NEW YORK - The Astros are still very much in the AL West race, but the bigger story around them is harder to miss: the division has turned into a slog, and Houston no longer looks like the team setting the pace for everyone else.
That point was hanging over Yankee Stadium on Tuesday as Josh Hader talked about how managers get judged. In his view, there’s no middle ground.
“It’s a teeter-totter that never stays flat,” Hader, the Astros’ closer, said before batting practice at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday. “It’s leaning one way or the other, and that’s just the way the game is.”
The AL West has looked nothing like that. It has looked balanced to the point of stagnation, with no club breaking away and no one quite willing to seize control. Steve Sparks, the Astros’ radio analyst, described it as a division where nobody has separated from the pack.
“There’s still a lot of time to go, and I think somebody’s going to pull away,” Sparks said. “Around here, everybody’s hoping it’s Houston, but who’s to say? I mean, nobody really looks that much better than anybody else.”
That has been the theme all season. The Angels got to two games over .500 in March.
The A’s reached three games over in May. The Mariners peaked at four over in June, the Rangers at three over in July, and Houston got to three over on August 14.
Since then, the Astros dropped six of eight at home, and owner Jim Crane responded Monday by dismissing general manager Dana Brown.
Crane made it clear on Tuesday that simply hanging around is not enough.
“The expectation that I have is we’re in the playoffs every year,” Crane said Tuesday. “It’s hard to win (the World Series) every year, but you have to get there.”
Brown’s firing made him the third AL West general manager to lose his job this summer, following Perry Minasian of the Angels on June 26 and David Forst of the A’s on August 7. The managers, at least for now, have stayed in place. Dan Wilson’s Mariners have underachieved badly, while Skip Schumaker, in his first season as Rangers manager, appears safe.
The strange part is that the division has enough talent to be annoying, but not enough consistency to be convincing. Sparks called it top-heavy, and that tracks with the way teams have been able to work around the big names and expose the rest.
“What I see is top-heavy lineups and (safe) places for pitchers to go,” Sparks said. “You can pitch around certain guys.
You see teams’ intentional walks to Yordan Alvarez. He set a franchise record for the Astros; he’s at 28 now on the season.
So you get an opportunity to expose teams’ weaknesses by pitching around guys in a top-heavy lineup.
“I think that’s part of it. I think the depth of rotations and staffs are a little down this year compared to last, and I think just the fact that bullpens can become so volatile from year to year, you might have the same people but not the same players sometimes. So nobody’s really gotten traction.”
For Houston, that reality is especially jarring. The Astros spent a decade acting like the AL’s standard-bearer.
From 2015 through 2024, they won 24 more games than any other American League team. Their pitchers led the majors in strikeouts, and only Cleveland struck out less often on offense.
That run grew out of the vision of Jeff Luhnow, whom Crane hired after buying the team in November 2011, when the Astros were baseball’s worst club. Crane handed Luhnow, an unconventional thinker, the room to rebuild everything, and the results changed the franchise.
Houston already had Jose Altuve, Dallas Keuchel and George Springer in the organization. The team lost heavily for two years, piled up high draft picks, used data and video aggressively, traded for Alvarez before his pro debut and found value in older Latin American pitching prospects who later became World Series contributors. The Astros even put an analyst in uniform in the minors.
But for plenty of fans, the story begins and ends with the sign-stealing scandal that cost Luhnow and AJ Hinch their jobs. That has flattened the public memory of how inventive the Astros were. They won four pennants and two titles and reached seven straight AL Championship Series for a reason.
Crane acknowledged Tuesday that Houston is no longer the team everyone else is chasing for ideas. He didn’t name the clubs he admires, but the Brewers and Rays fit the profile of the small-market teams that have kept finding ways to win.
“Once you come up with something new - (like) the shift, we were heavy on the shift, then everybody does the shift, and then they eliminate the shift,” Crane said. “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.”
The succession plan after Luhnow has not been smooth. Crane brought in James Click from the Rays, but the fit never worked, and Click was out after the 2022 World Series. Brown was supposed to be more comfortable, a straight-talking scout with an old-school background, but several of the moves on his watch - some with Crane’s input - did not land.
So now the Astros are moving on again, with a division title still there for the taking and a front office overhaul already underway. It is an unusual place for a team that spent so long at the center of the league.
“I don’t know the reasoning behind it; honestly, I don’t,” Hader said. “I mean, at the end of the day, it’s baseball, right? I think that’s what it comes down to: Baseball is a crazy sport.”
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