Everyone wants to be the Astros now. Good luck with that.
Everyone wants to be the Astros now. This was not true in 2011. This was not true in 2012, 2013 or 2014. Back then, the Astros were a thought experiment designed to explore just how bad a baseball team could be. It might be a century before another team loses more than 416 games in a four-season stretch. It might be two.
If you wanted to explain the legacy of the 2017 Astros, though, it might be with this: The next team that averages more than 100 losses in every season for four years will be applauded for its commitment to abject futility. Where the Astros were the butt of every joke (sometimes literally if you’re Brandon Phillips), the next team to be that bad will be following a blueprint set down by the
masters of tanking.
All hail the 2011 Astros, who realized that being the absolute worst was the absolute best path.
It would have been easy to throw the fans a bone with a Hunter Pence extension. A fan favorite from Texas would have been an easy sell, and the Astros would have won more games. Keep him around, keep Roy Oswalt until he broke, make sure Lance Berkman didn’t go anywhere … it wouldn’t have been a novel decision. Even bad teams keep at least some players the fans have heard of.
Not the Astros, whose commitment to the cause was extraordinary. They lost and lost some more and lost more than that. They collected firstrounders and draft picks, saved their money and built a foundation that will last for the next 10 years, if not longer.
Everyone wants to be the Astros now.
There’s just one teensy problem. It’s pretty hard to be the Astros. The idea that tanking is a magic salve, a panacea for every team that wants to be relevant again, is popular now. But it has its limitations, and there are a lot of teams that will find that out. It will be painful.
Start with what the current Astros front office inherited. They already had José Altuve, signed for $15,000 by the previous regime. Everyone involved with the Astros looks better because Al Pedrique, Omar Lopez and Wolfgang Ramos took a chance on an undersized player that nobody else wanted. If they decided not to sign Altuve, nobody would have second-guessed them. Just Altuve alone would be an argument in favor of the Astros being built through serendipity, not tanking.
They also inherited Dallas Keuchel, who was drafted in the seventh round. That means 30 teams passed on him six or seven times. The seven players drafted before him never reached the majors, and neither did the four players after him. The tanking helped the Astros get Carlos Correa, but Keuchel was a package left on the new owners’ doorstep.
On the day that Jeff Luhnow became the Astros GM, the Red Sox selected Marwin González in the Rule 5 Draft. They flipped him to the Astros for a player who never made the majors. While it’s possible that the new front office was involved in the move, it’s more important that the Cubs had to look at González and not see a future major leaguer. The Astros won the World Series because of how the Cubs futzed with their 40-man roster in 2011.
This isn’t to take away from anything the Astros had built. Keuchel had to be polished; Altuve had to be developed. They had to believe in Correa, even though he was far from a consensus firstoverall pick. There were 100 moves that helped the Astros win the World Series, and a majority of them had to do with outsmarting the competition.
But there’s an outstanding chance that all of the teams that are tanking or have been tanking over the last couple years — the White Sox, Tigers, Padres and Phillies, to name four — won’t already have that Altuve or Keuchel in the system. When they have the second-overall pick in the draft, they’ll be left with Dansby Swanson instead of Alex Bregman. The little bits and pieces that made up the 2017 Astros, one of the most enjoyable baseball teams of the last decade, don’t have to be there for them.
They’ll wonder where they went wrong. It won’t have to be anything they did, necessarily. It’s just how baseball works (or doesn’t).
Everyone wants to be the Astros. That doesn’t mean that they will figure out how that’s done. It was a cocktail that’s harder to recreate than you think.