I should start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. According to reporting from Bob Nightengale, Joe Espada has been informed that he will not be receiving a contract following the season. I should point out that Chandler Rome is refuting those comments and quotes directly from Jim Crane himself deny those claims. Which reporting is accurate? I suppose we will never know for sure and a lot of that depends on the credibility that you want to attribute to Nightengale or Rome.
I mention all of
this as a personal aside. Anyone that has been in the labor force can empathize with Espada and Dana Brown in this moment. Their situations are magnified by the public nature of their jobs. They are well compensated, so we can feel only so much sympathy in this situation, but if you are feeling some uneasiness about the release of that information you are simply human.
We can blame the reporter if we want and certainly some people will. However, journalistic ethics indicate that if you have a newsworthy story and you feel like you have credible sourcing then you probably should go ahead with that story nine times out of ten. The bigger question in my mind is who is feeding Nightengale with this information and what is their agenda? I fail to see the value in cutting off a manager at the knees five weeks before the end of the season. It is one thing to quietly inform him of a decision. It is another to generate a leak where that information is public.
Having been in his situation, I feel for Espada. I have had jobs that I had to go back to work even when management told me I would not be continuing. That’s absolutely brutal. I could only imagine what would have happened if they had announced that to the faculty and students. I have been very public about my displeasure with Espada and Brown, but that doesn’t mean I feel good about how this has gone down. This is particularly true in Espada’s case.
I say all that to say that these things are never easy and they shouldn’t be. However, cleaning house does present the Astros with some unique opportunities to reset some of the things they have been doing. Primarily, they should look at everyone with a more critical eye. Are the trainers and medical staff really up to snuff or should there have been a real house cleaning after last season? Are the minor league affiliates aligned in what they are doing in terms of developing hitters and pitchers? As we have heard in the last week, that has not always been the case.
The higher profile decisions come down to the coaching staff. The modus operandi has been to simply change the manager and keep the coaches. Are the pitching coaches doing a good job? Are the new hitting coaches really improving things that much? What about the bench coach and other members of the coaching staff? This presents Jim Crane and company the opportunity to simply ask questions they wouldn’t have asked in a normal situation.
Social media being what it is. there are always rumors that will make you raise an eyebrow until you snap back into reality and realize that the sourcing is dubious at best. One of those said that Jim Crane would not be opposed to bringing back Jeff Luhnow. Who knows what context that little nugget came from, but we can probably dispense with the notion of Luhnow or James Click coming back to Houston. I could go into the reasons why, but I think that would be a waste of everyone’s time.
However, the beauty of going into your fourth general manager as an owner is that you can look at what those first three did and pick and choose what you liked and maybe discard what you didn’t like. There were things that Brown did that were better than Click and Luhnow. There probably weren’t many, but he seemed to be more adept at picking up marginal players and getting some use out of them. He also probably drafted better than Luhnow and Click given where he had to draft.
Luhnow and Click were more organized from top to bottom and probably had some more creativity in terms of making things happen. Both were stronger in analytics and used that to their advantage. Click was probably better at engineering one-sided trades than Luhnow was, but Luhnow had a stronger international scouting apparatus that produced some low-price arms that helped us get through the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Knowing all of this allows you to ask some more targeted questions to get someone that can exhibit the positive traits of each while minimizing their negative traits. Luhnow had a tendency to come off as arrogant. Click and Crane obviously did not get along well. Crane would be in a better position than us to enumerate exactly why that was. Obviously, Brown had issues with making decisive decisions and was not nearly as media savvy as he needed to be.
Included in this period of reexamination has to be an overall look at the organizational structure. Some organizations simply have a general manager (or VP of baseball operations as Luhnow was) and some organizations have a president of baseball operations and a general manager working under them. It is a good time to explore both avenues. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both and there are positive and negative examples of both currently around the league.
A lot of that depends on Crane and how involved he wants to be. If he had someone he trusted, he could appoint them as a POBO and simply let the general manager funnel moves and suggestions through them. If the hire is someone that has done that job or the job of general manager then they would have more inside information on whether those moves should be approved or not. They also would be in a better position to evaluate performance of the general manager and manager when things go sideways.
As we move closer to these things, I and others here will chime in on what we think should be happening. I definitely have opinions, but that is secondary to realizing that the Astros are really in a unique position to reorganize themselves from top to bottom in a way that is more efficient and effectives. Challenges are merely opportunities. Jim Crane has an opportunity to get this right.
