For nearly all of the past decade, Houston was a “divisional opponent” that every other AL West team would have to develop a game plan against. Each year they would utilize their vast wealth of depth and pitching talent, as well as casually add high-impact bats to the mix, while the remainder of the division could only hope for table scraps.
In contrast, now the defending division champions in Seattle are preparing themselves for another serious run at the division title, while the Astros are… attempting to cut corners by relying on the trade market to bail them out.
From a Mariners perspective, that’s exactly where you want your biggest rival to be.
Astros’ money crunch could clear the path for another Mariners AL West title
Let’s start with the one-for-one swap. Houston shipped out Mauricio Dubón — a two-time Gold Glove winner who played everywhere and hit enough to justify being on the field — to Atlanta for Nick Allen, a glove-first infielder whose bat has yet to show up at the major-league level.
This wasn’t some galaxy-brain, sell-high baseball move. It was a cost-cutting exercise. Dubón was projected to make several million in arbitration; Allen is cheaper and comes with less offensive upside. Multiple reports have flat-out framed it as financially motivated, the kind of move you make when ownership is drawing hard lines on payroll rather than chasing marginal wins.
The Dubón move might’ve been the first warning sign. The Jake Meyers rumor is the siren. Houston is now openly entertaining offers for Meyers — a plus defender in center field — in hopes of landing starting pitching.
On paper, you can talk yourself into it: center field defense is a luxury some teams will pay for, and the Astros badly need arms after Framber Valdez’s departure blew a crater in the top of their rotation.
And even then, what are they likely to get? Two years of a glove-first outfielder, even a good one, usually buys you a mid-rotation arm at best or a bounce-back project with upside.
So the choice becomes: weaken the outfield to maybe patch the rotation — or run Hunter Brown out there as the only reliable starter and pray Cristian Javier and Lance McCullers Jr. turn the clock back a couple of years.
Public projections have Houston’s 2026 payroll sitting in the same ballpark as 2025, with very little separation between their current commitments and the first luxury-tax threshold.
None of this means the Astros are suddenly bad. They’re not. Hunter Brown looks like an ace, and a healthy Yordan Alvarez is still one of the most terrifying hitters on the planet. But the margin for error has evaporated. The names still pop on offense, but the reality is different. José Altuve will be 36 in 2026, Carlos Correa is into his thirties, and both are being paid like stars well past the point where you can pencil them in for MVP-level production every year.
While Houston is trying to thread a needle with a self-imposed spending cap, the Mariners are coming off their first AL West title in 24 years and just put up one of the most complete seasons in franchise history.
For once, it isn’t Seattle staring up at an untouchable Astros machine. It’s the Astros trying to patch holes, make the math work, and talk themselves into “value” moves while the defending champs watch from a far more stable perch.
Maybe the real question now is: who’s going to stop Seattle from running it back?