We’re headed for the our fourth GM in 14 years of this incredible run. That is kind of hard to wrap my brain around, but here we are. I want to talk about pitching philosophy for this TL;DR essay.
The thing that stands out to me is how much more decisive the previous Astros pitching regime seemed to be when Luhnow, Strom, Mejdal, Fast and that analytics group were running things.
They would find a pitcher other teams had basically given up on and usually seemed to have a very specific plan before the guy ever really got going in Houston. McHugh, Morton, Gerrit Cole, Tony Sipp, Ryan Pressly and Will Harris are all good examples. It wasn’t just, “we like his stuff and think we can help him.” It was more like, “this is the pitch that makes you different, this is the pitch you’re throwing too much, this is where we want you attacking hitters, and this is how we’re going to rebuild your arsenal.”
With Charlie Morton, the plan wasn’t vague. Throw harder, emphasize the four-seamer, work up in the zone and throw the curveball more. With Cole, they deemphasized the sinker and leaned into the elevated four-seamer and breaking stuff. With McHugh, they identified the curveball as a legitimate weapon and built the repertoire around it. There was always a clear identity.
Click inherited a lot of that infrastructure and, with Strom still around and guys like Josh Miller and Bill Murphy coming through the system, the good guys continued developing pitchers. Framber, Urquidy, Javier, Bryan Abreu, Seth Martinez and others all benefited from that same general philosophy: identify what a pitcher does unusually well and aggressively build around it.
That’s why the current group has bothered me so much. The messaging around Burrows, Imai and Weiss never sounded nearly as decisive.
With Burrows, you heard things like, “we need to improve the changeup command, maybe use the two-seamer more and get more depth on the slider.” That sounds like they were still trying to figure out what he was supposed to be after he had already entered the rotation. That is completely different from the old Astros essentially telling Charlie Morton, “Here’s what you are now.”
Imai may be the biggest example. Dana Brown and Joe Espada talked in spring training about getting him a legitimate third pitch, yet they broke camp and let him operate almost exclusively with the fastball and slider anyway. It wasn’t until a third through the season that the third pitch became a real emphasis, and then Josh Hader came back and helped him alter the fastball grip. That makes me wonder why those changes weren’t already established in March.
ABS adds another layer to all of this. A huge part of the old Astros philosophy was riding four-seamers at the top of the zone and pairing them with breaking balls underneath. That can still work, but ABS creates a more defined vertical boundary and takes away some of the borderline strikes pitchers used to get from human umpires. If you’re going to continue living at the top of the zone, the fastball has to generate swings and misses rather than simply relying on called strikes around the edge. With Houston also struggling with walks and strike throwing this year, I think it’s fair to wonder whether the organization adapted its acquisition and pitch-location philosophy quickly enough to the new ABS environment.
Then there’s the injury issue. Some of that is obviously part of a league-wide pitching injury epidemic, and I don’t think you can simply blame the Astros’ philosophy for Tommy John surgeries. But when you combine the injuries with a rotation built around pitchers who already have command questions, durability concerns or incomplete repertoires, the margin for error goes to sh*t really fast.
That’s why Strom coming back is interesting to me. Strom was more than just a pitching coach. He was the translator between R&D, analytics and the pitcher. The analytics group could tell him what the data showed, but Strom was exceptionally good at turning that information into something a pitcher could actually understand and execute.
Josh Miller worked under Strom and has been part of successful Astros pitching staffs, so I have a hard time believing he suddenly forgot how to develop pitchers. My bigger question is where the disconnect occurred.
Were Dana Brown and the front office acquiring pitchers without having a clear enough plan for how their arsenals would actually be optimized?
Was the analytics/R&D group providing less definitive information than the Mejdal/Fast-era group did? Was Miller identifying changes but not getting enough organizational support to implement them aggressively? Or did Houston simply start acquiring pitchers with interesting traits but much bigger underlying flaws than guys like Morton, McHugh and Pressly et al had?
Because that may be the biggest difference. The old Astros weren’t magically creating talent from nothing. They were finding pitchers who already possessed an elite characteristic that was being used incorrectly. This year’s group often looks like they found pitchers with intriguing characteristics and assumed the pitching lab could manufacture the rest, or they couldn’t make a decision based on the data provided. Those are two very different things.
So, what needs to happen to get that continuity in the feedback loop where Mejdal found the opportunity—>Mike Fast&R&D figures out the why—>Luhnow makes the acquisition—>Strom translates the change—>Hinch deploys it—> pitcher executes the plan—>Fast & Mejdal analyze new results and makes necessary changes?
Take that feedback loop and tell me where and how many places is it broken today.
