![]() ![]() Select Justin Maxwell off of waivers: A great lefty-masher, Maxwell will not play every day against righties. Trade Jason Bourgeois and Humberto Quintero for Kevin Chapman and D'Andre Toney: Bourgeois and Quintero are both expendable replacement level guys who will earn more than a million dollars combined, whereas Tony and Chapman are interesting lottery tickets for years down the road. Sign Justin Ruggiano: We know he's going to have a breakout year, so we still sign him as a minor league free agent, and we don't trade him to Miami in May. Select Rhiner Cruz in Rule 5 Draft: He will be terrible, but he'll make the league minimum and we have a lot of bullpen spots available. Select Fernando Martinez off of waivers: He's got a reputation as a bad guy, but we're an organization that needs talent, and Martinez was the #20 prospect in baseball according to Baseball America once upon a time, and he's still only 23. Lowrie was worth more than 2.0 wins above replacement, in spite of his own injury problems. Weiland ended up hurt for almost all of 2012, but remains under contract and cheap. Mark Melancon for Jed Lowrie and Kyle Weiland : This was a no-brainer, even at the time, as Luhnow traded a good reliever for a position player and a back end starter. Steve Mitchell-US PRESSWIRE Luhnow Moves We Still Make We also assumed we had perfect knowledge of how a player would perform in 2012, and that Opening Day payroll would rise from roughly $61 million to around $70 million. Was there enough out there, given the perfect set of offseason moves, to have transformed the Astros into a contender? In a word, no.Ī couple of notes on methodology before we get going: we assumed that we would be starting with everyone in the Astros organization at the end of the 2012 season, and that we couldn't simply make any trades I wanted, so we avoided exchanges with other clubs except for those actually made by Jeff Luhnow and the Astros, since it was clear that both parties would agree to that deal. In taking a skeleton of a team like the Astros and putting them through this retrospective exercise, we can get a sense of the cheaply available talent on the free agent market, and how it actually applies to a real major-league team. By using WAR (for these purposes, we've gone with Fangraphs' implementation) and some adjustments based on playing time, and we can estimate how many wins the Astros would have had. A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the following question on Twitter: Using the power of hindsight, how much would it have taken to build the Astros into a contender this year? The idea was simple: Assign the Astros the best cheap free agent signings of last offseason where necessary (including minor-league acquisitions), keep payroll within reason (expand it by, at most, 10%), and just see how far it gets them.
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