It’s a herd of turtles in the AL West, and the Astros aren’t innovators anymore
NEW YORK — Josh Hader was talking about the perception of managers, like his own, Joe Espada, who is still the dugout leader of the Houston Astros. They are either smart or stupid, no in between.
“It’s a teeter-totter that never stays flat,” Hader, the Astros’ closer, said before batting practice at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday. “It’s leaning one way or the other, and that’s just the way the game is.”
Not in the American League West. This is the land of the flat teeter-totter, a moving walkway to nowhere. Someone will disembark in the postseason, but nobody’s in a rush. It’s a division of turtles, seemingly sworn to uphold that old baseball axiom: never get too high or too low.
“There’s still a lot of time to go, and I think somebody’s going to pull away,” said Steve Sparks, the Astros’ radio analyst. “Around here, everybody’s hoping it’s Houston, but who’s to say? I mean, nobody really looks that much better than anybody else.”
No team in baseball history has won a division in a full season without a winning record. The modern AL West looks eager to take up the challenge.
The Los Angeles Angels peaked in March — yes, March — at two games over .500. The Athletics hit their high point in May, at three games over. The Seattle Mariners got all the way to four games over in June, the Texas Rangers to three games over in July and the Astros to three over on August 14.
Then they lost six of their next eight at home. With a week of games coming up in New York — three in the Bronx, three in Queens — owner Jim Crane dismissed general manager Dana Brown on Monday. Mediocrity is unacceptable.
“The expectation that I have is we’re in the playoffs every year,” Crane said Tuesday. “It’s hard to win (the World Series) every year, but you have to get there.”
Brown is the third AL West general manager to lose his job this summer, after Perry Minasian of the Angels on June 26 and David Forst of the A’s on August 7. The managers have all survived, so far, but Dan Wilson’s Mariners have painfully underachieved. At least Skip Schumaker, in his first season as Rangers’ manager, seems secure.
To Sparks, a longtime MLB pitcher, the division has star power but little depth, which seems about right. The Angels and A’s are well out of the race, but both won series in Houston last week.
“What I see is top-heavy lineups and (safe) places for pitchers to go,” Sparks said. “You can pitch around certain guys. You see teams’ intentional walks to Yordan Alvarez. He set a franchise record for the Astros; he’s at 28 now on the season. So you get an opportunity to expose teams’ weaknesses by pitching around guys in a top-heavy lineup.
“I think that’s part of it. I think the depth of rotations and staffs are a little down this year compared to last, and I think just the fact that bullpens can become so volatile from year to year, you might have the same people but not the same players sometimes. So nobody’s really gotten traction.”
It’s all a bit dizzying for the Astros, who spent a decade as the AL’s bully. From 2015 through 2024, Houston had 24 more victories than any other AL team. The Astros’ pitchers led the majors in strikeouts, and only one offense (Cleveland’s) struck out less often.
The success stemmed largely from the vision of Jeff Luhnow, the general manager Crane hired after buying the Astros in November 2011, when they were baseball’s worst team. Crane gave Luhnow, an unconventional thinker, the freedom to rethink everything. And it worked.
With three future stars already in the organization — Jose Altuve, Dallas Keuchel and George Springer — the Astros lost prodigiously for two years and collected high draft picks. They also stayed ahead of their competitors in using data and video as tools to help players improve. They traded for Alvarez before his pro debut. They found bargains in older Latin American pitching prospects who would star years later in the World Series. They even put an analyst in uniform in the minors.
Of course, the shorthand for many fans is that the Astros simply cheated. Their notorious sign-stealing scandal cost Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch their jobs and made people forget just how innovative the Astros were. You don’t win four pennants and two titles while reaching seven consecutive AL Championship Series without excelling in lots of ways.
That is what the Astros used to do, and Crane tacitly acknowledged they are no longer pioneers. He did not name the teams that are, but small-market marvels like the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays come to mind.
“Once you come up with something new — (like) the shift, we were heavy on the shift, then everybody does the shift, and then they eliminate the shift,” Crane said. “I think everyone has kind of caught up on some things, but there’s certainly some teams we’re going to do some studying on that have been able to win with not the payrolls that the rest of us have and have been pretty successful. I think we’ll take a look at that.”
Crane hired James Click from the Rays to succeed Luhnow, but the two meshed so poorly that Click was gone after winning the 2022 World Series. Brown was a better fit, a straight-talking scout who was proudly old-school; but several moves, some with significant input from Crane, have fallen flat.
So the Astros are moving on, but in the meantime, there’s a division title at stake. Somehow a team that needs a new GM is very much alive in a very middling division.
“I don’t know the reasoning behind it; honestly, I don’t,” Hader said. “I mean, at the end of the day, it’s baseball, right? I think that’s what it comes down to: Baseball is a crazy sport.”