Houston Astros: Five value free agents who can elevate the team in 2019
By T.A. Mock
The Houston Astros have a history of getting the most out of undervalued players. Here are five players the team can target in free agency that can have that kind of impact.
The Houston Astros are a great baseball team, they won the 2017 World Series and they made it to game five of the 2018 NLCS. Great baseball teams don’t happen by accident, they take meticulous thought and work to piece together the right combination of homegrown talent, trades, and free agent acquisitions.
Building a great team isn’t just about throwing money at players all willy-nilly as all teams can’t do that and there are eventual penalties and probable busts that come from it. Teams have to collect a solid team of coaches and talent developers to saturate their minor league system in order to ensure drafted players and international signings mature to their potential.
Trades are tricky. They take careful evaluation of the players the team is trading away. What’s their value, have the peaked, are they slumping? Then the team must evaluate the players they are trading for along similar guidelines. It’s a difficult process because teams are most likely always going to value people differently.
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Free agency is a lot simpler. It’s just a competition and battle between how a player and their agent view the player’s value versus how teams value that player and how much they want to pay them. A lot of times, teams end up winning that battle just like last offseason.
The Houston Astros have been incredibly successful at this process and that is what has made them a great team. Sure, they’ve had their swing and misses but not every move that gets made will be a hit. The key is limiting both the swing and misses and maximizing the hits.
Charlie Morton is a prime example of that. Morton had always had good stuff but he could never master his command and stay healthy and put everything together at the same time. The Astros plucked him off of the scrap heap and got him on a value deal where he vastly outperformed his contract. Let’s take a look at five guys who the team could sign that could have a similar impact as Morton did a couple years ago.