The Rebuild Review: What Do Rebuilding Trades Look Like, and What Does That Say About the Astros' 2026 Deadline Plans?

Editor-Theo’s Note: When I started work on this piece, the question of “should the Astros sell at the deadline” was looking a little more open-ended. However, while that question is looking fairly resolved now, this piece is just as much a case study on the history and past successes of MLB teams doing total tear-downs and roster rebuilds. It’s definitely influenced my understanding of the process, and I think it’s worth sharing those results.

Over the last few years, I’ve been chipping away at a longer, deeper look at how team rebuilding goes, both during the rebuilding process itself and in the return to success period. It started as a look at the Orioles, with a front office full of Astros alumni now trying to repeat that magic a second time, then expanded to include the Braves as a sort of counterpoint who both mirrored and contrasted the Orioles and the Astros.

The project slowed down a little as I expanded the scope, to get a wider view of the options. I still want to finish that part someday; I have a whole bunch of data that I’ve collected, and while it can be a little overwhelming to sift through and distill into meaningful narratives and strategies (not to mention balancing all of that against everything else in life), I think the information there is useful.

However, a useful thing I think I can talk about from all of this is one specific slice of the rebuilding process! At the time I’m writing this, the trade deadline is rapidly approaching, and the Astros sit in a strange place. They’ve been carrying a losing record most of the season, and even now, are hovering around .500 while being outscored on the year… but it’s been a disappointing year across the board in the American League too, and they’re still very much in the thick of the playoff race

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“Should the team go for it, or sell off and start a rebuild?” has been a prevalent question leading up to the trade deadline, and the answer right now seems to be “whatever facilitates making a playoff run this year”. There are of course fair questions about this, though; the team is unbalanced to say the least, with a Yordan Alvarez-heavy top covering up for a lot of holes in the roster. The team’s stash of prospects is relatively light too, which complicates attempts to patch up holes. And in contrast, there are some attractive pieces that the team could move for prospects: Christian Vázquez and Bryan Abreu are free agents after the season, while Christian Walker, Jeremy Peña, and Isaac Paredes will all hit free agency the year after (among others). And if you’re punting on next year too, you may as well also listen to offers on Hunter Brown and Yordan, since they’re hitting free agency after the 2028 season and will likely command a hefty return…

Up front, I will admit that I am personally against that, even before getting into the results of this study. The point of baseball is to win championships, and committing to a hard rebuild when you’re one game out of a playoff spot and carrying a potential Triple Crown winner feels like deliberately avoiding the whole reason for playing. I can see scenarios where this might make more sense, like from the back of a more crowded playoff chase, or following a spate of major injuries. The Astros are a middling roster with weak spots, but in a year where that describes the entire AL (and frankly, I’m not sure that won’t be the case next year, either). They’ve been outrunning a disastrous April (.308 winning percentage) as more and more players returned from injuries, so why not try and ride that success?

All that said… I do understand the thinking behind proposing a rebuild. The parts of a middling roster could turn into a juggernaut down the line, with good planning and some luck, and the Astros have ridden a similar process to success in the past. So, since I have all that rebuilding data, why not put it to good use? What might the Astros be forgoing by not selling off their stars on expiring contracts? How much does trading those players for prospects contribute to future success?

The 2025 Orioles and Braves: What Happens After the Rebuild? (The Rebuild Review)

I’ve wanted to revisit some ideas about big rebuilds and what comes next, so I started looking into it around the All-Star Break. However, the process sort of spiraled into something bigger, and as it went on, I realized that the first half of the article was a little more timely than the back-half. So rather than finish the whole thing and then start making decisions on publishing and where to divide it, I made the call to just preemptively split it up and publish the first part before it got too out-of-date, while still working on the back-half. As a result, I can’t really promise when Part 2 will be coming just yet, but it will hopefully be soon.

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Over the last few seasons, I’ve been maintaining something of a series where I look at rebuilding teams. The main focus initially was comparing the complete teardown and rebuild of the circa-2020 Orioles with the one pulled off by the early-2010s Astros, since there were a lot of similarities in the two (including a shared lineage of personnel). A few other rebuilds also got mentioned over the course of those articles, but I eventually got around to a piece centered around the Braves’ retooling as a contrasting method. Ever since then, I’ve had a sort of mental connection between all of them.

The last piece in that series came over two years, right at the start of the 2023 season, and that looked like the end of things. The Orioles would roar out to a division title (their first since 2014) and 101 wins (their first 100-win season since 1980). The only team ahead of them was that Braves team, who won 104 games and looked to be moving into the peak years of their dynasty following their 2021 title.*

*Also, all stats in this piece are going to be from Baseball-Reference or Fangraphs.

If that had been the end, it would have been a satisfying conclusion to a long process. The Orioles’ rebuild finally paid off, the Braves’ kicked into high gear, the end. 2024 didn’t go quite as smoothly for either team, as both fell to second in their division and around the 90 win mark. But hey, there’s always some randomness over 162 games and following up a 100-win season can be hard. The important thing was that they made it back to the playoffs. And sure, those playoff runs ended poorly, but again, that happens sometimes. Both of them would be well equipped to try and come back the next year in 2025…

You almost certainly know how that’s gone so far. Those 2024 swoons look less like bad-luck blips and more like omens for what was to come. At the 2025 All-Star Break, the two had near-identical records (43-52 for Baltimore, 42-53 for Atlanta) and were both around a dozen games out of the division, with only the faintest hopes of a second-half comeback. It’s difficult to decide which one is the bigger disappointment. 

The Rebuild Review: Comparing and Contrasting the Braves' Rebuild

Last year while I was writing my article on the Orioles' Trade Deadline, I dug up an older piece of mine with an interesting opinion that I wanted to dig into a little bit when I had more time. I ended up sort of looking into it at the end of the 2022 season, and slowly plugging away at it in between playoff stuff and Hall of Fame stuff and all of the other offseason writings that I did. I wanted to post it a little earlier in the offseason, but ended up having to reflect on some of it a little more and then push it back. I think it’s finally to a good place though, and getting it up before the start of the season seems like a good idea!

It’s sort of a companion piece to that mini-series I did last year looking at the Orioles’ Rebuild, this time approaching the question from a different angle. For background, in the back-half of the 2010s, it seemed like there were a lot of teams who were trying to copy off the Astros’ and Cubs’ strategies of a full teardown and rebuild, and I thought in the moment that maybe some of those decisions were a little premature; the Astros and Cubs were notably devoid of talent in both the majors and minors prior to their complete rebuilds.

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I feel like that gets lost in a lot of these discussions on “tanking”; go back and look at those 2010 and 2011 Cubs and Astros teams. Both had spent several years stuck in neutral at the bottom of the NL Central. The 2011 Astros’ best players were a pair of very-good-but-not-great outfielders (Hunter Pence and Michael Bourn) who were a year and a half from free agency, and another 35-year-old “left fielder” who really looked like he should have been at first base (Carlos Lee). The Cubs, meanwhile, were relying on their 21-year-old shortstop Starlin Castro to bolster their core of… 33-year-old corner infielders Carlos Peña and Aramis Ramirez. Their aces on these teams were Brett Myers and Matt Garza, respectively.

Those cores would maybe barely work, were all those players at their peaks, with very strong supporting casts and the potential for star prospects to bolster them down the stretch. None of that describes the rest of those teams, which were thin at the top and regularly ranked in the bottom third of Farm System rankings (with the Astros even picking up several last place finishes). Their drafting and player development was atrocious, Houston’s especially; Baseball-Reference’s has the Astros’ first round draft picks from 1999 to 2009 worth a combined 11.9 WAR for their careers, a number overwhelming supported by Jason Castro’s 12.4 total (plus Jordan Lyles’s 1.0 mark last season, the third-best year of his career).* Feel free to do the math on everyone else there, it’s pretty bad! That wasn’t the only factor in their lack of success obviously, but it’s a pretty good representation of the larger failure going on.

*The Cubs during that stretch look a lot less disastrous; it still wasn’t fantastic, but other clubs with similar records could turn it into strong minor league systems, with things like successful later picks, international signings, trades, or player development. The Cubs… did not do any of that.

All of that is to say: when the Cubs and Astros decided to do their total teardowns, there was a very clear logic behind it. Long gone were the early-to-mid 2000s glory days, of Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt and Derrek Lee and Carlos Zambrano, and the window on the late-2000s inglorious days of Carlos Peña and Carlos Lee seemed to be closing rapidly. But despite how much the teams sold off, every trade made sense; most pieces being sent out were some combination of aging, not great, or rapidly nearing free agency on a bad team. It’s part of why the 2018 Orioles made sense following their path, given their atrocious record, neglected minor league rosters, and a major league roster consisting of Manny Machado (in his final season before free agency) and a bunch of question marks.

However, that scenario did not describe every team going for a rebuild in subsequent years, and I think my general sense that too many teams in the late 2010s were going for that strategy has held up. Sure, some of them fit that Astros/Cubs mold: for instance, the Phillies under Ruben Amaro Jr. had been ineptly patching an aging roster for years up until 2015, and it had all fallen apart. Or the Tigers, who had seen a lot of their roster suddenly start to look very old come 2017. You’re always going to have a few cases like that, teams that went all-in on an aging core or something and stretched themselves thin (and sometimes it even works, like with the 2019 Nationals!).

But that clearly couldn’t describe over 20% of the league, like I called out in that original 2018 piece that I linked to, especially not when teams with win totals in the high-80s could still be in playoff contention (in fact, 2017 had just seen Wild Card teams with 87 and 85 wins). And I was arguably even playing it safe and just going with teams that were unambiguously already in the middle of a rebuild, and not teams that were just about to enter one (like the Orioles and Rangers), or the more muddled edge cases (like the Pirates and Royals).

Take the Marlins for instance, who famously traded a stellar young outfield of Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and Marcell Ozuna rather than do literally anything to reinforce that core beyond hoping their draft pick lottery tickets all suddenly became All-Stars at once. Or the White Sox, who dealt their two top, all-star level starters rather than bump up their middle-of-the-pack payroll even slightly while playing in baseball’s weakest division.

But there’s one team from that group that stood out. All of the teams I called out back then finished 2018 in a manner exactly as uninspiring as predicted… except for the Braves. And of course, ignoring the eventual end result of the 2021 World Series and looking only at where things stood at that moment, I absolutely understand why I included the Braves here.

Going into the 2014 season, the Braves were coming off of four straight seasons where they averaged 92.5 wins and made the playoffs three of four times. They had a young, homegrown core of stars, and things looked bright. Sure, their playoff runs had been short (two Division Series losses and one Wild Card Game loss), but October is pretty random, so just making it to the playoffs seemed like the thing to focus on.

And then, they mildly underperformed in 2014, going 79-83. Granted, that was still second in the middling NL East, and they still had their young core, so it wasn’t hard to predict a possible rebound. Except… Atlanta didn’t do that. Instead, they sold off a ton of talent, including Jason Heyward, Justin Upton, Craig Kimbrel, and Evan Gattis. It might be easy to forget given that we’re nearly a decade removed at this point, but back in 2014, that was half of their eight best players (by Baseball-Reference WAR), and they ranged in age from 27 (Gattis) to 24 (Heyward). The team took a corresponding tumble, going 67-95 in 2015.