What has doomed the Astros long term?

Whether the Astros are actually doomed long-term is a discussion for another post, but certainly, the ship is pretty shaky right now, and the arc of the team since their 2022 championship has been steadily down from a seventh-game loss in the 2023 ALCS to being swept in the 2024 Wild Card to missing the 2025 playoffs to whatever you want to call 2026.

This person linked below took a shot at what doomed them.

How 2017 penalties doomed the Astros long-term

The writer seems to concentrate on two areas – the four lost draft choices and the Astros trading away prospects for short-term help so that they could “prove” that 2017 was not a cheating fluke.

I believe both of these things weakened the Astros’ farm system, but I don’t believe this ultimately doomed their team long term.

Out of two late-round first-rounders and two late second-rounders, you might get a couple of decent major leaguers, or you might get four Forrest Whitleys.

Trading away prospects to try to shore up contending teams did not work out that badly. The Astros used that strategy before the cheating scandal was revealed (see Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Zack Greinke) and just continued it throughout this era. This resulted in seven straight ALCS appearances, four World Series appearances, and two championships.

To me, what has doomed the Astros is a mix of things.

• Natural attrition – The Astros suddenly were tail-end Charlie on the draft even before losing their draft picks – no longer picking in that top 5 due to their quality seasons. In addition, they were no longer first in line to pick up guys off waivers.
• The money issue – Over time, they were no longer paying minimum or near-minimum wages to the likes of George Springer, Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, and beyond.
• The International advantage – For a while, they were magically picking up international talent that other teams missed – this began with Jose Altuve far before 2017, but included Cristian Javier, Jose Urquidy, Luis Garcia, Bryan Abreu and Ronel Blanco, who all gave great contributions before injury or in Abreu’s case fall in performance and all were brought in cheaply.
• Losing Jeff Luhnow – Though I liked manager A.J. Hinch, I never thought he was the difference maker and frankly thought he cost us the 2019 World Series. But losing Luhnow was losing the visionary who built what looked like a sustainable war machine and who hopefully could have steered the team through the difficult period of rebuilding on the fly.
• The Owner’s hands – While Jim Crane always had a hand in what the Astros did from a highly restrictive budget to the times it looked like he got involved to push the front office to bring Justin Verlander back among others, it seemed to have worsened after the 2022 championship. He indirectly jettisoned the GM James Click days after that championship by giving him an offer he could (and did) refuse. Then he allowed a headless triad of Hall of Famers help him with roster decisions like signing Jose Abreu, Rafael Montero and Michael Brantley when no GM was in charge. After adding GM Dana Brown, it has been hard to decipher who has been making some of the personnel decisions – Brown or Crane and a number of these have been questionable as far as the sustainable success of the team.
• The technology gap – Outside of the high-tech garbage can banging, the Astros seemed to jump ahead of the rest of the majors with their ability to apply cyber data to reality with their players. That gap has now been closed and perhaps the Astros are even upside down in relation to it now.
• The injury bug – Almost every team has injuries, sure. But….after watching baseball for the last 60 years, this observer can say he has never seen a team suffer injuries in such quantities to key parts of the roster as the Astros have faced the last two seasons. It has been debilitating.
• Baseball Karma – We can make all the excuses we want about how the Astros were punished for cheating that other teams were doing at the same time. But it would not be surprising if the baseball gods punished a team that was so talented that they did not need to supplement their results.

Your turn…. Are the Astros doomed for long-term success, and if so, why?