It is no secret that the Astros have something of a dearth of good talent. I don't think the farm is as barren as people make it out to be, but it's pretty fucking close. A lot brought us to this point, and I think it's important as fans to know why our favorite team is FUBAR.
Let's start with how the Astros got to be where they were from 1996 to 2005:
1993 to 2004
In 1993, Drayton McLane Jr. bought the Houston Astros. At the time (and now) he was compared to George Steinbrenner - extraordinarily wealthy and strong willed, Drayton McLane has owned the Astros throughout the club's most successful years.
There are lots of reasons for this, but the biggest was an institutional understanding of the importance of the farm system. For the Astros, this hinged on two sources of talent: the draft and Latin America.
Let's first focus on the draft. Up until the 2000s, the Collective Bargaining Agreement included a rule called "Draft, Follow, and Evaluate." DFE (also known simply as Draft and Follow) allowed teams to take an unprecedented number of draft picks. As always, big name prospects were taken at the beginning of the draft, but ever larger numbers of high school and junior college players were taken at the bottom of the draft.
Most teams were unable to exploit this rule. But a few did. The Astros and Yankees both took huge numbers of players in the draft - the vast majority of which the parent club had no intention of signing. Unlike today's draft, where players must sign by mid-August, DFE allowed clubs to sign a draftee up to one week before the next year's draft.
What this allowed clubs to do was stockpile talent for a year. No other teams could talk to the prospect, but the club that drafted the prospect could follow that player's progress for almost a year. A high school pick who floundered when confronted by college-level pitching could be left unsigned with no loss. A JuCo prospect who gained several inches and pounds over a few months and significantly improved his skills (like, say, Roy Oswalt) could be signed without needing to be drafted again.
This favored teams with expansive scouting corps. And the Astros invested in this department, allowing them to take large numbers of under-scouted talent. In the days before the internet made scouting much easier through readily available statistical data, this rule was critical to the Astros' success.
The Astros also excelled in Latin America. The Astros' Venezuelan Academy would take such talent as Richard Hidalgo, Johan Santana, Bobby Abreu, and Freddy Garcia and mold them into professional players. Venezuelan talent was relatively cheap thanks to the oil crash of the 1980s (you may remember it as what took the boom out of boomtown), and investment in the market was virtually no-risk. For the ridiculously low initial investment of $60,000, the Astros and scout Andres Reiner founded the first MLB operation in Venezuela.
Over the decade, the Astros would dominate the NL Central and routinely contend with the Atlanta Braves for the National League crown. This was aided by:
1) The Bagwell trade - possibly the most ridiculously lopsided trade since the Sox sold Babe Ruth. (See, that was the real "Curse" - organizational incompetance)
2) The success of the domestic farm system. This system would produce Craig Biggio, Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, Billy Wagner, Brad Lidge, and numerous other supporting players for the Astros organization.
3) Latin American talent - though rarely as it should have.
It is this last point that must be explained. The Astros rarely had the foresight to keep the Venezuelan talent it had. Hidalgo was the rare exception, and he was undoubtedly the least talented of the stars that would come out of the system. Bobby Abreu would be lost to the Devil Rays in the expansion draft (he would be promptly traded to the Phillies). Johan Santana would be lost in the Rule 5 draft. Freddy Garcia was the only one who actually was a "productive" loss (kind of like a sac bunt); we traded him and two other players for two months of Randy Johnson.
It's here that we might see the beginnings of the Astros' problems. McLane and the front office rarely wanted to really fund Reiner's operation (he would eventually leave for the Devil Rays organization). They didn't even want to cover his costs to sign Johann Santana. That lack of foresight would come back to bite the Astros in the ass, time after time.
The last blow to the Astros' fortunes would come in two parts: the loss of the DFE rule and the 2004 season.
The DFE system had many critics, namely players and teams with smaller regional scouting departments. Teams hated it because it allowed wiser teams to grab up potential 1st round talent in the 20th to 50th rounds by drafting a bunch of regional talent and then signing those that were any good to large contracts. Players hated it because they were frequently left in the dark about their potential employers' interest in them. They couldn't talk to scouts from other organizations - that would be interference. So the DFE was axed in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement. The Astros had lost their primary advantage in the draft system.
The 2004 season ended in a loss. The Cardinals had defeated the Astros in the NLCS (though only to go on to lose the World Series to the Red Sox). The Astros were losing two of their best sluggers: Jeff Kent was leaving for the Dodgers and Carlos Beltran was playing the Astros and Mets off of one another. Beltran had little interest in signing with the Astros and was largely using them to drive up the Mets' offering.
2004 to Present
The Astros had come off of one of their most successful seasons, but were quickly looking at the possibility of failure in the next. The failure of GM Gerry Hunsicker to sign Beltran to a long-term deal led McLane to fire him.
Now, I'm not Dickie Justice, or even John Royal over at the Houston Press. I don't think Hunsicker was a genius of a GM. But what this really led to was the expansion of McLane's role in the franchise.
A year earlier, McLane had convinced Deer Park HS grad and Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte to sign with his hometown team. More spectacularly, he coaxed certain hall-of-famer, Houston native and legendary pitcher Roger Clemens to play for the Astros.
Clemens, at the tender age of 41, would post an ERA of 2.98 for 2004 (somewhat unbelievably, this was his worst year in Houston). Pettitte would spend most of 2004 on the DL.
In 2005, however, the Astros had three of the best pitchers in the game playing for them. Pettitte stayed healthy, keeping an ERA of 2.38 and going 17-9 in 33 starts. Young ace Roy Oswalt would have an ERA of 2.94. Clemens would post the absolutely ridiculous ERA of 1.87 (though he would go 13-8 in 32 starts). On any other ballclub, Pettitte and Oswalt would be the staff ace. On the 2005 Astros, they were 2nd and 3rd starters. And the bullpen was remarkably good in 2005. The one-two-three punch of Chad Qualls, Dan Wheeler, and Brad Lidge was a formidible base for the relief corps.
The problem for the Astros in 2005 was twofold. First, with the loss of Kent and Beltran, the only proven sluggers on the team were Jeff Bagwell and Lance Berkman. Second, Jeff Bagwell was injured. By the middle of the season, he would be unable to play first base. After undergoing surgery, he was available for pinch-hitting duty only. 3B Morgan Ensberg would step up, however, and would end up with an OPS+ of 148.
In the space of a few years, the Astros had gone from one of the best offensive clubs to one of the worst in contention. Jeff Bagwell, one of the finest right handed hitters of all time, was 37 and crippled by arthritis. Craig Biggio was reduced to league-average hitting. The rest of the team - Chris Burke, Mike Lamb, Brad Ausmus, Adam Everett, Wily Taveras, etc. were all below average, offensively. Only Jason Lane and Orlando Palmeiro (considered one of the best pinch hitters in the game) would post above league-average numbers, otherwise.
So the 2005 Astros were carried to the World Series on the strength of Lance Berkman, Morgan Ensberg, and the outstanding pitching staff. The presence of Pettitte and Clemens masked the larger problems for the club: declining offensive production and age.
That the 2005 club was spent by the time it got to the World Series was obvious to anybody looking. Two images stick out in my mind when thinking about the 2005 World Series. The first is Roger Clemens coming out of Game 1. He was a 42 year-old man, injured from years of pitching (and a healthy dose of steroid abuse).
The second was Jeff Bagwell as DH. Squatting in his familiar stance, looking all too much like hell with his playoff beard. I was struck by the fact that I had never seen the Astros without Bags. And here he was, playing what was probably going to be his last series, trying desperately to make his arthritic shoulders drive the bat with the speed it once had. He only got one hit in those 4 games. He was HBP, appropriately enough for the guy who probably introduced the idea of not getting out of the way of inside pitches to Biggio.
Now, the Astros could have easily avoided fielding only two players with OPS+ values above 110. The Cincinatti Reds offered power slugging manchild Adam Dunn to the Astros that summer. He would have vastly improved the Stros' offense at a fraction of the cost that would one day be the price, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
In 2006, the Astros would again make a run at the Wild Card. This time, the Astros would end the season only one game behind St. Louis in the NL Central. The Cardinals would go on to win the World Series over the Tigers.
But at the end of 2006, the Astros would lose Andy Pettitte when they apparantly failed to come even anywhere close to the offer from the Yankees. Pettitte was willing to take a significant pay cut to play in Houston, but the Astros were unwilling to pay the price. Roger Clemens would leave for the Yankees in the middle of 2007, as well.
That left the Astros in a precarious position. Only Roy Oswalt, Brad Lidge, and Lance Berkman were left from the stars that delivered Houston a penant. The Astros could compensate for a shitty offense with spectacular pitching, but they couldn't have that kind of pitching with only Roy Oswalt taking the mound.
Unfortunately, the Astros main solution was no answer to Pettitte and Clemens. The front office would trade for Jason Jennings and would hire Woody Williams. Jennings was 1) no good and 2) perpetually injured. Woody Williams was a) old, b) washed up, and c) never really any good. The result was more money spent on free agency, little gained, and many draft picks lost in compensation.
It didn't help that the in-house pitching staff was either injured or bad. Brandon Backe, who had distinguished himself in the lost-cause Game 4 of the World Series was out with Tommy John surgery for almost all of the year. Wandy Rodriguez, who had come in for Clemens during Game 2, posted one of the most ridiculous home/away splits in baseball. Matt Albers was bad, Chris Sampson was okay, and Brad Lidge was having issues.
The Astros also made a big mistake in free agency before the 07 season. Correctly identifying the absolutely horrendous situation in the Astros' lineup, the front office went after fat slugger Carlos Lee.
I'm no Lee hater. I like the guy. He's a great player. But we paid WAY too much for the guy. For roughly a million billion dollars, the Astros received a good hitter for many years. For the first four, he has a no-trade clause, not that anyone would want to take his ridiculous contract off of our hands.
Again, the result was a loss in money and draft picks. Aubrey Huff, whom the Astros had traded for earlier, was not offered arbitration in the offseason. Potential draft picks were lost (granted, it would have been one 1st round supplemental pick and one 2nd round pick from the Orioles, but picks are picks).
Meanwhile, the Astros had seemingly become a vehicle for the marketing of Craig Biggio's quest for 3000 hits. Winning was clearly no longer the top priority. What's more, the Astros had failed to sign any of their top draft picks. The farm system, depleted from years of use for trades and call ups, was virtually destroyed.
The Venezuelan operation had gotten significantly more difficult with the resignation of Reiner and the expansion of other clubs in the country. Recruitment there ground to a halt.
The chips would finally fall at the Jeff Bagwell jersey retirement ceremony. Fans booed manager Phil Garner and GM Tim Purpura. Before the end of the season, both were fired. In their place, the Astros promoted bench coach Cecil Cooper and hired disgraced Phormer Phillies GM Ed Wade to run the baseball side of things.
The State of Things
Ed Wade distinguished himself with a series of trades. Brad Lidge, at least to legions of idiot fans and the front office, seemed like broken goods. People sincerely believed that Lidge had been destroyed by Pujols' blast off of him in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS.
Lidge was dealt to the Phillies for a few young players in the offseason. But the club needed a new closer, so Ed Wade sent a few more players to Arizona for Jose Valverde. We've already been through what I think of that trade (quick refresher: Qualls could do Valverde's job cheaper and better).
The crown jewel of the 2007 offseason trades was for Miguel Tejada, 2002 AL MVP. Within days of the trade, Tejada was named in the Mitchell report. By March, ESPN had revealed that Tejada was actually 2 years older than he had claimed when signing with the Oakland A's as a young prospect. Tejada had faced much-declined production during his final season with the Orioles, but I'm sure that was seen as a temporary off-year.
So the Astros, in the span of a few weeks, had become much older and much more expensive. Woody Williams would be cut during Spring Training, though that did not cancel the money owed to him. Free agent pitcher Shawn Chacon would be hired to fill the gap. Backe would come back from TJ surgery. Brian Moehler would be brought into the rotation.
The end result of all of this: years of lost draft picks, a vastly bloated payroll, a depleted minor league system, and a fanbase increasingly disgruntled with the state of the team.
So that's where the Astros are. And that's how we got here.
Later (I need a fucking drink) we'll discuss how to improve the situation.
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