Oz Ocampo was one of the biggest losses for this organization.
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Who knows what the internal dynamics were and who made what decision.
By god Woodrow it has been a party!!!
You are responding to an unserious person.
How do you define serious?
Or is that some sort of internet tough guy crap.
He hasn’t really worked as a GM but Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal were also big losses following 2018 on the amateur side
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Has he done anything notable since his time in Houston ended? He hasn’t seemed to stick around in any place long.
I waxed poetic a couple of times on these boards about how Crane’s superpower seemed to be his ability to hire great talent and let them do their skilled work well. One of two things seems to be apparent to me now: 1) I mistakenly attributed skill when luck was really the catalyst or 2) there is some decline/change in his management strategy. His management team orchestration seems to be a muddled mess lately.
I don’t know how someone that built a wildly successful logistics enterprise (and initial baseball operation) based on the tiny data-driven discriminators that separate greatness from mediocrity got where he is now with this management team and downstream reflection of baseball performance.
Bagwell-esque management can’t be the solution here in 21st century MLB.
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I think Crane let the baseball people largely run the show, especially w.r.t. scouting and player development, but he allowed himself to become more personally involved in molding the big club as expectations grew. The earliest example I can think of is that Luhnow didn’t want to do the Verlander deal but Crane told him to make it happen.
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Probably right. The success of that initial decision probably emboldened him to make the successive decisions as well.
And I guess we could grade the rest of what we think his decisions were on a curve based on that one.
Transcript of Crane’s chat with the press yesterday.
Asked if they can stay competitive while maintaining his philosophy against long-term free agent deals:
- ”I think you’re watching some pretty good teams that don’t have big payrolls. That’s certainly something we’ll study very hard.”
Asked if he thinks the Astros are still a step ahead on the industry:
- ”I think everyone has kind of caught up on some things, but there’s certainly some teams we’re going to do some studying on that have been able to win with not the payrolls that the rest of us have and have been pretty successful. I think we’ll take a look at that.”
Despite the focus on low payrolls there, in context, I don’t take any of his comments to mean he’s looking to reduce payroll. That certainly doesn’t fit his history or his win-now focus. I take it to mean he’s interested in getting better results out of the money he does spend.
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Yeah there’s payrolls near the tax threshold and there’s deferring hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several decades.
I suspect he’s talking about staying out of the insanity category.
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100%
According to Spotrac:
- Above the luxury tax threshold: LAD, NYM, NYY, PHI, TOR, BOS, SD, CHC, ATL. Seven teams above .500, 7/12 postseason spots (all except NYM and TOR).
- $200mm - luxury tax threshold: HOU, ARI, DET, SF, BAL, TEX, SEA. Only one team above .500, 1/12 postseason spot (HOU).
- $150mm - $200mm: LAA, KC, MIL. Only one team above .500, 1/12 postseason spot (MIL).
- $150mm and below (11 teams): Only four teams above .500, 3/12 postseason spots (CHW, TB, CLE).
Finding better value within the Astros’ current $234mm payroll is certainly worth exploring, but all of the other teams in their spending bracket are undoubtedly trying to do the same thing and no one is really getting results. Meanwhile, luxury tax payers and the bottom 12 payrolls account for 11/12 postseason spots. While Crane highlights the low payroll teams that are seeing some success, the teams that are paying the penalty are a much safer bet to make the postseason.
My takeaway from this is that in today’s MLB if you want to spend then you need to spend, not necessarily LAD style but at least with a willingness to go above the threshold to get the talent you need when the need and opportunity arise. And if you don’t want to cross the threshold then you may be better off just staying well away from it, leaning on developing good cheaper talent, and having some extra payroll flexibility under the threshold to make big moves.
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That’s the key to success the Astros had from 2015-2023. If Crane wants that level of success without paying for and retaining talent, it’s time to tear it down and rebuild.
It depends on 2 things, did Brown draft the right guys this June? And secondly, do you make the right hire. If both of those are true then you can tread water for a couple of years being a fringe postseason team in a bad division while building for the future.
If Brown missed on the draft and the right guy isn’t hired then a full rebuild is coming like it or not
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The White Sox are an outlier but Cleveland and Tampa Bay have been able to excel at managing the window from player draft up to FA – draft well, make good trades for promising prospects when vets are near the end of their arb years, and player development.
Honestly, the only team in that entire bunch that I’d like the current Astros to try to emulate is the Rays.
Springer, Correa, Bregman:
It seems to me the Astros got their best years before they got their biggest contracts.
The key was getting them in the fold, and as noted above whether the cupboard is full or bare will be Dana’s legacy.
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Not telling you anything you don’t already know, but any future rebuild is going to be even harder to pull off than the immediate post-Drayton one. For one, you can’t tank for top picks as effectively anymore with the draft lottery in place. But even more important than that: Luhnow & co. saw an inefficiency in scouting & player development and exploited it to great effect. They saw an avenue to use performance tracking tech to identify undervalued prospects before they broke out, which is why every trade in that era seemed to bring back a complex-level pitcher whose value exploded afterward. It’s also part of how they were able to identify the inefficiency in “older” international pitchers like Framber Valdez and Luis Garcia, and how they were able to find the Collin McHughs and the Will Harrises who filled out the roster once they were real contenders.
Since then, the league caught up. And even more recently, the league killed teams’ ability to compete in the performance tracking space by limiting the tech they can use in minor league parks. It’s the same thing with the shift: find an edge? Fuck you, it’s banned.
That’s the problem in a nutshell. That next edge is getting harder and harder to find. And if you do find it, the commissioner’s office is going to blunt it.
That doesn’t mean a rebuild can’t work, but it’s going to be a lot harder than it was the first time around. They can’t run the Luhnow playbook again. They’ll have to write a new one.
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