What’s real and what’s fantasy? Two of three from Cleveland. The Guardians lead the AL Central and are one of five AL teams above .500, so a series win matters. Houston is 37-42, three games behind Seattle, with Toronto and Detroit coming up on the road this week. The schedule is getting softer.
But the pitching tells three different stories. Friday, Tatsuya Imai struck out 11 over six innings after getting yanked before recording three outs in his previous start. Saturday, Spencer Arrighetti, the guy Claude says is untouchable, gave up three home runs. Then, on Sunday, Kai-Wei Teng threw six strong innings in a 2-1 win, and Hader shut the door on nine pitches. Three games, three completely different versions of the Astros’ rotation. Brown is looking good working his way back, but Javier is still out.
What’s real and what’s fantasy?
Which pitching staff do you trust? And is it enough to make a run?
The CBA clock is ticking. MLB’s latest proposal came out Thursday, and the union rejected it before the ink dried. There’s a hard salary cap, a salary floor, and an international draft. But the piece that got my attention is the draft overhaul. MLB wants to ban high school and junior college players entirely, raising the minimum age to 20. Cut the draft from 20 rounds to 12. Eliminate competitive balance picks. The union says this wipes out a billion dollars in player compensation over the next five years.
No more debating about drafting a high school SS or a more proven college pitcher. The CBA expires Dec. 1, and the two sides are not good at finding middle ground. President Trump endorsed the salary cap too, because apparently this needed a political subplot.
What worries you most: the cap, losing high school draftees, or another lockout?
It may be time for Justin Verlander to just go home. JV was supposed to start Sunday at Comerica. Instead, he strained his hamstring during a bullpen session last Wednesday. He’s had one start all season. He told reporters: “I’ve always said that I want to play until the wheels fall off and, I don’t know, maybe they are falling off.”
He’s got 261 wins, three Cy Youngs, a no-hitter, and two World Series rings. Justin, you gave this game everything. Maybe it’s just time to go home.
Should Verlander retire, or does he try one more time?
Kylie McDaniel and Jeff Passan at ESPN ranked Jeremy Peña the third-most-valuable trade candidate before the Aug. 3 deadline, with a 35% chance of being moved. They mention a detail that we’re all keenly aware of, the one that is likely defining in Peña’s case.
Peña nearly signed an extension last year, then hired Scott Boras and the deal went south. We all know Boras clients go to free agency every time, so Peña is gone after 2027 no matter what. Passan has the Braves, Rays, Yankees, Blue Jays, and Red Sox as fits.
Deadline deal or offseason move? When would you pull the trigger on Peña?
Yordan Alvarez is the lone star for Houston. First All-Star ballot updates are out, and Yordan leads every AL player with over a million votes. Only Ohtani has more. Yordan’s on pace for 54 home runs, leads the majors in OPS, slugging, and total bases, so he’s a lock.
Is there another Astro who belongs in the All-Star conversation, or is Yordan going alone?
The pride night double standard. Three Giants pitchers wrote Genesis 9:12-16 on their Pride Night caps Friday. MLB issued a warning for violating uniform rules. Rules are rules, except when they aren’t. Kershaw did the exact same thing with the Dodgers last year, and nothing happened.
And this is the same league that approved BLM sleeve patches, “United for Change” messaging, social justice statements on cleats, and writings on the pitcher’s mound without blinking. Florida’s Attorney General has now subpoenaed MLB’s enforcement history since 2020, and I think he’s asking the right question.
If you want a uniform policy, enforce it the same for everybody. When you only enforce it selectively, it stops being about uniforms and becomes more about politically correct messaging. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now.
Should MLB allow personal expression across the board, or enforce the rules equally and ban all of it?
ALL THINGS ASTROS 
11 responses to “Astros’ random thoughts & musings”
Good morning. Yeah, the Astros took 2 of 3 from a winning team. Our guys have won four of their past five series, mostly against compromised teams, but we’re compromised too. Cleveland hangs their own hat on good pitching. And they sure shut our offense down 2 of 3 games. But their own offense overall is one of the worst in baseball. However we’ve got to credit Teng and Imai for going out and shutting that weak offense down.
I just don’t know what to expect from our starters each time out. It’s hard to sweep a series when Arrighetti, a guy acting like our number two behind Hunter goes into a funk as he has over his last four starts.
Chip, no I don’t trust our rotation to make a run, especially against the few good teams we have to play. But we don’t have to play a whole lot of good teams. So maybe our pitching can trot. Thing is, they need more offensive help than they are getting from our own mediocre bats.
I don’t care about a lock out. I’m not worried a bit. It’ll likely happen. MLB and the union are already making a big mess out of this negotiation. But what happens to the high school kid that has no interest in a college education? Is he going to have to go overseas to find competitive baseball? As far as I’m concerned, as we’ve found out, drafting most any high school kid is a big crapshoot. It’s usually a bad pick. But it sounds like MLB is trying to reinvent itself. 2027 could easily be a total wash.
We’ve already discussed Pena and I don’t have any reason not to have faith in what Claude thinks on this one.
Verlander can play golf. He might even go to Hollywood.
Spencer Arrighetti was going to the All Star game just three weeks ago. Things can change quickly. Pena might get in if someone gets hurt or wants the time off.
Chip, you ruined a good post with your last comments. You obviously founded this blog (was it called a blog way back then?) as an apolitical environment, a place to discuss baseball. When you brought the Attorney General into the mix, you lost me. Some things are evident. We all want consistency. But life is not quite so perfect. You won’t get my political opinions here. And I don’t want yours.
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This wasn’t meant as a political post, but I get it. It’s more about the uneven application of the league’s politically correct hand and how politics has gotten too far into the mix of all sports over the past twenty years. The AG reference probably took it a step further than it needed to go and shouldn’t have been included in hindsight.
You may be surprised at my politics, though. But you shouldn’t find them here (you’re right about that), or in any of my writings. More than 1,600 blog entries and seven books, and I’ve kept that line.
Yes, it was a “blog” back when I started writing for the Chronicle (spit, in honor of Dan). It became the leading baseball blog on the site, including the beat writers, back in 2005. Blogs have evolved since then, to say the least. Everyone seems to have one now, because everyone has an opinion. But the reason people stuck around this one was because we talked baseball.
So let’s stay focused on arguing about whether Imai is for real.
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Short answer, because that’s all my computer wants to let me do today, the Imai you are seeing is for real. Probably not the for real you want, but the for real you are going to get.
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So do we look at his last two starts and accept that as the real Imai, or is this a three year work in progress?
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Unless he finds more consistency there is no doubt he opts in, well one maybe, in that maybe he will decide he wants to return to Japan.
By the real guy, this is who he is. 6 innings to start a no hitter one week, can’t get out of the first with a 9 run lead the next.
The Astros can’t win this. If he suddenly goes 10-2 in the second half of the season with a 2.90 ERA we lose what would have been the reason we got to the playoffs. If he goes 3-3 with a 6.54 ERA in the second half, he opts in.
A little 20/20 hindsight, but I hope they stay away from these opt in/opt out contracts in the future.
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I believe Cleveland just lost their best hitter to a hamate fracture. If they could have figured out how not to throw fastballs to a rookie they might have swept that series.
Verlander has thrown less than 4 innings so far and it’s June. If this were the 1980’s he probably could have pitched another five years and racked up all the wins he needed, but the game has changed. Unless someone finds another miracle cure for aches and pains his career is over. I would expect he considers trying his hand at being a pitching coach somewhere.
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In bits – sorry I missed Claude. Was out of town. Prompt engineering is a real thing. It’s why I still can’t trust AI to give a good answer when you ask it for an opinion – the thing is designed to give you the opinion it thinks you want based on how you asked. It’s like talking to a politician, it just tells you what it thinks you want to hear.
Dana Brown is managing this roster with his job on the line. Does that mean he has the 2030 Astros up front in his mind. Not likely. Should he? Maybe not. Baseball is a funny sport. The 2021 Astros and the 2026 Astros look dramatically different, so maybe he should just manage the roster with now in mind. I would think he wants to win in 2026, and getting this roster to the finish line might get him signed on for another year or two. Espada is just tied to him in the exact same way.
Me, I would not be concerned with the 2030 Astros either. Don’t offer me a bunch of 18-19 year olds for Pena. But I am a little different. I don’t mind missing the 2026 playoffs because of a deadline deal if it means the team is better for 2027. That’s how I would treat this deadline. In 2027, I still have Correa, Altuve, Yordan, Hader, Brown, Paredes, I still have a lot of pieces, get me a younger lefty hitting OFer with upside, a flame thrower for the pen that might still need a little work, and your best AA starting pitcher, and we can have a conversation. I hope people don’t get the idea though that Pena is going to bring a franchise changing deal the way that Yordan would. I just don’t care for a 2026 first round elimination after 2 games IF I can get better for 2027.
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I don’t mind missing the post season in 2026 one bit if moving someone, pretty much anyone, will help build this club a stronger foundation for 2027. And as it looks today, the Astros in 2026 could well squeak their way into October baseball as they did in 2024. But I’d rather sit and get better than repeat that quick exit again.
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Good morning folks and thanks Chip for the help today – I’ll answer the last question first.
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Imai has actually been pretty good in his last five starts — EXCEPT, of course, for the one game he didn’t get out of the first.
In the other four, he has two quality starts, including part of that no-hitter, a sub 3 ERA and he has four wins in those games.
Interesting to note though.
1. He has massive run support in all four.
2. He generally is pitching on 6-7 days’ rest most of the time.
So, it’s essentially the Tale of Two Imais. The next few starts may tell us which one we’ll get.
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Pitching staff – I trust they can be good enough. I don’t know if they can be the engine, but to get past even the first round they need to be.
The lockout will cost us Altuve’s chase, but being honest he looks done anyway. MLB’s proposals just pushes off development money to colleges. It would help their talent influx though. To me, a cap is necessary. The other sports can celebrate championships in Milwaukee or Oklahoma City or Kansas City. The Royals did win in 2015 (as we remember as we were one of their stepping stones), but since then, its LA, Dallas, Houston, Washington, Boston, a lot of big markets. It’s hard to win without a market in baseball.
JV probably said it best himself.
I would trade Pena, possibly at the deadline, independent of my feelings of buying/selling.
Yordan is probably our only representative.
MLB should require following a rule across the board. Consistently. But – just my two cents – they should be strict. Baseball is a conservative, traditional sport. The more they can maintain that, the happier I am. But they do have to be cognizant of how 22 year olds feel about the sport as well.
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