I think it would be better to say that the Astros are playing the system how it is best set up to be played which cheats the fans in the short run. For fans that are with the team through thick and thin, it is hard but the vision of the future is good. For new fans or fans you are trying to attract... yikes. But the end is near! Good times are coming!
As a fan, how much happier would I be if we had been at .500 the last three years rather than .380 ? For me, only marginally. Hope for the future outweighs the short term pains for me. A team in perpetual mediocrity is a team where my interest wanes over time. In a perfect world, it would be nice if the situation was such that every spring was a new beginning. And any team could rise from the ashes of recent failure and succeed anew. Imagine how things would be if every player was on 1 year contracts? Or if the pay scale for organizational personnel was based purely on team performance? Or that owners could be voted out when they display overt and continual poor decision making?
Exactly. The goal should be to try to be great - not just good, and not trying to never be terrible. The Astros are following exactly the path they need - burn it all down and position themselves for the best chance at being great in a few years.
Understand that I agree with you. If I were to pick how we handled the past few years, it has all gone to plan with how I would want it (minus a few minor things and players being called up). Being the perpetual mediocre team may pay off in basketball, but not here and I am glad that we did what we did.
I dont think mediocrity pays off in any sport. But given the playoff structure for the NBA, hope exists longer into the season and further down the pecking order given an 8th best conference team can sneak in. Where as in baseball, well before the all-star break, the majority of teams have written off all hope. Hope is the key.
If mediocre is average, I still think it pays off to be average in basketball. You have the hope of going to the championship, but there is more than hope when you get to play for it. The Golden State Warriors in 07 would agree. They didn't sneak in, they deserved it for finishing 8th in their conference. Maybe it is just semantics, but being mediocre in basketball or not even in the top half of the league can lead to a finals appearance.
Rockets in 95 made a 6th seed payoff. I'd rather be mediocre in baseball though. Look at the 2006 Cardinals. 83-78, but WS champs. Baseball is game of statistical variance, and with a star pitcher (especially with 2), it becomes so much easier to win a playoff series in baseball.
This is true. But I feel like baseball is more division specific than most. You can get away with being mediocre more in basketball (though your odds are lower mostly because there are just more teams once the playoffs roll around). Mediocre in baseball just seems to be different than the mediocre in other sports. you are right, though. If you sneak into the playoffs in baseball as a mediocre team, your chances of winning are much better than most if you can rely on some aces.
Basketball gives mediocre teams a better sense of accomplishment because so many squads make the playoffs,especiallay given how bad the east has been for a while, but there is no doubt that it is much, much harder to genuinely compete for a title in the NBA. In baseball any team that makes the playoffs can win a title. I know it has been tough to watch, but are you guys really saying that the hopelessness the Astros went through from 07-10 was better than these recent 3 terrible seasons with light at the end of the tunnel. Signing a few free agents in an effort to be mediocre is not what I would consider good. This stretch is particularly extreme because of where the Astros started, which was the absolute floor. Very little MLB talent, and a completely barren farm system. Crane started with basically an expansion team.
Eh hardly. Drayton used more of the "band-aid" approach during the 07-10 seasons. To say that he was trying to achieve a "good team" is just not fair. Outside of 2008 which most people consider luck, we didn't really put a product on the field that fooled people into thinking we would actually make the playoffs. Most of the signing and trades during that time (Tejada, Wolf, Pudge, Matsui, Mike Hampton, Russ Ortiz, Pedro Feliz) were people past their prime and just not a wise choice. Outside of the Bourn trade and a few reliever signings, there weren't any moves that made you think that the Astros were getting better but rather perpetuating mediocrity. I know I am not throwing out an example of a team that is mediocre and at least teasing their fans to thinking they make the playoffs... but we were far from doing that. This all being said, I still much prefer what we have done the past three years and a build towards a sustainable future, but I can understand how some FA signings can lead to some hope for playoffs for some teams.
Its all cyclical... a lot of the lack of progress those years were due to crappy minor league management/drafts that netted really only Hunter Pence as an everyday player. Additionally, the extensions of Berkman/Oswalt along with the Lee signing inflated the payroll to an above average level, with below average results. The new regime needs to be a combination of everything. Continue to harp development... but don't just discard/dump/trade players for young prospects once they start to get close to making money. The end of the Drayton regime would have turned out better if the farm system had produced anything of value... along with holding on to the franchise cornerstones.
Many issues caused the minor league collapse.... we lost so high end draft picks signing players like Pettite. We also had an owner that gave us a budget, and the money was shuttled to the big league club to take advantage of the window we had to win a title. Also, lets not kid ourselves, there is an element of luck involved in minor league development. It is hard to have long term sustained success. Especially when you have scouts and FO types moving up the ladder to other organizations.
Right... hence I said its all cyclical. The key is to try to keep things afloat during the dry periods where the farm isn't giving much. That being said, this team's 2007 draft would have been enough to kill any sort of farm system that was already fledgling... years like that can never happen.
Did anyone we sign make the majors? Well, I looked it up and no one did. Chad Bettis, Robbie Weinhardt, & Derek Dietrich made it, but we didn't sign them.
Angels have a lot of money tied up in Pujols and Hamilton , it will be interesting when Trout is a FA and ready for arbitration.
No coincidence that they signed Hamilton for 5 years. Hamilton's contract gone the same time Trout hits FA. CJ Wilson & Weaver will be hitting FA the year before.
Trout is 2 years YOUNGER than Springer! Angels should have stashed him longer and then they'd have less concerns about his arbitration years!
Exactly. In a game like baseball, where statistics mean almost as much as wins and losses, the playoff system almost goes COMPLETELY against the entire complex of the sport. To go from a 162-game grind to all of a sudden needing to just win 4 of 7 (which is ironically just one click north of mediocre) basically implies that everybody has an equal shot once they get into the post-season. Having a game-changing ace (or two) can almost guarantee you a fair shot at winning the pennant in any given year.
