The Launch Angle's 2026 Houston Astros Predictions!

I wrote up my predictions for the Astros in 2026 as part of The Launch Angle's Season Preview. I'm adding my part here for posterity, but definitely go check the full thing at to see where the group consensus lands! This season's predictions are definitely the most polarizing one in at least a decade, so there's a lot to cover. And if you're an Astros fan, definitely check out The Launch Angle this year!


I feel like I’ve seen a lot of doom and gloom around predictions for the Astros in 2026. And I don’t know that I can blame it all; the 2025 team missed the postseason for the first time since 2016, suffered from a rash of bad luck along the way, and in the offseason lost long-time ace Framber Valdez, continuing a multi-year run of high-profile free agency departures.

And yet… I feel like it’s important to remember that somehow, the 2025 team wasn’t nearly as much of a disaster as it felt like at times. In last year’s preseason predictions, I guessed that the squad would finish with an 88-74 record, good for second place in the AL West and a Wild Card spot. The end result was instead 77-75, good for second place in the AL West and missing out on the last Wild Card spot by a tiebreaker. That one game difference was incredibly consequential, but this team was more or less where I expected.

Built with Kit

Of course, how the 2025 team got to that end point was extremely unusual. If I had known going into the year that Yordan Alvarez would miss over 110 games (not to mention his as poorly as he did in the first few weeks of the season), that Yainer Diaz would be a below-average hitter, that Jose Altuve would struggle in the outfield, that Christian Walker would take several months to heat up, that Chas McCormick would play so poorly that he would get demoted, that Framber would somehow go on a protracted meltdown to close out the season, that Josh Hader would go down at a critical point, that Lance McCullers Jr. would return from injury looking totally spent but still rack up substantial innings anyway, that the rest of the rotation as a whole would continue to get generally bad luck on the injury front… Frankly, that all sounds like a disaster scenario taken together. I think if you had just told me the Yordan tidbit prior to my 2025 prediction, I would have knocked a full 5 wins off my estimate, let alone any of the other news.

And I think that’s why I… actually feel somewhat optimistic about 2026? Don’t get me wrong, this version of the team is still a far cry from the 2022 Championship team. But taking a team that missed something like 18 Wins Above Replacement due to injuries* (far ahead of anyone else) all the way to the brink of the playoffs feels like a big deal, and it provides a very obvious answer to the question “where will your potential improvement in 2026 come from?” Even mediocre injury luck in 2026 would be a huge step up over what the team got in 2025, and hopefully the new medical team can manage that.

The Astros Paid a Steep Price at the Trade Deadline, but Their Recent Prospect Development Successes Might Offset Those Losses

I started looking at a question several weeks ago, just out of curiosity. It was a complicated question, and I don’t know that I found a conclusive answer; but then, it was a tough question, and I was hardly the first person to take a stab at it. If nothing else, I at least found a lot of interesting bits of trivia, and it seemed like it would maybe be interesting to write about them… except I still never really found a central hook to build it all around.

See, my basic question was: Have the Astros been doing a better-than-expected job at converting young prospects into useful big leaguers lately? I mean, it’s an interesting question, but there weren’t any factors making it especially pressing to sort through.

And then, we had the trade deadline, with the Astros sending away two players who were very likely their top prospects (Drew Gilbert and Ryan Clifford) in order to re-acquire Justin Verlander from the Mets. This came just days after sending away Korey Lee, another prospect with some hype behind him, in order to re-acquire Kendall Graveman. As you might figure, those have taken a toll on a farm system that was already regarded as one of the weakest in the majors.

There’s a lot going on here; losing big prospects is tough, especially when things are already thin. And part of that is the limitless potential of young players; of course they’ll all succeed, and keep your team competitive indefinitely through several cost-effective, All-Star quality years. Until they try and fail (a few times), there really isn’t a reason for fans to think otherwise (unless they like being pessimistic, or something).

Built with ConvertKit

Of course, in reality, a lot of prospects fail, and a key reason to have a good farm system is to trade bits of it for established players. In fact, as I sit here on the evening of the Trade Deadline (writing this intro, at least), I began the day thinking that I would actually be working on something to that effect, a sort of capstone on my series comparing the Orioles’ and Astros’ rebuilds. In fact, I had this big thing planned, where I would point out how weird it was that a second Mike Elias-guided team with a deep farm system acquired a reigning Cy Young runner-up with two and a half years of control left from an underperforming AL Central team, but then the White Sox just held on to Dylan Cease.

But actually, that 2017 Justin Verlander trade isn’t a bad point of comparison, for those feeling the doom-and-gloom side of things right now. In exchange for those stellar 2017 to 2019 season (all that was guaranteed when they acquired him), the Astros gave up three prospects for JV, two who were generally considered top 100 prospects and another who would go on to play in the Futures Game. Except that, as of 2023, Franklin Perez is 25 and still hasn’t made it to AAA, Daz Cameron is on the Orioles’ AAA team after Detroit waived him last November, and Jake Rogers (the least-heralded of the trio at the time) is finally, in his third season in the Majors, looking like he can be an average MLB catcher.

One Last 2022 Postseason Trivia: Most Clutch Players of This Year's Playoffs

After a long series of trivia articles and quizzes that spanned the MLB Playoffs (you can see a decent summary of them all in my last article, the Best Active Players Without a World Series write-up, or just by browsing the site’s Sporcle tag), I have my final big trivia piece, one tying together all of this year’s big games and my new collection of Win Probability Data: Can you name the Most Clutch Players of the 2022 MLB Playoffs?

I wanted to do something unique as a sort of wrap up to the playoffs, something that took at the last month of games with a wide-angle lens, covering every series and team involved. I thought about just taking the top however-many players over the entire postseason at first, but was worried it might bias a little too heavily towards teams that played more games.

In truth, the effect wasn’t as overwhelming as I thought it might be, but it was still definitely present; both the top twenty hitters and pitchers list were about half Astros and Phillies, with another quarter or more coming from the Padres and either the Yankees (hitters) or Guardians (pitchers). So I decided to try a few other formats.

What I ended up settling on instead was a method that looked at the top performing hitter and pitcher for each team across every single round they played in (as well as an overall leader, for teams that played in more than one). There actually wound up being some decent overlap with the other method anyway, with the biggest change generally being a wider breadth of teams represented at the cost of losing lower-performing answers from teams with a lot of representatives (for example, the Astros and Phillies losing their fourth and fifth options). That didn’t seem like too big of a deal, to me.

And on top of that, I think there’s something to be said for the way this method separates each individual series out, giving you an almost chronological approach to the month and serving as a better reminder of everything that happened. Sure, there are a few weirder answers (for example, the Mariners’ ALDS hitter wound up leading the team with exactly 0.0 WPA; or I would bet the Cardinals’ position player answer trips up most people), but even in the shorter, earlier rounds where you might have forgotten the highlights, guessing a team’s stars is generally a strong fallback strategy. And hey, you might even know some of the answers here already, if you played the updated version (or read the update notes last time) of my Best Postseasons by Hitters or Best Postseason by Pitchers quizzes!

I suppose this is a type of quiz that I could also make for past playoffs, at least throughout the Wild Card Era. I still have all the data, after all. And maybe I will, if this new quiz really takes off among Sporcle users. But for now, it’s probably just going to be a one-off, a sort of memento to remember the 2022 postseason. I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up years down the line (although maybe I’ll be surprised). But for now, this will probably be the end of my 2022 Postseason Trivia Quizzes. Thank you for sticking with me throughout it all!