[Passan] The Houston Astros have traded their best player, Kyle Tucker, and are letting go of Alex Bregman, who has the most WAR for them since his first full season in 2017. In the meantime, they will pay first basemen Christian Walker and José Abreu a combined $39.5 million in 2025.

37 comments

  1. Continued:

    >The consequences of an unwillingness to go beyond six years on a contract reveal themselves in moments like this. Bregman and Tucker were drafted and developed by the Astros machine, which will struggle to retain its best talent as long as it places arbitrary restrictions on itself. This is an uncapped sport. The best players get more than six years in free agency.

    >The Astros remain formidable. A team with Walker, Yordan Álvarez, José Altuve, Yainer Díaz, Jeremy Peña, Framber Valdez, Hunter Brown, Josh Hader and more. They will be a contender and have the talent to win a World Series. But they are an objectively lesser team than last year, and that’s no small thing in a close AL West.

  3. Love to shit on the Astros, but nobody could have foreseen Abreu becoming the worst player in baseball as soon as he was ~~traded~~ signed with the Astros

    Edit: for everyone saying this was a bad contract the day it was signed, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/z74vmj/nightengale_the_houston_astros_are_finalizing_a/) is the thread where it was announced. Everyone is bitching about how the astros just got so much better and how Abreu was a fantastic signing

  4. Well. They traded Tucker for Bregman’s replacement at 3rd who hits at an all-star clip and will profiles to mash in Houston. So not all is lost

  7. Passans right, you can’t keep locking yourself at a max of 6 years, expect to sign great guys, trade prospects for aging players/rentals, losing and forfeiting draft picks and still expect to continue the ride.

    Trading Tucker was smart cause it fills holes but this team will fall eventually with the barren farm system. We already have bleak OF options at the moment.

    Crane has kinda dug himself a hole here that’ll be hard to get out of as every year goes by

  10. Ehhhhh I disagree. Hard to blame teams for not locking into contracts that everyone knows will age horribly. Astros have no farm and have navigated this offseason very well.

  12. Eh I can’t blame them for moving on from Bregman. He turns 31 right before the 2025 season and has regressed offensively the last few years.

  13. I hate the Astros but this is a weird tweet. Also doesn’t acknowledge what they got back for Tucker. Paredes should be his normal self in that park. Walker is an elite 1B defensively and an underrated bat on the offensive side.

    I get not being happy with the way they’ve handled extensions and contracts, but this team went to how many straight ALCS’s? I think they know what they’re doing lol.

  14. Kyle Tucker was never at any point the Astros best player, and Bregman’s best years are likely behind him.

  17. If you wanna shit on us, look no further than the 2022 off-season.

    > Let our WS winning GM leave with no replacement.

    > Signed Montero and Abreu on the word of our interem GM Baggy. (90+ million of dead money since we released both)

    > Got Dana Brown who is famous for getting players on team friendly extensions.

    > Proceeded to extend only Altuve, who was literally never going to leave.

  18. He has a point about Tucker – homegrown star just now reaching his prime. If Crane wasn’t hellbent on the weird 6 year max, you definitely make that deal.

    Bregman, while being one of the faces of the franchise for the last decade, has declined every year since 2019. He is showing signs of aging poorly, and was asking for 7 years. Most Astros fans will be sad to see him go from an emotional standpoint, but objectively the contract he is looking for will most likely age poorly.

    Letting Springer and Correa walk were absolutely the right calls. Springer has aged poorly, and Correa has been solid but not worth the value that his contract is for.

    The Astros have also had a upper tier payroll for most of this run, so its not like Crane is some cheapskate operating with ridiculously low contract values.

  20. Neither are signed for long term and they got a good prospect out of it. Honestly not terrible.

  21. I usually like Passan but this is way to editorialized. Dana is working around the owners set parameters and keeping the team competitive. There’s plenty of bad owners in the league that deserve more shame than this.

  22. Abreu turned into a pumpkin, but that’s a sunk cost that has nothing to do with the Astros’ moves this offseason.

  23. > Astros machine, which will struggle to retain its best talent as long as it places arbitrary restrictions on itself. This is an uncapped sport. The best players get more than six years in free agency.

    This has been the Astros motto for several seasons now. This isn’t new. Nothing has changed.

    > But they are an objectively lesser team than last year, and that’s no small thing in a close AL West.

    Seems like that’s been said every season for the past several years.

  26. Most postseason wins of any team in the last 10 years. Multiple world series championships in the recent past and still a contender. Pulling a new ace out of their butt every season despite having one of the “worst” farm systems in baseball.

  28. The best players are indeed signing for extremely long 10 year deals, however will those players be playing at the same level the entire time? Of course not. Some may get seriously injured while others will regress immensely. We have entered a period in time where literally everyone is signing 10+ year deals. And because of that i forsee a lot of teams having issues trying to trade or work around said contracts when the players age or become less productive. Teams are banking on the value of the US dollar to continue a steep drop

  29. They are also paying Isaac Paredes $6 million in his first year of arb, and he’s projected for basically the same fWAR as Bregman (3.7 to Bregman’s 4.1)

  33. This seems like a look at me tweet. Abreu was a flop and had a drastic freefall, I’m sure there were a lot of teams that wanted him that breathed a sigh of relief they didn’t get him.

    And although I do think that Tucker and Bregman are a better combination than Walker and Paredes, they aren’t anything to look down upon. Astros are moving on. They don’t want/don’t feel like they can get Bregman back and they feel they’re better off moving on from Tucker now that next year.

    TL;DR: Piss poor tweet from Passan

  35. when a tweet is this long you just know its gonna be some sanctimonious finger wagging thing.

  37. What goes up must come down.

    The Astros were the Lastros in like 2005, 2006 etc. Then they went up.

    They will go back down again too… and then back up after that.

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