What happens when you can’t kick the can?

I’m an Astros fan and a Saints fan. Blessed and cursed at the same time.

Sometimes a team’s identity is its blessing. Loyalty, continuity, and the desire to “run it back” are sentimental threads that tie fans to players and players to cities. And I’m probably more sentimental than most. My office is littered with memorabilia, both from Astroslore and my family. Bill Brown wrote the foreword to my latest book. Pictures of Bagwell and Biggio with my kids, back in the day. Sentimental. Guilty as charged.

But there’s a cost to that identity when the world keeps moving. The New Orleans Saints have aging cores, a roster hamstrung by commitments, and a forced abrupt pivot into rebuild mode. And the Saints feel eerily familiar to what we’re starting to see from the Houston Astros. You can kick the can down the road for a while. Eventually, it rolls back.

Start with the obvious difference: baseball has a luxury tax, not a hard salary cap. Teams can exceed MLB’s competitive-balance tax threshold, but they’re going to pay for it, and the penalties ratchet up if you do it over and over again. The NFL, by contrast, enforces a strict cap, so decisions there lead to roster turnover that baseball teams don’t necessarily face. Most MLB contracts are guaranteed, too, and while NFL contracts will have a level of guaranteed $$$, teams can get out of those contracts if it’s not working out.

That legal distinction matters because it shapes when and how clubs are forced to change direction.

Look at the rosters. The Saints’ quarterback situation made headlines when Derek Carr announced his retirement in May 2025, leaving New Orleans searching for answers and accelerating discussions about youth, cap flexibility, and where to go next. That retirement was a real inflection point for the franchise, though, because it actually created some salary cap room for a change.

The Astros’ roster arc is quieter but just as consequential. The faces that once defined the franchise have already started to scatter. Justin Verlander is pitching elsewhere, and Alex Bregman has left Houston and recently elected to test free agency again after spending the year in Boston. Meanwhile, Kyle Tucker, one of the young cornerstones fans hoped would anchor the next chapter in Houston, was traded and played this season in Chicago (and probably somewhere else next season). Remember George Springer and Gerrit Cole? Gone. These are not overnight changes; they’re the slow erosion of a core. Side note: Three of the top four available free agents, according to ESPN, played in Houston as recently as 2024 (Bregman, Tucker, and Framber Valdez).

What ties the Saints’ and Astros’ stories together is not a single transaction but a recurring philosophy: organizational loyalty to veterans and a preference for short-term competitive windows over heavier, earlier rebuilds.

For New Orleans, keeping beloved vets and trying to extend a contending timeline until it became untenable left them with low draft capital and limited cap room. And they didn’t help themselves at the trade deadline this year when they held onto favorites like Alvin Kamara and Chris Olave. Still trying to hang on though a losing season – and top 5 draft spot – is inevitable.

For Houston, repeatedly holding onto and extending aging stars and paying past-roster premiums nudges payroll toward that luxury-tax zone. This is not a recent trend, as it goes back to Bagwell and Biggio even.

That pattern produces middling results. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see the logic: veterans take up dollars and roster spots; prospects and cheap, controllable players, the lifeblood of sustainable contention, don’t get as many reps; soon the team is competitive enough to avoid complete teardown but not flexible enough to reload. The Saints’ step into a rebuild (or at least a heavy retool) is simply what happens when the bill comes due. And the Saints are now trying to do both: Kick the can down the road by keeping some stars while trying to gather draft capital to add to them.

The Astros are at the same table, reaching for the check.

Which brings us to the open question we both care about: Is a Houston rebuild inevitable? Not yet. Maybe. That’s the honest, fan-friendly answer. There are ways to pivot: trade high-value veterans while their stock still commands return (a la Tucker), prioritize controllable pitching and shorter “bridge” contracts, and resist the temptation to overpay in free agency to buy another marginal postseason slot. But the window is getting narrower. If the front office chooses comfort and loyalty over a calculated reset, Houston risks becoming the baseball equivalent of the Saints: proud, storied, and stuck in a slow slide.

I’m not here to scold loyalty. Remember, I’m a purist who loves to see a player go the career distance in only one uniform. I’m a believer in honoring players who gave you your best years. The point is strategic, though: loyalty without a plan becomes a kind of stubbornness. There’s an art to balancing gratitude and ruthless roster management. The teams that manage both — accept the tough trade, let the veteran chase one last run elsewhere, and prioritize the long view — avoid those awkward “we were great once” essays five years down the road.

Green Bay (NFL) comes to mind with Brett Favre and Aaron Rogers. So does Indianapolis and Peyton Manning. In baseball, St. Louis let Albert Pujols walk. San Francisco moved on from Evan Longoria. Instead, the Astros are hanging onto a declining Jose Altuve (a fan-favorite to be sure), bringing back Carlos Correa, signing 30-something players like Christian Walker, and allowing players like Valdez to walk with nothing in return.

So, where could Houston be in 3–4 years if nothing changes? Picture middling regular seasons, payroll penalties that limit deadline flexibility, younger talent blocked by veteran contracts, and a slow drain of prime draft capital. It may not be instant doom, but it will be a prideful, stubborn drift away from the success of the last decade.

The Astros have been hamstrung by salaries before, and they’re teetering on the brink of a complete meltdown with aging stars and others who have an injury history.

On the flip side, a proactive pivot with some tough decisions could leave the Astros in position to reload without a total teardown. The possible downside of said pivot? A potential 1-2 year transition that may be painful for an organization used to playing into late October.

Call it a mirror or whatever you like. The Saints show us what happens when you kick the can long enough. The Astros don’t have to learn this lesson the hard way. They still have time to pivot. But time is the one resource neither loyalty nor money can buy back.

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15 responses to “What happens when you can’t kick the can?”

  1. Chip – As we’ve texted on this – I love this comparison as a very insightful comparison between the two teams – while not being happy about the reality of the comparison.

    As we’ve talked about before, the sustainability of the Astros’ highly competitive run was built on certain building blocks …Five critical items: Astros’ sustainability – ALL THINGS ASTROS and I’m sure others.

    But they’ve gotten to a spot where they are no longer hitting on all cylinders (or even most cylinders) on sustainability.

    Will they turn into the Saints where they never have really let it all go to pot and end up in rebuild mode (until they did)? Or will they bite the bullet hard and at least perform a mini-rebuild or Lord help us – a complete tear down and rebuild?

    Looked at one way – we can think that the Astros are not that far off from being a contender, if they just have some decent injury luck. Or we can think that they may go off the cliff trying to sustain the unsustainable.

    Very good comparison.

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  2. I think you can get around an aging player or two with dimishing performance in baseball far easier than in a sport like football. You’re right the Saints were going to have to post one or two of these years to get right. However, they’ve been better than their 2-9 record shows. The point differentials in the games is:

    -7, -5, -31, +8, -6, -12, -20, -24, +10, -14

    but only the losses to the Rams and Seahawks were out of hand. I’m not sure what to expect from the Astros going into 2026. I think we’re stuck with Walker. Aiming for 120 starts instead of 150 might make sense. We have to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and put the best matchups out there as often as we can. Now, that’s not really how Dusty or Joe Espada roll…I think they made out lineups in advance without fully considering the matchups. I doubt Altuve reads this blog, but this is an offseason where he needs to decide whether he wants to be a baseball player or if he just wants to run around in a uniform. At age 25 he won a gold glove. I’m not saying that’s a possibility, but he needs to play Derek Jeter/Cal Ripken defense where you always make the normal plays and don’t worry about the others making it to the outfield. The staff isn’t going to have a bunch of shut down aces, but if the defense and offense can keep them in games going into the 7th to 9th innings there is enough there to be a winning team. As for the playoffs and potentially winning it all…well, by the end of Spring Training I’ll have talked myself into all the reasons why we can do it.

    Ultimately, though, I think we have to look back a decade or so when our Chipalatta mantra was to find at least one legit MLB player in each draft and perhaps hope that they can expand it to 2 to 3 in a few of the coming years. You can’t just replace guys in free agency unless you’re the Dodgers or Yankees and Jim Crane is proving that.

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  3. Chip, what do you think about trading Meyers now after his best season? I doubt he will have another as good and the Astros could probably get some kind of return for him instead of like Chas, just letting him go for nothing later. We have Melton and Zach, who both could field the position, bat left handed and have higher ceilings .

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    • Larry, in the scenario above, I’m not sure that getting rid of Meyers is going to make a huge difference. At ~$3.5 million in ’26, he could be a bargain, if he can stay healthy. He is arb-eligible through 2027, so no hurry to make a decision. However, he does have Boras as an agent, if I remember correctly.

      Do you think the Astros could get anything of value for him?

      The bigger issues, for me, are trying to lock up some of the younger players before they run out of “time”. Buy out a couple of arb years and maybe a FA season or two.

      Paredes, Cam (in a year or two), Pena…those are the bridge guys. Probably too late to try with Hunter, and he has an agent who probably won’t “buy” into that, but it may come down to a trade of him in a season or two.

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  4. As a fan, I want the Astros to have continuity. I believe Jose Altuve should retire an Astro, performance be damned down the line. Guys that are future statues in the park, that might be giving HoF speeches, they should be here. From an economic standpoint, having Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio so tied to this community that both guys, not from here, have made their homes here and have become fixtures in the community, at the park, speaking at schools, they are Houstonians now. You can’t buy that. They represent this franchise.

    Where I see the Astros fail is how they have handled the rest. I wrote about David Price yesterday, and how the Rays used the first 5 years of his career to get that 21 WAR with him at his best (for just 35M), then with 1 year left they traded him for Smyly, Adames and Franklin, which gave them a combined 20 or so more WAR for less than a combined 15M, while Price cost the rest of baseball 215M over the remaining 8 years of his career for 19 WAR.

    Instead of letting some of these guys walk, what if the Astros had flipped Springer, Correa, Bregman, Morton, Valdez, what if? None of those guys walked in 2022 or 2017, so we wouldn’t be less two championships, but we sure would not have a minor league system that we can’t get to one star player out of anymore.

    There is room for both. The Rays don’t have room for both. They haven’t developed a big time star since Price, maybe Glasnow, and they won’t keep them even if they did. But they don’t let them to turn into nothing but memories and people that say nice things about the fan base from a podium wearing a different hat. We live in a world where we can keep Altuve here, and because of our payroll, can make up for it in other areas with good choices – and you do it because you want Jose Altuve retiring here, making his home here, and having a seat next to Bagwell and Biggio behind homeplate. But it’s also a world where you don’t have to let the rest of them leave for absolutely nothing. That’s what is going to cause an inevitable rebuild. So what actually happens with Hunter Brown in 3 years?

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    • You make a strong point. I will say every player is a different scenario to consider. Price was never staying in Tampa and needed to be moved rather than lost for nothing (or a QO?). From your list Morton could have been retained for less than the others. Pena was injured in 2021 and not on the radar as ready to replace Correa. In hindsight, he was great that year but we certainly expected to lose him while expecting Crane might make a deal to keep Bregman.

      I think Crane expected the whole time they could keep Bregman after 2024, but he should have known better. His offense that year was only fair, but he got paid as if it were elite. Valdez is a tough one. We all knew they wouldn’t trade him and, again, in hindsight making a trade last winter would have been the right move. I suspect they were convinced the 2025 team had a real chance at the WS, but outside a stretch in June I don’t think many of us felt that was the case.

      As for Springer you can blame Luhnow for that. He was so concerned with years of control they kept him in the minors when he was clearly deserving of a spot on the big league club. We knew the contract situation was coming, but I think the fans riot if they traded him after 2018. He had a great 2019 – clearly the best of his career – and we should have won the WS that year. What we needed was for him to break camp with the big league club in 2013 and then be offered an extension buying out some arbitration to give us an extra year or two. Then, you consider whether to trade him in that last year.

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    • Larry, totally, completely agree on a player like Altuve. He’s a once-in-a-generation player (a la Bagwell/Biggio) and he needs to retire here. Loved in the city, and he loves it in Houston. But they need to construct these contracts better. He’ll earn $33 million this year AND next, and I wonder if he’ll play 120-130 games in ’26.But bringing back players like JV and Correa and having Walker into his mid-30s are decisions that may come back to bite. Especially if injuries take over like 2025

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  5. Looking back, I was optimistic in January of 2023. I think it was the beginning of November in 2023 that I had my initial Framber tirade. And then at some point I had decided Bregman should go too. 2024 and 2025 turned out to be very frustrating to watch, at least for me, sure because we had so many injuries, but we were also aging as a club. We were not quite as athletic. I’m beating a dead horse now, but although we won 90 and 87 games and squeaked into the post season in 2024 and just missed in 2025, did those two years help prepare us for the future? No. I honestly would have preferred to sit out both 24 and 25 watching young talent mature. Retooling, tweaking, whatever you want to call it.

    I give Jim Crane credit for taking this organization and turning it into a power house. He trusted the system for a long time. And then he didn’t. When he lost Luhnow, he got off track. But I think his oft stated goal of playing post season baseball every year was detrimental to the long term stability of the Astros. Today we’re constantly scrambling. Trying to put together a roster that will have a chance in September. Thing is, we’ve done that that last couple of seasons, but it’s not all that much fun. We keep talking about guys getting fired and players that can’t play.

    I think Jose Altuve is the last guy I’ll see play his full career with the Astros in my lifetime. I’m ok with that. I think for a team like the Astros, we needed to take advantage of the value some of our players had before leaving us with just a draft choice as they entered free agency.

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  6. Dylan Cease, coming off a season with a 4.55 ERA and a 1.327 WHIP gets 7 years at 210 million from the Jays. He’ll be 30 when the season starts. I wonder what Framber will get?

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    • Stupid money. And it’s one reason the sport is struggling. He’ll never “earn” all those dollars, but the Jays probably see the fact that he’s made 30+ starts in EACH of the past 5 seasons. He’ll be hard-pressed to match that in the next 5.

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  9. Astros announce Tony Perezchica is returning to the third base coach’s position. More of the running into an out at home coming up for the 2026 season.

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    • I was kind of hoping Tony P. would be handed a new role in 2026.

      I trust you all had a great family Thanksgiving Day!

      And I hope Black Friday brings us a Ranger Suarez deal.

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