Watching the Cardinal game last night they said Carlos told them that his most enjoyable year was with the Astros. He said he wanted to return an the money was right, but the Astros wouldn't give him a no-trade contract.

(04-27-2013 12:06 PM)bobreinhold1 Wrote:  Watching the Cardinal game last night they said Carlos told them that his most enjoyable year was with the Astros. He said he wanted to return an the money was right, but the Astros wouldn't give him a no-trade contract.

He should never have left in the first place.

One of the long term consequences of his leaving for the Mets was the beginning of the Astros decline. Beltran, Bagwell, Biggio, and then Berkman. Too much loss of talent due to free agency, retirement, and injuries when the farm system had been depleted in trades and never reinvested.

(04-27-2013 12:39 PM)Memphis Owl Wrote:  

(04-27-2013 12:06 PM)bobreinhold1 Wrote:  Watching the Cardinal game last night they said Carlos told them that his most enjoyable year was with the Astros. He said he wanted to return an the money was right, but the Astros wouldn't give him a no-trade contract.

He should never have left in the first place.
One of the long term consequences of his leaving for the Mets was the beginning of the Astros decline. Beltran, Bagwell, Biggio, and then Berkman. Too much loss of talent due to free agency, retirement, and injuries when the farm system had been depleted in trades and never reinvested.

When Drayton bought the Astros, they had the best scouting and player development system in baseball. After years of trying to do it with trades and/or free agents, McMullen finally figured out (or hired somebody who figured it out for him) that player development was the way to go. They developed Biggio, Darryl Kile, Ken Caminiti, Shane Reynolds, Richard Hidalgo, Kenny Lofton, Lance Berkman, among others, traded for guys like Bagwell and Pete Harnisch and Mark Portugal and Curt Schilling as youngsters, and had Bobby Abreu and Johan Santana on the way. It's truly amazing how much talent they produced.

Drayton proceeded to destroy that system. Three of his last four years, the aggregate record of their minor league was 30th out of 30 (and the other year it was 29th), by a margin of 30 games worse than 29th in 2011. And the teams averaged a year older than their leagues, so they were worse prospects than their record would indicate.

He wanted a hard salary cap but at the same time wanted to stroke his own ego with big free agent signing splashes. The result was a stars-and-scrubs system where half the salary went to 2 or 3 players and they had to give away at bats and innings to guys who didn't belong above AA ball. To make the budget work, they scrimped on scouting and player development. Look at their drafts from about 2004 on and you won't see many household names. Compare with Cardinals drafts for the same period, when Cards were almost always drafting after the Astros. Who masterminded those Cardinals' drafts? Jeff Luhnow.

Now they've gone back to the scouting and player development mode, with a healthy dose of sabermetrics thrown in. I think Luhnow really knows what he's doing. I think they're on the right track.

Interestingly, this is the third time they've gone this route. The second is detailed above. The first was at the start of the franchise, under Paul Richards, the pride of Waxahachie. Similar tale, they had Joe Morgan, Larry Dierker, Rusty Staub, Don Wilson, Mike Cuellar, Jim Wynn, Doug Rader, John Mayberry, Bob Watson, Cesar Cedeno, Dave Giusti, Cesar Geronimo, Sonny Jackson, but Richards left for Atlanta and they got impatient and got rid of them.

Here's hoping they stay the course this time and we find out how good Correia and McCullers and Ruiz and Springer and Singleton and Cozart and the rest can be in Houston uniforms.

One other thing, I am definitely NOT a fan of the rent-a-player deals. Unless you can get the player you are getting locked into a multi-year deal up front, you give away too much for what you get. The new free agent rules, where you don't get a compensatory pick unless the guy is on your team for a full year, will probably put a damper on that, although that did not prevent the Angels going after Zack Greinke last year.

To get 399 plate appearances and 4.5 WAR (wins above replacement) from Beltran, the Astros gave up John Buck and Octavio Dotel, both of whom are still in the bigs nine years later (Buck 5.5 WAR, Dotel 15.7 WAS, the majority of the value coming after 1999 for both). That was too high a price, unless maybe Beltran had gotten them to the World Series. But giving away too many at bats to scrubs prevented that. Of course two reasons they had to give so many PAs/IPs to scrubs are that 1) they didn't have the Bucks and Dotels instead, and 2) they spent too much of their payroll on the Beltrans.

To my mind, the Randy Johnson deal was worse. Astros gave up Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and John Halama. Halama had some success (career WAR of 5.6 in 9 seasons), Garcia was around until last year with a career WAR of 35, and Guillen played through 2011 with a career WAR of 28, again the bulk of all three coming after 2004. So they gave up around 60 WAR to get 84 innings and 4.3 WAR from Johnson. Guillen and Garcia might have been enough to push some of those early 2000's Astros teams over the top. But here's the worst part of that deal. Garcia had a next-door neighbor whose family was best friends with his, and this kid made it clear to the baseball world that he was going to sign with whatever team Freddy was on. That's how Felix Hernandez ended up becoming a Mariner, and when you factor that into the Johnson cost, it was a really bad deal. I'm not sure that's a winner for the Astros even if Johnson had gotten them to the World Series--which, of course, he did not. Win the Series, maybe, but anything short of that, probably not.

Would they have gotten to more series, and maybe won one, with Garcia, Guillen, and King Felix? Strong possibility that answer is yes. Put Garcia, Guillen, and Halama on the 2001-04 teams and there's a strong possibility that would have been enough to put any of them over the top. Add Buck, Dotel, and King Felix from 2005 on, and the same applies at least until Biggio and Berkman were gone.