Commentary: Ineptitude starts at top of Astros' organization
When Pittsburgh Pirates fans feel sorry for you, you know your team is bad. The Pirates are in many ways the worst franchise in baseball. The last time a Pirates team had a winning record was in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president and most current Rice students were still learning how to count. So, when a Pittsburgh sports blog called the Bucs Dugout posted an entry called, "Schadenfreude: Your 2010 Astros," it was obvious that the Houston Astros were in trouble. Pirates fans are experts in bad baseball.
This offseason, after several years of mediocre baseball, Astros general manager Ed Wade decided to retool his team and make a run for the playoffs. Wade was tasked with finding replacements for star closer Jose Valverde and ex-star shortstop Miguel Tejada (now with the Orioles) as well as filling holes in the pitching rotation and at catcher.
U n f o r t u nately, Wade failed to rise to the occasion. He couldn't find a catcher, and replaced Tejada with a gamble: The Astros' starting shortstop in 2010 is defensive expert and career minor leaguer Tommy Manzella, who has exactly five major-league at-bats, four of which were strikeouts.
Wade sought to fill the other holes by throwing money at mediocrities. Fifteen million dollars was invested in the average reliever Brandon Lyon. Also new to the pitching staff is ineffective starting pitcher Brett Myers, who is most famous for punching his wife in the middle of a street in Boston.
Wade did find an acceptable third baseman, Pedro Feliz, and made a smart gamble on reliever Matt Lindstrom, who is returning from injuries. But between an unreliable bullpen, a weak starting rotation and question marks at shortstop and catcher, the Astros enter this season with a chance to be one of the worst teams in baseball.
What should Ed Wade have done instead? It is tempting to second-guess his acquisitions, but the truth is that the Astros may have just been beyond repair. Too much money is tied up in players like bloated left fielder Carlos Lee, and the Astros have so little cheap talent that trades for high-quality players were out of the question.
It is equally tempting to say that the Astros should just blow up the roster and start over. If they trade players like Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt and Hunter Pence now, Houston could receive talented young prospects in return. But waiting for those prospects to mature would be painful.
According to some analysts, Houston has the worst minor-league system in baseball. The Astros minor leaguers who could someday be stars at Minute Maid Park can be counted on one hand. Fanhouse lists just two future Astros in its list of the MLB's top 100 prospects, catcher Jason Castro (No. 27) and pitcher Jordan Lyles (No. 99).
Beyond Bud Norris, who made a promising but inconsistent debut with the Astros last year, the Houston system has almost no young pitching talent. The pitching staff of the Corpus Christi Hooks, Houston's AA affiliate, was next-to-last in the Texas League for opponent batting average, innings pitched and earned run average, dragging the Hooks to their last-place finish this season.
But help for the minor league system is a long time coming, because Wade is too busy allotting his resources towards securing mediocre pitchers like Lyon and Myers. Only a truly awful 2010 season will convince Wade that he cannot fix his team without making drastic changes. I hate to wish for disaster, but if the Astros do not fail completely and quickly, the team's management will remain oblivious to its steady fall into the cellar.
The Astros need to completely overhaul their minor-league teams. They need to assert themselves, and powerfully, in the international free agent market. They need to find ways to trade for the young talent that they currently lack. They need to unload the engorged contracts of players like Lee for anything they can get. And they need to heed these warnings before it is too late.
This is a team on the brink of several seasons, or maybe even a whole decade, of futility. Pirates fans know the frustration of a talentless farm system and a mediocre major league team, and they recognize their team's past in the Astros' future. The Pirates should be a warning, not a role model, for Wade and his team.
Perhaps the most obvious sign that the Astros are a team nearing oblivion came when team owner Drayton McLane announced that he was accepting bids from groups interested in buying the team. But nobody wanted the hapless Astros. One group sniffed, but McLane never received an offer.
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