and 2. It appears to be the same as in the past, when Biggio got on base, they tended to have good offensive production, but for too long they have had an OBP hole at the top. They struggle because they are a poor OBP team (with a few exceptions - Berkman most notable). Until they fill that OBP hole, unless everyone else is clicking, they will continue to be offensively streaky.
Help me out here... Here is a list of the Astros' guaranteed contracts for next season: Carlos Lee: $18.5M Lance Berkman: $14.5M Roy Oswalt: $14M Miguel Tejada: $13M Kaz Matsui: $5M Brian Moehler: $2.3M Darin Erstad: $1.75M Oscar Villarreal: 1.6M Geoff Blum: $1.25M Total = $71.9M I assume we are planning on re-signing Valverde, Pence and Rodriguez so that brings us to 12 players (4 pitchers since Villarreal is just owed money) and around $80 million. We will need to sign/re-sign several additional pitchers just to have a complete rotation and bullpen. We will also need a couple of catchers and a few more position players. That will bring our starting point for looking at FAs somewhere around $85-95 million. This is a list of what McLane has spent over the last 9 seasons: Opening Day payrolls for 25-man roster (salaries plus pro-rated signing bonuses): 2008: $ 88,930,414 2007: $ 87,759,000 2006: $ 92,551,503 2005: $ 76,779,000 2004: $ 75,397,000 2003: $ 71,040,000 2002: $ 63,448,417 2001: $ 60,897,667 2000: $ 52,400,000 So, unless we make trades to get out from under at least one of our bigger contracts (Tejada?), even if Drayton is willing to spend $95-100 million for 2009 (his most ever as owner), we probably wouldn't even have enough to sign one top-tier pitcher like Sheets. We may be best off trying to get a non-Type A FA starting pitcher and holding onto our 1st rd pick. We may not be able to afford a Type A starting pitcher anyway.
I forgot to include the in-season signings of Clemens and stuff in the previous post. Those payrolls are opening day numbers only.
