The Houston Astros are 47-54 with a run differential of minus-53. They just played three games against the Baltimore Orioles and didn’t score more than two runs in any of them. They sit four games out of first in the AL West and four and a half behind the Boston Red Sox for the final American League Wild Card spot.
General manager Dana Brown says they’re buying at the trade deadline.
You don’t need to have spent thirteen seasons eating double teams in the trenches to smell what’s cooking here. You just need a nose.
Brown and manager Joe Espada are both working in the final year of their contracts. The Athletic’s Chandler Rome laid it out with the delicacy of a forearm shiver: “Both men must save face and try to save themselves, so saying anything to the contrary is illogical, especially if they hope to keep this clubhouse intact.”
In other words, genius, you don’t tell the room you’re folding the tent when your own lease is up in October. You say you’re going for it. You say it loud. You say it to the cameras, to the players, to the fans buying nineteen-dollar beers in the upper deck. Whether the front office above you agrees is a different conversation — one that may already be happening without you in the room.
Because here’s where the story gets thick. According to Rome, the Astros asked right-hander Lance McCullers Jr. to waive his no-trade clause to free payroll ahead of the deadline. The Sporting News, citing Rome’s reporting, states McCullers was subsequently traded to the Milwaukee Brewers. That’s not the move of a team loading up for a October run. That’s a team trimming the brisket off the bone and calling it a diet.
So which is it — buyers or butchers? The Astros seem to be trying to be both at once, which is like calling a dive play on third-and-long and telling the press box it’s a vertical concept.
“Fifteen days and twelve games before the trade deadline, this is the state of an Astros team that still fancies itself a championship contender,” Rome wrote. “Being in the American League can help to verify its claim, but a shrinking calendar is removing the luxury of relying on others’ mediocrity.”
He’s right about the mediocrity part. The AL has the structural integrity of a gas station sushi case this season. Nobody above .500 wants to pull away. The Astros can hang around simply because the teams ahead of them keep tripping over their own shoelaces. But hanging around and contending are two different animals, and Houston’s offense — which managed six runs across an entire weekend series — looks more like the former than the latter.
The contract situations for Brown and Espada complicate everything downstream. Shortstop Jeremy Peña and other roster pieces that might otherwise be dangled for prospects stay in limbo when the people making the calls don’t know if they’ll be making calls next spring. You try evaluating talent for the future when your own future is a month-to-month lease.
The Astros have two weeks to decide who they really are. The record says seller. The run differential says seller. The McCullers trade says seller. The men running the show say buyer. And in this league, the men running the show are the ones holding the pen at the deadline — even if the hand holding them is on its way out the door.
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