It wasn\u2019t pretty, but the Astros are back in the postseason. 81-81 was good enough to win the American League West for an eighth time in 10 years, so now the Astros will host the Chicago White Sox in a best-of-three Wild Card Series starting on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The Astros will have to submit a 26-man roster Tuesday morning, and there will be some difficult decisions. Complicating matters further, the team doesn\u2019t have a general manager, so who gets final say if there is a disagreement over who should be carried?<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s my pass at projecting the 26 players Joe Espada will have at his disposal:<\/p>\n
Hunter Brown, Hayden Wesneski, Peter Lambert, Ethan Pecko, Miguel Ullola, Josh Hader, Bryan Abreu, AJ Blubaugh, Bennett Sousa, Bryan King, Logan VanWey, Josh Hendrickson<\/p>\n
Most teams carry 12 pitchers on their Wild Card Round roster. Some teams will carry as few as 11 pitchers, including the 2024 Astros, and there might be one team that carries 13.<\/p>\n
I have the Astros carrying 12, mostly because it looks like Game 1 will be a bullpen game after the team elected to use Peter Lambert for two innings on Sunday, and it\u2019s not exactly easy coming up with 12.<\/p>\n
Enyel De Los Santos and Cristian Javier are ineligible because of their recent placements on the injured list, while Ronel Blanco is ineligible after he was optioned to Triple-A before Sunday\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
The last spot came down to Hendrickson and Tatsuya Imai. Hendrickson, who made his major league debut this week, threw pitches of significance, while Imai did not, so Hendrickson gets the nod.<\/p>\n
Yainer Diaz, Cristian Vazquez<\/p>\n
Christian Walker, Jose Altuve, Jeremy Pe\u00f1a, Isaac Paredes, Nick Allen, Raynel Delgado<\/p>\n
Yordan Alvarez, Cam Smith, Taylor Trammell, LaMonte Wade Jr., Nelson Velazquez, Lucas Spence<\/p>\n
11 of the 12 were easy picks. Remember, Daulton Varsho is ineligible because he was placed on the IL this week, while Jorge Barrosa is ineligible because he joined the organization after the September 1 deadline. The last spot came down to Delgado and Joey Loperfido. I went with Delgado for two reasons:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t pretty, but the Astros are back in the postseason. 81-81 was good enough to win the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":816305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2290],"tags":[5,64940,65265,67679,65394,4522,32124],"class_list":["post-816304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-baseball","tag-baseball","tag-houston-astros-analysis","tag-houston-astros-discussion","tag-houston-astros-game-information","tag-houston-astros-injuries","tag-houston-astros-news","tag-houston-astros-roster"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117348430187055240","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}