Astros Offseason Primer: Looking Ahead At The Winter
By Yoni Pollak
Isn’t baseball fun again?!?
The Houston Astros finished their surprising season as the 2nd Wild Card team, beat the Yankees on the road to make the ALDS, and took the best team in the American League to a five-game series before being sent home for good.
Any Astros fan would have signed up for that in April.
But this coming April, Astros fans will want to sign up for more.
Over the course of the offseason, House of Houston will have tons of articles coming out about the Astros. We’ll go in depth at every position on the roster. We’ll talk about our Minor League system, which prospects can help us, which prospects need more time and which prospects may not be in the organization come spring training.
Trades! We’ll talk about which players may be traded, which players should be traded and which players the Astros should be looking to acquire.
And of course, free agents. Who will the Astros target? Who should they target? An ace or back-end starting pitcher? Big name or depth bat?
But all of that will come in due time. For now, here, right now, we’ll just look at what the final roster looks like as the players pack up their stuff and head home for the offseason.
The Astros roster is in great shape to both add premiere free agents and keep their core guys around. They have five impending free agents (Scott Kazmir, Colby Rasmus, Joe Thatcher, Oliver Perez and Tony Sipp), though they are likely to re-sign only a few of them.
As far as possible extensions go, Dallas Keuchel is the most likely candidate to receive one. He is entering his first year of arbitration and isn’t scheduled to become a free agent until 2019, but the Astros would be wise to lock him up and keep the Cy Young candidate in Houston for the rest of the decade. I could see the Astros giving him a five-year extension this offseason.
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If the Astros (somehow) find themselves looking to shed money, they have two contracts that have become expendable over the last year. Scott Feldman is owed just $8 million in the final year of his deal. He pitched well after his injury in 2015 and a team may be willing to take on the last year of his deal. Jed Lowrie is owed another $14 million over the next two seasons. A team that loses out on Ben Zobrist in free agency may look at Jed Lowrie as a plan B.
Their core is set with Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa up the middle. George Springer and Carlos Gomez are two of your 2016 starting outfielders. Keuchel, Collin McHugh and Lance McCullers Jr. will be at the top of next year’s rotation. The core is there and the Astros front office will look to build on it in the winter.
This offseason should be very busy for owner Jim Crane as the Astros look to improve their roster. They’ll be in the hunt for many big name free agents and may even make a big trade or two to help bolster their chances for a run at the 2016 World Series Crown.
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