As Jose Altuve and a veteran-heavy Houston Astros team chase another AL West division crown, they’ll be doing so without lead baseball executive Dana Brown, who mutually parted ways with the organization on Monday.
Brown’s departure was unexpected, as we rarely see these kinds of massive organizational changes amid a playoff push. He had joined the Astros as their general manager in January 2023, replacing James Click, who left the club following their World Series title after contract negotiations failed.
Although the Astros put out a press release containing statements from both Brown and owner Jim Crane, neither said anything overly meaningful. Watching the Astros, and especially Altuve, tells the story on its own.
Jose Altuve’s latest extension will go down as arguably Dana Brown’s worst move
Brown made plenty of poor decisions during his three-plus years with the Astros, but that’s true of nearly every general manager or lead baseball executive. Even the two-time defending champion Dodgers are facing early buyer’s remorse on Roki Sasaki, Kyle Tucker (more on him soon), and Edwin Díaz.
But above all else, giving Altuve a five-year, $125 million contract covering the 2025-29 seasons has aged horribly. The move didn’t make sense at the time, especially given how baseball contracts are typically structured. Altuve already had full 10-and-5 rights, and he’d never hinted he wanted to finish his career elsewhere.
Altuve was less than three months away from turning 34 when he signed the extension in February 2024. There was no arguing that he was still a top-tier second baseman, but awarding a five-year deal to someone with that much mileage turned heads for the wrong reasons.
Age hasn’t been kind to Altuve, who entered Monday hitting a career-worst .245 with a .707 OPS and 0.1 bWAR. He last had an OPS exceeding .800 in 2023, and his 20.7% strikeout rate is considerably above his lifetime 13.5% average. Can we truly point to someone's durability — he’s been a lineup mainstay outside of a month-long IL stint — as a positive when they’ve barely been a league-average player?
MLB Trade Rumors’ Steve Adams defended the move following Brown’s departure, arguing on Monday that the Altuve contract could have been “orchestrated as much by ownership as the baseball operations staff.” And, sure, that can be true at times, because it’s difficult to envision Jim Crane letting Brown make that move on his own.
But we don’t know what those conversations were like, so we’re not going to speculate. The bottom line is that Brown was in charge when the Astros extended Altuve, and the move, fairly or unfairly, falls on his shoulders.
Should Dana Brown get credit for Kyle Tucker and Framber Valdez’s respective Astros departures?
That said, Brown deserves credit for trading Tucker and allowing Valdez to leave in free agency, if only because how they’ve fared elsewhere. The former had a mediocre second half with the Cubs last year and battled effort concerns after failing to run out a ground ball, and the only positive that we can say about Tucker’s 2026 season is that his bWAR is finally back at 0.0. Congratulations!
Valdez has a 4.35 ERA in 25 starts for the Tigers, though his strikeout rate has plummeted from 22.3% to 18.1%. Opponents have a .715 OPS against him, his highest number since 2019, and his 8.7% walk rate marks the third straight year that number has worsened.
If we’re going to be objective, then we can’t penalize Brown for the Altuve deal and not point out the two contracts he didn’t hand out. That’s not to say that neither Valdez nor Tucker would have run into the same problems in Houston, especially with how uncomfortable the latter has looked in both Chicago and Los Angeles.
But with how strange baseball is, let’s prepare for Altuve to earn World Series MVP honors when the Astros inevitably sweep the Dodgers. What better way to prepare for an impending lockout than by watching arguably the two most despised franchises of the 21st century clash in the Fall Classic?
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