SUSTAINING SUCCESS
Trey Mancini was an hour away Friday from blasting his first home run as an Astro into the Crawford Boxes inside Minute Maid Park.
Christian Vázquez would soon guide José Urquidy through five hitless innings on the way toward another home victory that pulled the American League West leaders closer to the Yankees.
Seattle, Minnesota and New York all made significant moves during a hectic trade deadline; San Diego mirrored an NBA superteam by adding young slugger Juan Soto in a blockbuster. James Click’s Astros kept pace with Major League Baseball’s best, again balancing the needs of the present with the promise of the future. With three new players added to Dusty Baker’s 2022 roster and an afternoon game scheduled before a road trip to Cleveland, Click’s first answer is a confession in the form of a joke.
Maybe he can get some sleep now. Maybe.
Then the third-year Astros general manager goes back to work with the best record in the AL up for grabs and October getting closer every day.
“The most difficult part of it for me is that we have to be different than we were two years ago, three years ago. Because if we’re just running the same program, everybody else is going to catch up,” said Click, sitting inside a suite that former GM Jeff Luhnow used to regularly watch Astros games from. “And so it becomes exhausting. You have to give up on the idea that we’re ‘solving baseball.’ You’re never going to solve baseball. But we have to constantly stay ahead of not just the other 29 teams but of ourselves.
“How do you strike that balance of the success that we’ve had here and not changing what makes us successful, but at the same time not getting complacent and letting yourself ossify and your process grow stale and you wake up and everybody else is three years ahead? It’s a difficult mindset.”
Did Click do enough at the deadline?
Does the GM question himself or just keep moving forward in a sport that never stops?
He’s honest, engaging and funny during an interview that addresses everything from the Astros’ interest in Soto to Lance Mccullers Jr.’s potential lateseason return and Click’s relationship with veteran manager Dusty Baker, who doesn’t exactly fit with the GM on paper but has produced a .588 winning percentage and two AL Championship Series appearances during a partnership that began after a sign-stealing scandal forever changed the Astros.
In the Click-baker era, the Astros have continued to win and win, all while remaking their image and gradually winning back believers across the country.
“It’s always so beneficial for me in every walk of life to try to be around people and talk to people that have come up in different environments, different parts of the country, different backgrounds, different countries entirely, different schools of thought. We need to have all those different voices,” Click said. “Dusty and I are 30 years apart in age. Obviously, he played and he’s been around the game for a long time. I did not play and I’ve been around the game for not as long. We have very, very different paths. I think it’s tremendously beneficial to have that different viewpoint.”
Pregame music and introductions boom through the ballpark. Two days removed from a deadline that could ultimately define the Astros’ season — Atlanta downed Houston’s MLB team 4-2 during the 2021 World Series, partly because the Braves won that deadline — Click refers to moves the Astros didn’t make or could have made this year.
A highly analytical mind is at
the heart of this era of Astros baseball.
“We do a decision post-mortem on everything. The draft we do one. We’re setting up the trade deadline one right now,” said Click, discussing a process that began during his Tampa Bay days. “Everybody who was involved in the trade deadline is putting their own thoughts down about what we did well, what we could’ve done better. They’ll send those to me. I’ll review them. And then we’ll all sit down and talk about it, and how we can make the process better.”
Did the Astros consider trading for Soto, a 23-year-old outfielder under club control who already has 119 career homers and a .292 batting average, but could soon command MLB’S first $500 million contract?
“The job is to explore,” Click said. “Fortunately, we have some pretty good corner outfielders, lefthanded corner outfielders on this roster. And so it wasn’t something that we spent a ton of time on, to be honest. But the job is to explore.”
He’s methodical and processoriented when discussing players, moves and deadline choices.
“I think we accomplished our primary goals. And from that perspective, we got done what we needed to get done. The unacceptable scenario was not doing anything,” Click said. “We got three guys who were at the top of our list and three guys who I think will fit in well
in the clubhouse. … There were definitely some things that I was hoping to accomplish that we weren’t able to quite get there but that’s going to be true of any trade deadline.”
He’s passionate when discussing the Astros.
The sustained organizational success that has now connected 2015 with 2022, while other teams have torn apart winning rosters, could stretch into the latter years of this decade.
“I don’t want to ever say that getting to the top is easier than staying at the top,” Click said. “But in a lot of ways, you get there and staying there can be trickier or more difficult.”
A franchise that has survived the fire of 2020, when the Astros* were the most-hated team in sports, and reemerged with a largely new collection of onfield talent that still has Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman and Justin Verlander at the core.
“It’s just such an amazing testament to the guys on this team and the guys that are out there playing the game — and the people who identified them and scouted them and developed them — that we’re able to sustain this through everything,” Click said. “I can’t think of a more impressive group of guys in the clubhouse than these guys.”
Is this the best Astros team that Click has been a part of ?
Entering Saturday, Baker’s squad was 70-38 and just a half game behind the Yankees for the top record in the AL. In
franchise history, that .648 winning percentage only trails the 2019 Astros, who won a clubrecord 107 games before falling to Soto’s Washington Nationals during the final stand of the A.J. Hinch and Luhnow era.
“Look, the standard for success here is incredibly high. So for me to sit here and say that this is the best team that we’ve had in the three years that I’ve been here, we’ll find out in October, honestly,” Click said. “But in terms of the depth of the pitching, in particular, I think this is the deepest pitching staff that we’ve had in the three years that I’ve been here.”
Could Mccullers rejoin the Astros and give Baker another arm?
“Every time that he’s like, ‘Yep, I feel normal,’ it gets us that much closer. And we’re very close,” said Click, who regularly checks in with Mccullers the morning after his minor-league rehab starts.
With each newly promoted name and every trade, the Astros take on more of Click’s image. Year One was chaotic and unprecedented but the Astros almost won the pennant. Last season, they won 95 games and hosted Game 1 of the Fall Classic.
Is Houston starting to feel like home for the third-year GM?
“It does,” Click said. “Some of that is just the return to normalcy that we’ve had in life. My family finally feeling comfortable going out, returning to the
normal things that would make you feel like part of the city. And that took longer here than we would’ve liked.
“My kids are settled in school, they’ve got their crew, they have their friends around the neighborhood and you can see them running around with everybody. So just that aspect of it really makes you feel like this is home.”
Minute Maid Park echoes and buzzes. Another first pitch approaches. The 2022 Astros wait to take the field again.
Pennants (2005, 2017, 2019, 2021) are eye level with the suite. Only one is golden, though, and the Astros fell two wins short of their second world championship last year.
How competitive is Click? He laughs. The question is difficult to measure, he says.
Then Click tells a story about a family card game of UNO suddenly ending after he played a winning hand, when he should have taken it easy on his son.
Click’s fire burns brighter as another Astros win and October draw closer.
“There are so few people in this game that can say, ‘I won a World Series,’ ” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can. I’m going to burn the candle at both ends to do that. It’s paramount. The only thing more important than that is my family.”