In our previous post, there was some bantering back and forth about where the team might be headed in support of a questionable starting pitching staff heading into 2026. Founder of the blog, Chip Bailey, threw out a sentence that triggered this post.
“The money in baseball — and all sports — is ridiculous now, and I wonder if Crane has become weary of the high-dollar options.”
It is no secret that under Jim Crane’s ownership, two things have occurred relative to higher-cost free agents or trade targets:
- The Astros have spent money on extending a few of their own players, but have not signed any of these 10-year, $300 million contracts to free agents. They have not handed out anything longer than the five-year team-friendly extension to Josh Hader or the six-year team-friendly extension to Yordan Alvarez, which bought out his arbitration years and only commits through his age-31 season.
- Jim Crane has consistently allowed his GMs to spend up to and even over the luxury tax limit since the team became a contender in the last decade.
But it has been pretty clear that Crane sees the mega-contracts as a poison pill.
In general, a lot of these longer contracts either never return reasonable value or do so for a much shorter period than the contracts run, and they become a boat anchor on the payroll down the line. Many times, players are being paid for what they were, not what they are or what they will be in the middle of the contract.
But even with Crane’s commitment to shorter high annual value contracts, one has to wonder if he is growing weary of those.
Let’s take a look at the club’s biggest commitments in 2025 and how those worked out for the team:
- Jose Altuve – $30 million – 12th on the team with a 0.5 WAR (baseballreference.com)
- Christian Walker – $20 million – 14th on the team with a 0.2 WAR
- Jose Abreu – $19.5 million – Was released in 2024
- Josh Hader – $19 million – 2.3 WAR – All-star – but was injured down the stretch of the season
- Framber Valdez – $18 million – 3.8 WAR – but 2-7 with a 6.05 ERA in his last 10 starts
- Lance McCullers Jr. – $17 million – -1.1 WAR – 36th and last among those who pitched
- Yordan Alvarez – $15 million – 10th on the team with 0.7 WAR
- Cristian Javier – $10 million – 0.1 WAR
- Rafael Montero – $8.5 million – 0.0 WAR – pitched 4 innings and then was released
- Carlos Correa – Approx. $7 million after trade – 1.3 WAR
- Ryan Pressly – $5.5 million – Was traded before the season to the Cubs – Astros ate part of his $14 million salary
So, for those following along at home, the Astros paid $169.5 million to their top-end salaries and received 7.8 in total WAR.
Doing some quick math – that meant they paid the balance of their $232 million payroll allocation of approx. $62.5 million to all other players and received a total of 32.9 WAR back.
Looking at that….they paid $21.7 million per WAR for the top of the payroll and paid $1.9 million per WAR for the lower part of their payroll. Yikes!
Maybe I shouldn’t post this or Jim Crane will never let the front office make a signing or trade for another highly compensated player in the future.
ALL THINGS ASTROS 
17 responses to “Why Jim Crane may be hesitant about big contracts”
We’ve gone through a cycle for nearly a decade where we are likely to sign guys that are easily signable, but didn’t really want to compete for a guy. Crane will spend money, but he won’t SPEND money. We have a hole at 1B, they are talking to Anthony Rizzo and Christian Walker, but probably not a single phone call to Pete Alonso.
Same with our own guys. Alvarez and Altuve were easier signs than Bregman or Correa or Springer. So was someone like Michael Brantley, not quite as expensive as other options.
I think 2025 is the first year this strategy cost us the playoffs. But you could argue its been eroding this team for a while. Abreu was signable, because there wasn’t much competition for him. Same with Walker.
I supported the Altuve contract. Still do. When you got a guy thats statue worthy and will probably give a speech at Cooperstown, it needs to a statue in front of our park and a speech in front of a bust with our hat. It pays dividends down the road. But Walker, it was never my idea for 1B. I about cried myself to sleep when I heard about the Correa trade.
Imagine going after Alonso? Do we make the playoffs this year if Pete Alonso takes all of Christian Walkers at bats? Surely we do. I get being worried about 2028. I am too. I don’t want to pay Alonso 30M to be hitting .220 and only 22 HR and striking out 200 times. You just have to hope it doesn’t happen, because the counter is you watched Christian Walker post a negative WAR THIS year.
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My only disagreement with your take is that I think if they’d signed Alonso he would have had the same, crappy year that Walker did:
Home: .304/.374/.572 20HR 71RBI 72K
Away: .242/.320/.478 18HR 55RBI 90K
First: .280/.376/.532 21HR 77RBI 96K 97 Games
Second: .262/.304/.513 17HR 49RBI 66K 55 Games
Walker was bad at home. Let’s just look at this splits:
First: .229/.286/.374 12HR 47RBI 90 Games
Second: .250/.312/.488 15HR 41RBI 64 Games
Alonso somehow convinced the Mets to pay him $30M for one year after looking cooked in 2024. If you look at his similar batter scores on bref you’ll see Khris Davis, Glenn Davis, and Christian Walker all in the top 10.
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We’ve been talking about how crazy the money is in sports as long as we’ve been here together. When Nolan Ryan got a million, it was considered crazy money, especially coming from John McMullen. We might finally see some version of a salary cap/minimum one of these days soon. I’m for it.
Yes, Jim Crane has remained firmly against doing mega contracts. Wise of him. But he has at the same time broken his own rules too frequently. Bringing Correa back is the latest dumb example of going off course. It’s really made building a 2026 club all the more difficult.
Crane was largely responsible for the Altuve, Abreu, Hader, Montero and Correa deals. Yes, Altuve is family, but as much I would not care either way if Dana got dismissed, bad deals have been a team effort. It’s not all on him.
And now we’ve farmed out the farm. Probably a good idea, because even though we’ve managed to keep grooming and polishing up kids that have had an impact playing ML ball, we’ve again put ourselves at a disadvantage when it comes to making important trades. Most teams have more to bargain with.
Talking about Walker once again, even if we only got 8 million for him, or a slightly lesser arm on paper, we keep Paredes, the hitter the new hitting coaches most want in their line up after Yordan. Losing Isaac would make the Tucker deal dim a bit.
So anyway, is Crane simplifying the books and keeping costs down because he sees tough years ahead for the Astros and would consider walking away? Or is the potential lockout a factor. Or like I said yesterday, is he preparing to pounce and surprise us again?
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Is Bob Nightengale ever correct? He seems the think the Mets might replace Alonzo with Walker.
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As for bad contracts we obviously didn’t learn our lesson with Abreu when we did basically did the same with Walker (3@20/yr). At least we’re out from under the Montero, Abreu, and Pressley contracts. One more year for LMJ but at the time it seemed like a decent deal. We definitely overpaid for Hader and have 3 more years at 19MM/yr. We have Javier for two more years @21.5/yr. The Coup de gras is the Correra contract. We’re stuck with him through 2028 for 62MM. If he does any of the vesting items (most likely the 575 plate appearances) he gets another year @ 25mm with a declining target amount each year until 2032. If we’re smart (haven’t been) he never reaches the vesting unless he’s ripping the cover off the ball.
So for the next two years unless something changes we have an aging, under performing infield at three positions and maybe two until 2029 or long (Correa).
The sad part of this is that I doubt that we would be in this position except for the cheating scandal, Thank you Josh Fields and all those who participated in it and those that didn’t have the cajones to do anything about it. Yes I’m still pissed off about it.
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Z – yeah the Correa situation doesn’t make sense unless he suddenly becomes a guy who does not get hurt and finds the fountain of youth with production.
Did you mean Josh Reddick, Z? Not Josh Fields.
Speaking of Reddick – interesting article from a few days ago.
Former Astros World Series Star Tells All About 2017 Sign-Stealing Scandal
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Dan, I think we all knew about the tattoo. I laughed though when Reddick said it was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen. Heck, maybe it was a previous girlfriend. I could see where Mrs. Altuve might have been pissed.
Some of you guys will remember that Fiers led the club in innings pitched in 2017. We really had an injury problem on the mound then too. So indeed, when Verlander showed up on the roster as I slept on August 31 literally minutes before the clock stuck midnight, Fiers must have freaked out. And as Fiers sat in the post season dugout, through the greatest Astro weeks of our lives, he must have been seething. He wasn’t an Astro fan!
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Josh fields was the whistle blower. That’s what I was referring to. I read the article on Josh Reddick and I believe he is spot on with his assessment. Fiers was PO’d about losing his spot in the rotation and it’s obvious he wasn’t a team player. Personally I think Pierzynski is a first class jerk (I’m being nice) and I couldn’t care less about his opinions.
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Z – Just to be fair to Josh Fields (who only did good things for us by being traded to the Dodgers for Yordan Alvarez and by giving up back to back homers to Altuve and Correa in extra innings of Game 2 of the 2017 WS)…you meant Mike Fiers, who apparently got hacked off by being replaced by JV and by not making the playoff roster and blew the whistle.
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Sorry Dan. I was having a Senior moment. You are correct. I got the two mixed up. How in the world I got Josh Fields mixed up with Mike Fiers I’ll never know. As Homer Simpson would say, doh!
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No problem “Z” – we all do this once in a while -?especially at our ages.
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Not sure if this is even possible with our lack of trading chips.
Yankees, Astros Interested In Freddy Peralta – MLB Trade Rumors
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With Winter Meetings a wrap, Astros remain interested in starting arms, backup backstops
Some thoughts on this…
CATCHERS
J.T. Realmuto (35 years old, 4.0 WAR)
Victor Caratini (32, 2.7)
Danny Jansen (31, 1.8)
Christian Vázquez (35, 1.0)
James McCann (36, 0.9) — signed 1-year deal with AZ (Nov. 21)
Elias Díaz (35, 0.8)
Reese McGuire (30, 0.9)
Tomás Nido (32, 0.3) — signed MiLB deal with DET (Oct. 30)
Austin Barnes (36, 0.2)
Gary Sánchez (33, 0.2)
Yohel Pozo (29, 0.2) — signed 1-year deal with STL (Nov. 24)
Sebastián Rivero (27, -0.2)
Will Banfield (26, -0.2)
Mitch Garver (36, -0.4)
Andrew Knizner (31, -0.4)
Luke Maile (35, -0.4)
Jonah Heim (30, -0.5)
Tom Murphy (35, -0.5)
Jacob Stallings (36, -0.5)
Martín Maldonado (39, -2.3) — retired
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Dan, when it comes right down to it, Dana talks too much B.S. I’d like to see the day again where we have a more cerebral GM again.
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35 year old Tyler Rogers gets 37 x 3 from the Jays. And he’s a set up man. Bryan Abreu keeps getting more valuable. He is one of the few guys we’ve got that might be lockupable.
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Correction, still on coffee #1. 3 years for 37 million getting paid to Tyler Rogers.
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And Danny Jansen just got 14.5 million over 2 years from the Rangers. Victor Caratini will be around there somewhere and I don’t think we’ll paying it.
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