BALTIMORE — Sometimes, an incomplete grade is just that.
Red ink can fill the margins, pointing out the pupil’s many failings, yet it’s possible to understand that this is a rough draft and not, hopefully, the final product.
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That concept has been increasingly harder to grasp across Major League Baseball in the past 72 hours.
Alex Cora is out in Boston, the Red Sox deeming a 10-17 start cracking open a window to fire their highly respected manager, who indeed needed less than 24 hours to find another job offer.
That came from Philadelphia, as club president Dave Dombrowski flirted with Cora even as his own manager, Rob Thomson, skippered the club Sunday in Atlanta. Nothing personal, Thomson said after he, too, was fired. Just an underachieving $283 million club needing a scapegoat.
That brings us to Houston, where a once-perennial playoff club has sputtered to an 11-19 start, with both a manager, Joe Espada, and a general manager, Dana Brown, working without contracts this season.
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It is natural to wonder if the Astros will be the next to issue a pink slip to their manager. Yet as Brown noted to USA TODAY Sports: It is very early.
And there is an alternate reality the Astros imagine themselves experiencing this season.
“I know there’s a lot of talent in this room. There’s a hundred wins in this clubhouse right now,” says first baseman Christian Walker.
Crazy? Maybe.
Yet as the managerial death watch spreads from coast to coast, assigning culpability to the Astros’ last-place showing illustrates how complicated that can be.
An MVP, and a roster on the IL
Cora and Thomson’s dismissals hit home particularly for Espada, who counts both of them as good friends. Cora is a fellow Puerto Rican, and Espada was on the New York Yankees staff with Thomson from 2015-2017.
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“Just good people,” he says.
Both Cora and Thomson did not deal with the litany of injuries Espada’s faced: Fifteen Astros are on the injured list. Espada’s pregame comments as the Astros began a six-game road trip included the detail that closer Josh Hader faced shortstop Jeremy Peña in live batting practice back in Houston.
Certainly, those guys would help the squad right now.
So, too, would starting pitchers Hunter Brown and, perhaps, Tatsuya Imai, who made a rehab start in Class AAA and should return soon, hopefully for the Astros as sound of mind as body. Brown, who finished third in AL Cy Young voting last year, could return by June as he recovers from a right shoulder strain.
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Yet the Astros do have the planet’s greatest hitter at the moment on their side.
Yordan Alvarez has rebounded from an injury-plagued season with what might prove to be his greatest one yet, among the league leaders in homers (11) and RBI (26), and leading the majors in OPS (1.199). Carlos Correa – Astros version 2.0 – is showing well thus far and Walker has continued a resurgence that began in the second half of 2025, with seven homers and a .299 average.
Yet the lineup hollows out in the bottom half. On Tuesday, April 28, the Astros gave Kai-Wei Teng the first start of his career, and he did well to complete three innings with just two runs given up.
The guys in the infirmary are undoubtedly missed.
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“That’s one of the hardest parts of going on the IL, whether you’re the guy getting hurt or you’re trying to hold the ship steady until these guys come back – it’s adversity,” says Walker. “I’ve had enough time on the IL in my career to know you feel bad. Whether out of your control or in your control.
“You feel like there’s something more you could do to help the team. And it’s not true – injuries are a part of what we do.”
Little help on the farm
In a perfect world, the Astros would have the depth to backfill those holes. Yet it’s been a long time since the club had so many good players in its system, it didn’t know what to do with them: Talents like Teoscar Hernández, Ramon Laureano, J.D. Davis and Joe Musgrove went on to become starters, or stars, somewhere else.
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But that was more than one front-office regime ago. Mike Elias, the club’s scouting director who laid the groundwork for their talent overload in their glory years is now the GM in Baltimore.
Eight consecutive playoff appearances means an awful lot of drafting at the back of the first round, with a diminished bonus pool. Yet after Elias’s 2018 departure and the 2020 firing of former GM Jeff Luhnow as the club’s sign-stealing scandal was revealed, the groups that followed have not produced talent like their peers.
From 2019 through 2024, Astros drafts yielded 20 major leaguers – but 11 of them have produced negative Wins Above Replacement. Brown, the ace currently on the IL, has produced a 10.5 WAR, the only one higher than a 1.2 WAR.
The other 19 have combined for -0.4 WAR.
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That pales in comparison to clubs like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, who like the Astros were perennial playoff contenders (the Yankees missed in 2023).
The Dodgers produced 17 major leaguers, three fewer than Houston, but seven are at least one win above replacement and they’ve totaled 19.5 WAR. Homegrown arms like Emmet Sheehan and Justin Wrobleski have fortified a rotation that’s also benefited from their huge spending on aces like Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
As for the Yankees? There are 17 major leaguers in their recent draftees totaling 36.8 WAR, including a burgeoning ace, Cam Schlittler, drafted in the seventh round and slugger Ben Rice, picked in the 12th round in 2021.
Not that the story’s been totally written for all those Astros draftees.
Houston Astros manager Joe Espada looks out at the field before the start of a game against the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards on April 28, 2026.
‘Just gotta weather the storm’
Brice Matthews, an area kid from Humble, Texas, was picked 28th overall out of Nebraska in 2023. He had a 13-game cameo in 2025, but now, with center fielder Jake Myers ailing, has been getting regular starts in center and left. He brought six hits in 44 at-bats – a .136 average, a .224 OBP – into Tuesday’s series opener at Baltimore.
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He proceeded to open eyes, tallying a career-best three hits and lashing a 97-mph Shane Baz fastball 387 feet to the opposite field for a home run that halved the Astros’ deficit.
They’d eventually lose, 5-3, but modest steps forward can occasionally lead to better days.
“This was something I always thought I could do. It wasn’t a surprise for me,” says Matthews. “Honestly, I feel like I could do it each and every night.
“But it’s baseball. It’s not going to go your way each and every night. You just have to keep competing.”
Which is what Espada and Co. will do. His first year as manager started disastrously, with a 12-24 record in his first 36 games. That club eventually figured it out, buoyed by the subtraction of slumping slugger Jose Abreu in June, and once again won the AL West.
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This time around, the division is better. The pitching is a little thinner. Stalwart Jose Altuve turns 36 in a week. The standings are what they are.
“Just quantifying people’s worth and all that on just a record can be tough sometimes,” says Walker. “There’s a lot that goes into it. You ask the players, it’s on us. You ask a coach, they feel like they need to be doing better in some ways to prepare us.
“Everybody wants to be accountable. I think the reality is, fan bases get impatient and feeling like you’re going out and losing every night can be hard to swallow.
“The players feel like, it’s just a matter of time. It’s coming. We just gotta weather the storm. But I guess the optics of that can be tricky sometimes.”
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A couple years ago, the tincture of time proved restorative and the Astros eventually sprayed champagne. Cora and Thomson didn’t get that luxury, not this year.
What the Astros do have is 132 games, and an apparent aversion to panic.
“I do wish, sometimes, everybody seeing the game of baseball could take the long approach,” says Walker. “We play 162 games for a reason.
“And I think that matters.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Astros remain optimistic despite sitting last in the AL West
Read the full article here