We are very fortunate right now in Houston to have the Houston Texans, Houston Rockets, and the Houston Astros all functioning at a very high level in each of their respective sports, with some trying power well into the future. Of those three, the Houston Astros have given us the most thrills and the only titles from the last decade or so.
While they've spent the last decade functioning at the highest level in there own sport, the Astros certainly haven't been perfect. For example, the selection of Forrest Whitley with a first round pick in 2016 was not great. The Whitley saga has lasted nine years, and finally ended with a whimper of a trade last Friday, with the Astros sending Whitley to Tampa for cash.
So, it was somewhat funny, and maybe even metaphoric, when the Astros' social media team posted a "thank you" tweet for a pitcher, Whitley, who threw just over ten total innings at the MLB level in nine years with the organization. It was very odd, and a reminder that even people very good at their jobs, do strange (and sometimes severely detrimental) things.
Here are five such times, with widely varying degrees of severity, where really good Astros entities have fallen short:
5. ASTROS SOCIAL MEDIA – thanking Forrest Whitley for “everything” last Friday
Here is the aforementioned X post from the Astros' social media team, thanking Forrest Whitley for "everything":
Thank you for everything, Forrest! Wishing you the best in Tampa. pic.twitter.com/2if7VvZKrY
— Houston Astros (@astros) June 13, 2025
Scouring Whitley's Wikipedia page, "everything" includes a 50 game suspension for drug use in 2018, a Tommy John surgery in 2021, various other injuries and weight fluctuations, and a grand total of 10.2 innings pitched at the big league level. So, yeah, thanks for everything, Forrest!
4. ASTROS ORGANIZATION – throwing a “This Is Your Life” celebration for Cam Smith making the teamLook, I was really happy for Cam Smith when he made the big league club out of spring training, happy for him and happy for his family, who seem like wonderful people. Also, Smith is undoubtedly one of the most important players on the team for the next five or six seasons. That said, I felt like this production announcing he made the team, where they marched his family in, was a little over the top, and judging by the looks on some of his teammates' faces, I'm not alone:
The Astros brought in Cam Smith's family to tell him he made the Opening Day roster 🥹
(via @astros)pic.twitter.com/GOqp3WsA6x
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) March 25, 2025
3. JOSE ALTUVE – his base running blundersJose Altuve is the greatest player in the history of the Astros organization, and he's in the argument for the most popular athlete in this city's history. He is a first ballot Hall of Famer, in my opinion. He's hit for average, he's hit for power, and he's won a Gold Glove. Altuve has been elite at nearly everything as a baseball player. His one blind spot is that he routinely makes baselining gaffes that would embarrass a five year old playing tee ball. I think this tweet, from what I presume is an Astros fan, sums it up best:
Wouldn't be an Astros game without a Jose Altuve baserunning blunder
— looshin (@Thetexanshurtme) June 14, 2025
2. OWNER JIM CRANE – overseeing a GM-less Era back in February 2023, and allowing the organization to butcher free agencyLeslie Alexander and Jim Crane — those are the top two names in any debate on the "Who is the greatest owner in Houston sports history?" Alexander won two titles as the owner of the Rockets, and spent the appropriate amount of resources to keep them competitive for nearly all of his tenure. Similarly, Crane spends money and his team wins. He's made mostly great decisions as an owners which makes the few months post-James-Click-as-GM, in the winter of 2023, so utterly ridiculous. The few months between the departure of Click and the hire of Dana Brown saw a consortium of Crane, Jeff Bagwell, and Reggie Jackson dole out the worst contracts in team history — the $57 million deal for first baseman Jose Abreu, and the $34 million deal to retain reliever Rafael Montero. Just horrific.
**1. TODD KALAS and GEOFF BLUM – their odd fixation on the worthless “catch probability metric"**I will preface any criticism of Kalas and Blum by trying to make it very clear — I think they are a tremendous television broadcast team. Kalas is a chip off the old block of his Hall of Fame father, Harry Kalas, and Blum brings the perfect combination of humor and analysis. When I have to watch the Astros on a national network, I hate it. That said, the two of them have a weird fetish and go down deep rabbit holes in games about the catch probability metric, where some mechanism is able to instantaneously tell us the percentage chance that a particular catch (or non catch) should have been caught. The stat is wildly flawed, as evidenced by a Jacob Melton catch last week having its CP recalculated overnight from 15 percent to 45 percent. Sorry, any metric that swings that wildly on a single play is not valid. Yet Kalas and Blum will spend minutes on end in a broadcast slicing and dicing catch probabilities and doling out fictitious star ratings based on the numbers. Eliminating this talking point is the only thing standing between them and perfection.
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