2025 Opening Day Astros Predictions

In honor of Opening Day tomorrow, I contributed my predictions for the 2025 Astros to The Crawfish Boxes’ Starting Nine! Go give it a look to see how everyone evaluated the team’s chances for this season. For posterity’s sake, I’ll re-post my blurb here, with a few extra thoughts:

Built with Kit

It’s difficult to not feel like the 2025 Astros are worse on paper than the 2024 Astros. This was the most disappointing offseason for the team in recent memory, honestly probably since the mid-2000s? (Those early 2010 teams were bad, but most of the disappointment with them came from during the season rather than in between them.)

Trading Kyle Tucker made sense, but losing him a year before free agency made it sting more than other homegrown stars like Carlos Correa and George Springer actually leaving as free agents; it was like there was time to prepare yourself mentally with those, while this happened relatively all-at-once. Although speaking of that, we had another one of those cases in Alex Bregman leaving, but with the additional frustration of a brief window where it seemed like Houston might somehow manage bring him back on a short deal, hope that collapsed pretty rapidly. Ryan Pressly was dealt out, and Yusei Kikuchi and Justin Verlander signed elsewhere, all of which make sense in isolation but do bring back stark concerns of just how thin the pitching staff felt at times last year. Really, given the constant rumors swirling around Framber Valdez, it feels kind of shocking that there weren’t even more high-profile departures.

But on further reflection, there were some interesting additions. I keep forgetting that the team signed Christian Walker, since bringing in a big free agent clashed with the “everyone is leaving” vibes emanating the rest of the winter. Really, things weren’t nearly as dire as they felt at times. Isaac Paredes and Brendan Rodgers feel like they could be surprisingly solid pieces of a team this year (much has already been said about Paredes being a good fit for not-Minute Maid Park, and I feel like the Astros’ development side might be able to get more out of Rodgers* than the Rockies’), while Cam Smith^ and Hayden Wesneski feel like they could be longer-term pieces who still have a chance to make a big impact this year.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2025 Edition (Part 2)

We’re back with Part 2 of the Starting Pitchers section of the Future Hall of Fame Series. We’ll once again be picking up right where Part 1 left off; if you missed that one or need to refresh your memory on the methodology, you can find it here. And for that matter, if you missed the Position Players portion of this update, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

I’m going to try and get one more piece finished for this year’s update, hopefully soon. If you would like to be notified right when that goes live, you can sign up for the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list using the box below (or in the similar box at the end of the article).

Built with Kit

Age 29: 31.7 WAR Median; 38.78% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Shane Bieber (17.7 WAR)

We have a couple of former Cy Young winners at the top of this group in Shane Bieber and Corbin Burnes (17.1 WAR). Both of them are pretty far off from Hall pace, in spite of those high peaks. Again, some of that is due to the specific quirks of bWAR, but only a bit; Fangraphs has both of them a little higher, but still only in the low 20s rather than high teens.

Since we’re at the end of the 20s, this seems like as good a place as any to talk about how the difference in quantity for modern pitchers really starts to add up. There are nearly 200 Liveball-era pitchers who have reached the 20 career WAR mark before their age 30 season, so way more than just the best of the best. Like I said earlier, part of the difference is that teams are more hesitant about calling up young arms than they used to be; there are a lot of debuts at Age 20 and 21 and even some 19s in that set of 200ish names, and 23s and later are harder to come by. But even among the pitchers who debuted at 23 (the same age that Bieber and Burnes got called up), you see a big difference. Just to give you a random mix of guys: Charles Nagy (debuted in 1990) got up to 1127.0 innings by this age, David Cone (1986) was at 1267.0, Andy Pettitte (1995) had 1449.2, Tim Lincecum (2007) was at 1411.2, Roy Oswalt (2001) sat at 1413.1, Jered Weaver (2006) was at 1320.1, Jose Quintana (2012) reached 1314.0, Jordan Zimmermann (2009) landed at 1094.0…

In comparison, Bieber is at 843.0, and Burnes is at 903.2. It’s not shocking that guys in the ‘80s and ‘90s threw more, but even seeing guys from a decade or two ago several hundred innings ahead is kind of shocking. Granted, some of that is external factors, like Bieber’s injury history, or Burnes taking several years to really stick in the majors… but that is part of the issue, right? Pitchers take longer to adjust to the modern game and aren’t trusted at young ages, they’re expected to go all out and wear themselves down more quickly, batters will adjust their entire games around driving up pitch counts and taking starters out of the game sooner… It all adds up in the aggregate. Looking at stuff like this is the kind of thing that makes me think future Hall voters will need a big shift how they think about these things.

Shohei Ohtani is also here with 15.0 WAR, but I already covered him back in the Hitters article.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2025 Edition (Part 1)

Editor’s Note: I will once again be splitting this longer piece up into two more manageable posts, with Part 2 coming early next week. If you’d like to get an email notification when that goes up, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list in this box below; I only use it when there’s a new baseball piece up (even my pop culture site uses a different list), so you don’t need to worry about getting too many messages.

Built with Kit

With the two parts devoted to position players taken care of, we can now move on to the next focus in the 2025 update to the Future Hall of Fame Series: the starting pitching. And this year’s entry is especially exciting, because it represents something of a full circle moment here.

Last year’s Future Pitchers article was the most dire entry since I started this series, with almost no active pitchers projecting as “on a Hall of Fame pace” and little sign that things would be turning around in the near future. Because of that, I turned my attention towards finding out what got us into this mess, as well as rethinking how the Hall of Fame could evaluate pitchers, with the end result being a pretty in-depth series on the subject.

How the Hall arrived at this point is a multi-faceted issue, but a generalized summary (check those articles out if you’d like to know more) would be “Cooperstown voters have been inflexible at evaluating pitchers, but usually the massive changes that the role was seeing cancelled each other out to some extent, so the Hall could always find some pitchers to induct”. Something about this seemed to change in the 1990s, though: a string of pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts hit the ballot in rapid succession, and writers seemed to respond to this by taking it as a sign that these clubs should be prerequisites for induction, rather than special distinctions for the absolute cream of the crop.

The result was actually a massive slowdown* in pitcher inductions, as they went from about a third of inductions to a quarter (with starting pitchers making up an even smaller share of that, thanks to the rise of closers as a role). Starting pitcher standards have been all around pushed higher, right as the role seems to have faced new challenges in the modern game; pitchers are debuting later, throwing more pitches at even higher effort, consequently throwing fewer innings, upping their risk of major injuries… all things that mean modern numbers are lower than ever before.

*This seems counterintuitive, but the reasons for that seemed to be: 1) this run of pitchers by itself was not actually enough to cover a full 2-to-1 hitter-pitcher ratio, and the slightly lesser pitchers that would have pulled that ratio back up got very overlooked in comparison; 2) there were so many 300/3000 guys in such short succession that they kind of started getting in each other’s (and everyone else’s) way, meaning a lot of milestone club members didn’t even go in on the first ballot and instead hung around ahead of everyone else.

This poses a problem for the Hall of Fame, given that the standards for induction are highly defined by what comes before. I suppose you can take the stance that we must stick to the old numbers even as they become infeasible in the modern game… but we have adjusted before, for example holding Liveball Era pitchers to the offense of their era, rather than wondering why they aren’t putting up the numbers of their Deadball Era counterparts. I looked at some ideas in that other series about comparing pitchers within their eras, if you’re interested in reading more.

But one other thing I highlighted towards the end of the Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitchers mini-series was Félix Hernández, who was about to join the ballot with a resume that was very of-its-time, and consequently seemed like a prime candidate to get once again overlooked. Except… it didn’t happen; King Félix got above 20% of the vote this year, well above the 5% needed to return to the ballot next year.

Hall voters have actually been adapting lately, if only to reset the artificially heightened standards from those ‘90s ballots. It’s been a slow process, but you could see it in things like Mark Buehlre hanging around rather than getting immediately bounced on his first try. But Hernández seems like a real shift; Buehrle’s case makes sense within the existing context of Hall of Fame pitchers (the bottom half of Cooperstown, but still within it’s boundaries), but Hernández’s Cooperstown credentials really only make sense taken within the context his era (the overall numbers were low, but he loomed large over his era). It seems like voters aren’t just open to reverting to the pre-‘90s pitching evaluations, they might even be willing to account for the modern game as it exists when they vote for pitchers, rather than just blindly reverting to older standards like pitching wins.