For the first time since 2016, the Astros won’t be part of baseball’s postseason. Houston was officially eliminated from wild card contention yesterday, ending an eight-year run for the club that included two World Series titles, four AL pennants, and seven AL West crowns (plus, since it can’t be overlooked, the infamous sign-stealing scandal). The Astros won their season finale today to finish with a respectable 87-75 record, but a 3-6 record over their last nine games left Houston short of the playoffs.
The franchise doesn’t appear to be taking this near-miss lying down, as general manager Dana Brown told MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart and other reporters. The Astros are planning “a complete look at all of our operations,” with Brown saying “we’ll have a full assessment of what we’re doing in this offseason, and so we’ll take a look and really think about the entire operation.”
While teams routinely take stock in what they’re doing after every season, it will be particularly interesting to see how the Astros respond after their eight-year stretch of October success has been interrupted. This is the same franchise that parted ways with former GM James Click immediately after the 2022 World Series win, so owner Jim Crane is certainly no stranger to shake-ups even when things are seemingly going well.
Perhaps the most inevitable question is the fate of manager Joe Espada. Brown stated that Espada is “under contract” for at least 2026, providing some clarity on Espada’s status since the terms of his deal weren’t made public when Espada succeeded Dusty Baker following the 2023 campaign.
Brown stopped short of confirming Espada’s return, but said “as far as I’m concerned, Joe worked hard through this season….I haven’t sat down and gone through it yet, but from my initial thought process, Joe did a good job. He battled through all of the injuries and pressed a lot of the right buttons.”
Espada has a 175-148 record over his two years as Houston’s manager. The 2024 season saw the Astros win the AL West again, but their streak of seven consecutive ALCS appearances was ended when the Tigers pulled the upset and swept Houston in two games in the wild card round. With that early exit now followed by a playoff miss altogether, it might not be a shock if Crane decided a change was needed in the dugout, even if Espada’s overall record is quite solid.
Moving beyond the manager’s office, it isn’t out of the question that Brown himself could be feeling the heat. Crane is considered to be more hands-on than most owners in baseball operations decisions, and senior advisor and ex-Astros great Jeff Bagwell is known to have an influential voice within the organization.
Houston’s health woes were brought up multiple times by Brown, and it is hard to argue that even an average amount of injury luck would’ve greatly improved the Astros’ season. As it turned out, almost every player on the roster missed at least some time, and the Astros finished the year with a whopping 15 players on the IL. The pitching staff was particularly hit hard, and the position-player mix was finally depleted to the point of no return when Jeremy Pena and Yordan Alvarez were sidelined in late September. In Alvarez’s case, his ankle sprain came after he’d already missed close to four months recovering from a finger fracture.
“Losing Yordan and Peña for those last three series is what I really feel like hurt us,” Brown said, and the health issues as a whole were his “biggest frustration” with the 2025 campaign. “There’s no magic bullet. There’s nothing to point to to say, ’Oh, we got these many injuries because of this.’ We had freak accidents that happened. There’s been multiple reasons why we had a lot of injuries.”
It could be that the Astros will view their health problems as a reason to hold off on wholesale changes this winter, if there’s a sense that fewer injuries will just naturally mean better results next year. However, some of those injuries (i.e. multiple pitchers who underwent UCL-related surgeries) will linger into 2026 or even beyond, and there’s also the natural concern over how well the veteran core can continue to hold up. Returning to the pitching, longtime staff stalwart Framber Valdez is heading for free agency, so that represents another rotation hole and a lot of innings that will need to be filled if Valdez isn’t retained.