Outside of that whole sign-stealing scandal, Jim Crane and the Houston Astros have spent the last decade outlining how to build a successful franchise.
Largely because they never leaned too much into traditional data or became overreliant on analytics, the Astros’ player development system is one worth envying. They’ve (mostly) known who to trade for and why those players, whether it was Yankees catcher Brian McCann or Brewers closer Josh Hader, made perfect sense.
Whoever remains in the Astros’ leadership group might want to remind Crane of the blueprint that netted them two championships and four pennants, because things are spiraling fast.
Jim Crane and the Houston Astros have completely lost the plot
We’re personally against letting a head coach or manager’s job status linger unless they’re the ones weighing their plans. Teams should either announce the coach’s return or their immediate dismissal, as the Mariners did with Dan Wilson. (Then again, we won’t give them too much credit, because they had Wilson announce his own firing.)
Crane and the Astros chose the opposite route, waiting until Wednesday to announce Joe Espada’s departure. Keep in mind the Astros’ season had ended 13 days earlier, and the third-year manager already planned to interview with Seattle. So what was the point in prolonging the inevitable?
Refusing to fire Espada within 48 hours of the Wild Card Series loss to Chicago reportedly impacted others in the organization. Former Mets general manager and MLB Network contributor Jim Bowden claimed the Astros refused to let assistant pitching coach Ethan Katz interview for a promotion elsewhere. Naturally, Houston included Katz — who’d previously been the White Sox’s pitching coach — among Wednesday’s terminations.
Bowden ripped Astros leadership in an X/Twitter post, saying the team added to “the bloodbath and dysfunction” with how they treated Katz. He also called it a “pure lack of understanding of how to do the right thing.”
Neither Katz nor the Astros had responded to Bowden’s post at the time of publication.
None of this is to revise history and argue that Espada should have remained the manager. The bottom line is that you don’t treat people that way, regardless of their job or how long they’ve been in the organization. It’s not like Katz planned a lateral move or a lower-paying job.
Remember, Crane is serving as the interim lead baseball executive because the Astros parted ways with Dana Brown in August. We’ve argued that “culture” is one of the most overused terms in sports, but this is exactly where it fits: he’s destroying the winning culture the team spent so long cultivating.
Crane’s choices are backfiring, and it’s costing the Astros at the worst time. The AL West could again be baseball’s worst division next year, but their owner is voluntarily holding them back. Bowden was dead-on when he used the term “dysfunction.”
Then again, Crane has two World Series rings, so he may not care until a work stoppage starts hurting his bank account.
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