It literally pains me to write this, because the idea of flushing an MVP season from Yordan is a sin, yet here we are.
Where we are is literally with the finish line in sight. Ronel Blanco, Hayden Wesneski, and Bennett Sousa are all about to return and provide much needed reinforcements to a beleaguered Astros pitching staff. Despite that, it really may be too late.
By nature, I am an optimist. I’m someone who sees problems as challenges and opportunities, not roadblocks. The bigger the problem, the more the challenge, the more reward in solving it. The 2026 Astros are a very challenging problem, one that seems will require more than one season to solve.
For the returning support that those three pitchers can give, none of them can be compared with Hunter Brown. Brown is the legitimate ace of the staff. He finished top 3 in Cy Young voting last season, doing all he could to carry the load on a team that was ravaged by injury, much as the 2024 team was and the 2026 team is.
Right now, Brown is not Brown. Without Hunter Brown acting as the true ace he is, there is not enough pitching the Astros can acquire at the deadline to make up for it. They don’t have the means. I’m not sure any team does.
Without Brown as their ace, the Astros lack the needed pitching to drive wins through the dogs days of summer, and certainly lack the mound power to drive wins in a postseason.
The biggest impediment to the Astros having any kind of sustained winning streak all season has been the starting pitching, it’s propensity to blow up on a moment’s notice, leaving the Astros is huge early holes that even the greatest offenses of all time couldn’t sustain.
It’s why the Astros PR team calls it “The Slow Turnaround”, the Astros incredibly relentless but painfully slow climb back towards .500, because they never had a 9 game win streak or a 14-2 run, it was an elongated series of taking 2 out of 3 steadily for almost 4 weeks. With each passing series, they got 1 game closer to .500.
Just one game. Each time. Slow. Methodical. Grinding.
The injuries are once again much to bear. The offense can’t afford to not have prime Jeremy Pena at the top of the lineup every day wreaking havoc. It cannot afford for Christian Walker to revert to first half 2025 Christian Walker. It cannot afford to finish a full season of Jose Altuve hitting like August/September 2025 Jose Altuve.
Most of all, what the Houston Astros cannot afford is a broken Hunter Brown. That may just be what they have right now.
Brown hasn’t looked right since returning from a Grade 2 shoulder strain. In his second start back (6/22), he needed 85 pitches to get through 3 innings against the Toronto Blue Jays. He allowed 7 runs, 6 earned against Tampa Bay 7/4 where he allowed 4 walks and 2 homers. He followed that with a 5 walk performance against the Rangers (7/10), one in which he allowed 3 runs in 6 innings and a homer. Today, Brown couldn’t escape the 5th, allowing 4 runs and walking 6.
Over his last 3 starts, Brown has pitched 14.2 innings. In that time, he has allowed 13 ER, 13 hits, 15 walks, 3 homers, with only 11 strikeouts.
Brown entered play today averaging 5.6 BB/9, a rate that would easily be a career high (his career rate 3.2). That number will rise after today.
He entered today with a career worst 1.77 K/BB ratio, another number that will get worse today. That rate is 3.1 for his career, and was 3.61 last season.
His 1.39 WHIP this season is a far cry from his 1.03 WHIP last season, let alone his 1.22 career number.
These numbers would be less concerning if Brown was in the process of a turnaround where he had pitched better of late. “Of late” is when he’s struggled the most.
This is no way is to say that Brown can’t or won’t turn things around. It is very much a referendum on whether he can do it beginning with his next start and then dominate the rest of the season in 2025 fashion. That is the part that seems highly unlikely.
Without a true ace atop the rotation, the Astros are essentially dead in the water. They will not stomach the costs to acquire such a pitcher at the deadline, nor should they. It’s throwing good money after bad. There is still no performance guarantee on Brown, on the returning Blanco and Wesneski, and certainly not on Tatsuya Imai and Mike Burrows.
Baseball analytics are about risk assessment and management. There is entirely too much risk in the Astros pitching portfolio, and it can’t be a recommended buy anymore for this season.
It brings us to the most unenviable point in the road, the point where Jim Crane must admit (for one year at least) that this team doesn’t have a real chance at making the postseason.
Therefore it’s time to sell. They should not have a full scale fire sale. They should not sell cheap. Considering that so few teams will be sellers, returns should be strong.
However, it is that time. They can sell off various parts (bullpen arms, veterans entering FA for ‘27 or ‘28) to re-load the minor league system, and then re-tool in the offseason via trades and free agency to give the team it’s best chance to contend again (presuming we have a 2027 season).
The bottom line is: it’s the end of the road for 2026.
As Sammy Hagar once sang: Dream another dream, this dream is over.
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