After returning the Astros to relevance, Jeff Luhnow faces a new challenge: making them big winners
The most important decision Jim Crane has made as the Astros’ owner now has five years of baseball history attached to it.
Carlos Correa, Lance McCullers, Alex Bregman and Carlos Beltran.
Mark Appel, Kris Bryant, Brady Aiken and Carlos Gomez.
Houston’s completely rebuilt and reconstructed baseball team still hasn’t won a World Series, and the closest the Astros have come since Jeff Luhnow arrived as general manager on Dec. 7, 2011, was nine wins away from a still-elusive ring in 2015. But no GM among the city’s Big Three has remade a team in his image like Luhnow. And with the Astros in the midst of their biggest spending spree since the overwhelming overhaul began, it’s indisputable that Luhnow holds the club’s future in his
waiting is finally over at Minute Maid Park.
Forget that Boston just pulled off the move the Astros have never made — ace Chris Sale for multiple prospects; capturing a huge name that everyone else in MLB wants — and Luhnow’s an early favorite for front-office MVP of the 2016 hot stove league.
Brian McCann, Josh Reddick and Beltran followed the surprise July signing of Cuban star Yulieski Gurriel for $47.5 million over five years. Throw in the best young core in the game — Jose Altuve, George Springer, Correa, Bregman, McCullers — and the Astros’ offseason has already been more exciting than the Texans’ 2016 season.
“We accumulated a lot of young talent. That talent has now come to the big leagues,” Luhnow said on the heels of a disappointing 84-78 mark last season, which saw an overly hyped team start 17-28 and end up in third place in the American League West. “In three years, we had Springer, Correa and Bregman all come up, and that’s in addition to Altuve, who was already here. And so we’ve got a great lineup of young stars.”
If I was forced to grade Luhnow right now, he’d receive a B. But fully evaluating Crane’s chosen one is currently impossible, considering that so much about the rebuilt Astros and Luhnow’s vision remain works in progress.
Pains to gains
Crane’s club has back-to-back winning seasons, brought baseball’s heartbeat back to Houston during the thrill of the 2015 playoffs, and is set up as a potential championship contender into the next decade. The Astros have also been badly beaten up by the instate, division rival Rangers the last two years, still lack a true No. 1 starter, and just watched the Cubs win the World Series for the first time in 108 years with Bryant, an MVP the Astros could have drafted with the No. 1 pick in 2013.
Whenever I think about the state of Luhnow’s Astros — which is often and stretches from January through December — I always go back to my initial thought during a time of firings, dismissals, upheaval and deconstruction: It will all be worth it if the Astros win the World Series.
Luhnow, 50, still has to make that part of the story come true. And he knows it.
“We still remain on our strategy to field a competitive team over the course of a long period of time, and I think we’re in a good spot to do that,” said Luhnow, whose club has gone 346-464 since he became GM. “We’ve had to give up a little bit of the future in some of the trades that we’ve made … we may continue to do that. But we’re in a good spot.
“I really am excited about the next five years. I think this team has a chance to compete every year and potentially win one or more championships, and that’s really what it’s all about. We put ourselves in a pretty good spot. Now it’s a matter of having a good roll of the dice and making good decisions.”
Even Luhnow’s won-lost record is obscured by how painful the early years of his rebuild were. He took over a directionless organization that was coming off a 106-loss season and had consistently overspent at the MLB level while bankrupting its farm system. Back-to-back 100-plus-defeat years followed, and the Astros’ 51-111 mark in 2013 is the worst in franchise history and always will bear Luhnow’s name. As does the hiring of fiery manager Bo Porter, who lasted only through September 2014 and never clicked with Luhnow’s long-term view.
A.J. Hinch immediately pointed the Astros upward in April 2015, though, and the past two seasons have represented the first promising stage of the new Astros.
The bullpen needed arms, and Luhnow found them in creative ways, blending trades and minor league promotions with the waiver
wire. At the same time, the club transitioned from the awkward big league experiments of the Brandon Barnes and Matt Dominguez years to a locked-in, young Core Four of Altuve, Correa, Springer and Bregman.
When the holes in Hinch’s lineup became impossible to ignore this year, Luhnow responded with proven veterans (McCann, Reddick, Beltran) who should even out the 1-9 order and bring a presence to the clubhouse that has long been missing.
Wide-ranging approach
Financially, Crane’s Astros aren’t set up to be the Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs or Yankees. The Rangers have also owned Houston’s baseball team at the bank and have been far more willing to gamble by throwing money around at the MLB level.
Luhnow’s approach has been more wide-ranging and less splashy. Build up the Astros’ international pipeline, keep the farm producing, improve the major league roster when possible, then spend real money when the time is right.
It’s helped that Crane has finally begun to open up his checkbook for his GM.
“He wants to win as badly as anybody. He also understands the way the world works and that it takes time and it takes a little bit of luck,” Luhnow said. “But he’s been fully supportive of all of our efforts and will continue to be. A lot of what we’re doing will be satisfying when Jim gets to sip some champagne someday.”
Five years. So many names. One playoff run. A process that’s still playing out.
Luhnow has remade the Astros, and baseball hasn’t been this exciting in Houston in a decade. But a World Series ring is still needed for his rebuild to have been worth all the work.