The day the music died

Everyone leaves.

Everyone but Altuve. For now.

As a rhetorics nonbeliever, Friday 13th is a day like any other, though what happened as an Astros fan makes it a compelling argument to question the obscure nature of such a date.

On a night where Houston says goodbye to his King and presumably to another face of the franchise, it’d be easy to consider it as a fixed point in time, a full stop on what has been almost a decade of Astros baseball exellence.

That’d be an oversight: the AL West is so bad Houston might still win without 8–10 WAR and to be fair the Astros got back a quarter of what they lost in production with Isaac Paredes and Hayden Wesneski.

I won’t argue the Tucker trade much, it was the right thing to do after the Soto megacontract reset the expectations for King Tuck’s upcoming FA, to such a level the Astros would have never been able to retain him.

They should have extended him in 2022 or got a better return: you have to be a Cam Smith aficionado to think he’s more peak Evan Longoria and less Eugenio Suarez; Paredes is going to be fine even as a slugging 3B with some walks and questionable defense; Wesneski can be molded into a weapon by the Astros pitching lab.

That getting back two third basemen, as much as they can both play other positions, is a signal Alex Bregman is the next Houston star to leave town, that’s a bummer in and on itself.

Giving Breggy a long term deal as he goes into his late 30s might not be the smartest move, yet something I kinda expected from the 2024 Astros front office.

Because the Astros Golden Era doesn’t die on a bleak Friday 13th December 2024. It was already dead a long time ago.

A juggernaut built after a cruel teardown by Jeff Luhnow and his assistants, supplied with a similar vision by ex-Ray James Click, a Chevy driven by professional F1 drivers finally got to the dry levy in November 2022.

After a WS win, Click was offered an offensive one year deal, owner Jim Crane basically showing him the door under the advice of Hall of Famers Jeff Bagwell and Reggie Jackson because, Bagwell verbatim, “baseball is played by humans and not computers”.

That’s the day the music died, make no mistake.

Here’s a quick rundown of what happened in two years since then:

• over $30M AAV burned by Bagwell and friends in the form of a one year deal to an ailing Michael Brantley and 3 year pacts to declining Jose Abreu and BABIP merchant Rafael Montero;
• a deadline trade to get back the remnants of Justin Verlander, and a big bag of $, for Astros top prospect Drew Gilbert and promising Ryan Clifford;
• a record contract for closer Josh Hader, almost $20M AAV for five seasons while still employing Montero, Bryan Abreu and America’s closer Ryan Pressly with his $14M AAV extension, forming the priciest bullpen in baseball;
• another Trade Deadline deal, this time sending Astros top pitching prospect Jake Bloss, fan favorite Joey Loperfido and blue blooded Will Wagner to Toronto for three months of an albeit great Yusei Kikuchi;
• two of the worst full seasons in the last decade as per W-L record and PO results, once eliminated by then champion Texas in the ALCS, finally dismantled by old pal AJ Hinch’s Tigers in a first round sweep.

Three months without a GM and a year and a half with a scout hired to oversee baseball’s dead last ranked farm system, all while Crane and his buddies made franchise shattering decisions over his head, torpedoed the Houston Astros from MLB’s ideal of a successful rebuild into a dynasty to the latest rendition of Jerry Jones’ Cowboys extravaganza.

Dana Brown has been nothing but a car dealer in his Astros tenure: a lot of promises and empty proclaims, no feasible results.

A former head of scouting in Atlanta, he came onto the scene pledging the Braves way of team friendly extensions to key young players, and nothing of the sort happened: aside from Cristian Javier, who got promptly hurt, nobody else was given a long term deal under Brown.

Not Tucker, FA at 28, not solid performers such as Hunter Brown, Yainer Diaz and WS MVP Jeremy Pena, not a soul.

While his drafts look solid, Bloss was an early round pick in 2023, his tendency to talk the talk while never walking the walk is almost hilarious.

At the 2023 Trade Deadline he went out of his way to declare Gilbert and other top prospects as untouchable, only to see him and Clifford go to allow Crane’s friend JV another chance in Houston.

In that offseason he acknowledged the issue with Montero’s contract, ruling out another big addition in the bullpen. Days later, Crane gave Hader close to $100M to take Pressly’s closer role.

He reiterated how Kyle Tucker would be an Astro for life. He’s now a Cub.

Finally, he entered the 2024 offseason announcing Alex Bregman as a priority only to trade Tucker for an actual 3B and a future 3B, all but closing the doors on a reunion and gifting a ticket to Yankee Stadium to a franchise icon that Altuve, something he never did for the likes of Springer and Correa, pushed to keep into Houston confines.

In his latest oratory to the media he clamored the Astros are still going to compete while presenting an outfield composition that even the loudest Meyers-McCormick fan would be afraid of, he pulled back on a possible Framber Valdez trade, you know what that means, and he presented no options as to how Houston is going to address glaring holes at first and in right field.

Which was better than the latest news on a possible Nolan Arenado trade, presumably another “Crane and co.” escapade at a big name that is clearly on a plummeting decline, on an oversized contract, on the wrong side of Father Time and with contact peripherals that would make a grown man cry in pain.

Yes, you guessed it, just like Jose Abreu.

But the reasoning of Crane, Bags and company is simple: why sign a long term Alex Bregman to get 4 good season and 3 bad ones when you can just give up prospects and payroll for 3 horrible seasons of Nolan Arenado?

It’s the sort of genius the 2023-onwards Astros FO has displayed over and over again, a litany of hilariously misguided, dumb choices that are slowly sending the franchise back to the black hole of a complete rebuild, one that has zero chances of ending up well without a competent set of drivers at the helm.

Paying Anthony Santander the $15–20M AAV he’s going to ask for 5 years would be another nail in the coffin, a long term deal for a worse and older Tucker replacement, a masterpiece that I all but expect from Brown, rather from Crane and his golf cabal through Brown.

Altuve and Yordan might not be drinking whisky and rye, though Tuve ought to have a drink as the only player he’s ever vouched for is on his way to NY, but I can do it in their stead.

The Astros still look like they want to try and be the AL West standard, not that hard even as Seattle can’t be a worse hitting team than his 2024 counterpart, Texas keeps on spending and even the A’s sign contracts and do trades now that they left Oakland.

They are losing good old boys as seasons go by, replacing them with either young unproven commodities or older former glories, now barely able to withstand 162.

There’s no rhyme nor reason as to how they are operating, zigging and zagging between shedding payroll and adding, the truly most disheartening search for enough mediocrity to battle for a PO spot, that 50-something percent Dipoto set for Seattle’s ambitions, irating the whole fanbase in the process.

The Astros Golden Era is over, it was over, it’ll be over for a while.

There’s not going to be another walk in the park of a regular season for a long time, just like 2023–24 you’ll see a flawly constructed roster try their best to sniff 90 wins, whether that is enough to dance in October it’s up to the opposition.

What was once a feared, hated, revered by some, strongly considered franchise by the whole league is now a trudging giant, all the glory of the past and a name built on decades of swings and misses until a resounding success, nothing worth the honor of a legacy built on analytics and homegrown players.

They are still the Astros, pundits won’t see them falling until they actually do, but not that kind of Astros, the 2015–22 menace with all time rosters, historical Postseason performers and vanguard minds atop.

To those Astros, to the Golden Era, you can sing them their goodbyes.

Until better days.