Jim Crane is the Pivotal Man Steering the Astros at the Crossroads

The owner has put himself at the top of the Astros decision making apparatus. That is especially important as the team reaches a crossroads in its player development and payroll fronts.

From December 20, 2011 until sometime in the 2022 season, the Astros front office was defined by—and its decisions made by—its general managers.

This period starts on December 20, 2011 because that is the date when new owner Jim Crane hired Jeff Luhnow as his general manager. For the next eight seasons, the Astros were defined by the choices and methods of Luhnow and his front office: the choice to tank in the early part of the decade in an effort to build up draft capital; the deep embrace of analytics; the early adoption new technology like high speed cameras; and the integration of technology into minor league coaching.

Crane was obviously a key decision maker, but his decision was primary to let Luhnow and his front office innovate and build the team. Luhnow had no restrictions from Crane. Literally.

“Normally when you take these jobs you have a lot of constraints; keep this manager, do this, do that. I asked Jim Crane, ‘What are my constraints if I take this job?’ He ripped out a blank piece of paper of the pad he was holding.”

—Jeff Luhnow. On the Wharton Moneyball Post Game Podcast

Crane fired Luhnow in January 2020 for failing to stop the sign stealing system and replaced him with James Click. For 2020 and 2021, little seemed to change. Click mostly steered the front office in a similar manner to Luhnow, making modest changes to both the roster and the front office while maintaining a similar set of players and integrating young stars developed in the Astros farm system into the major league lineup.

But things changed for the Astros sometime in 2022. We do not know the exact date, but we do know that at some point in 2022, Jim Crane decided that he was not happy with James Click and his front office.

Click’s contract expired at the end of that season, and Crane chose not to begin renewal negotiations until after it expired, and then offered Click only a 1-year contract. Click took that as a sign that he would be without power or a future in the Astros organization and declined Crane’s offer. While Click technically turned down a contract offer, anyone reading between the lines could see that Crane did not want Click as his general manager.

It is still unclear a year and a half later why Crane did not want Click as his general manager. It certainly was not on-field performance…the 2022 team won 106 games and went 11-2 in the playoffs, winning the World Series. There is no bit of reported scuttlebutt has come out since that explains why Click was difficult to work with. No report that he got into deep arguments or was pushing for changes that others didn’t want. There isn’t even a report that he would leave the toilet seat up.

Crane Has Made Himself the Pivotal Man in the Front Office

In the end, it doesn’t much matter why Crane ran off Click. At this point, the consequences of that decision are much more important. That decision has made Jim Crane—for the first time in his ownership of the club—the most important decision maker in the Astros front office.

He is the pivotal man for the Astros.

Obviously, Crane is not the only important decision maker in the Astros front office. Crane hired Dana Brown at the end of the 2022-23 offseason, and Brown has started to reshape the front office to his liking, most notably with the promotion of Gavin Dickey to Assistant General Manager where he joins holdovers Andrew Ball (hired to the AGM job by Click) and Charles Cook (promoted to the AGM job by Crane). Notably, Brown seems to have made the decision to hire Joe Espada as Dusty Baker’s replacement as manager, and I argued that it showed Brown gaining influence in the Astros decision making process.

But if we look at the major personnel moves the Astros have made over the past thirteen months, they show the strong influence of Jim Crane. At the trade deadline, the team re-acquired Justin Verlander in a deal that saved Crane money from if he had signed him as a free agent in the offseason, but at the cost of two of the team’s top prospects. Verlander is a personal friend of Crane’s and his golf buddy. Owners do not usually get involved in trade negotiations, but reading through the lines leads to a strong suspicion that Crane was the driving force behind this deal.

In January, the team signed Josh Hader to be their closer. Signing Crane required the team to go over the luxury tax threshold and most likely over the team’s 2023 budgeted payroll. These are the type of deals that have owners at the center. They have to approve such deals either because they cut into profits.

The team has signed two players to contract extensions since Brown took over as GM—Cristian Javier and Jose Altuve. But As I noted in analyzing both deals, they bore the hallmarks of previous deals signed by Crane across all three of his general managers. Both also followed the “five year rule.” Crane has never signed a contract that covers more than five free agent seasons for a player.

That Crane-imposed rule is also important because it seems to explain some of the moves the front office has not made—namely signing Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, or Framber Valdez to contract extensions. All three likely expect to get longer contracts than that when they test free agency.

That the five year rule seems to have been in place for years in an indication that as much as Luhnow seemed to be the dominant force in the Astros front office for years, Crane was a key decision-maker. That should not be surprising; all owners are.

But it’s also clear that Crane is more central to the Astros decision making since Click left the front office. And that is different from the first dozen years of Crane’s ownership of the team.

After years of the Astros key decison maker being their general manager, Jim Crane has become the team’s key decision maker over the last two seasons.

The Astros at the Crossroads

For fans of a baseball team, it is always important to understand who is making the decisions for their team. But for us Astros fans, it is especially important at this moment.

The Astros are approaching a crossroads. It’s been the watchword in Chandler Rome’s coverage of the team this offseason at The Athletic.

In previewing the offseason, he wrote that the Astros had “a roster to fortify and a championship window to widen. Outside publications consider [their] farm system one of the worst in the sport. Two franchise cornerstones are scheduled to enter free agency after this season. Two more homegrown standouts are eligible after the next one.”

Rome continued “Neither of [Brown’s] two predecessors encountered this sort of crossroads.”

The crossroads involves potentially “keeping the core intact…[to address questions] about the sustainability of Houston’s success, especially as aging creeps into its core and attrition is expected.” Or it could involve a “new core crystalizing” to meet “massive expectations” with those signed to long-term contract, primarily Altuve and Yordan Alvarez, “the face of it.”

The other ways to address the crossroads are the ways that Jim Crane has already done. One is to go for it in the 2024 season. After the Verlander trade last July, I wrote “The front office had a number of choices on how to deal with the team’s post 2024 future and today staked out a clear path. It’s all in on 2023 and 2024 and will figure out 2025 at a later date.”

The Astros dealt away the prospect most likely to replace some of its upcoming free agents in the starting lineup in Drew Gilbert. But they got their Game 1 starter for their 2023 playoff run. The hope is a healthy Verlander contributes to another successful October run in 2024 while Gilbert will have just made his major league debut.

The other possibility is to spend more money, like we saw with the Josh Hader signing. It is worth noting that the Hader signing is also primarily about winning in 2024 at the expense of the future (in this case, the two draft picks the Astros must forfeit for signing such a large free agent). It’s another all-in move.

But just as importantly, signing Hader put the Astros above the luxury tax threshold. The Astros have only done this once before in their history in the 2020 season.¹ But the Astros reduced their payroll in 2021 to stay out of the tax. The Hader signing raises the potential that Crane will authorize another above the tax payroll in 2025.

Rome also wrote about this response to the crossroads.

“Jim Crane approached the crossroads and went to a place he never had. His tendencies for fiscal restraint and avoiding free agency are gone in favor of another World Series pursuit with a core that may not be intact much longer…Houston’s five-year, $95 million agreement with free-agent closer Josh Hader shattered every part of Crane’s previous standard operating procedures, but projected the win-now mentality he’s maintained throughout the team’s golden era.”

A New Era of Crane’s Ownership

Jim Crane’s ownership of the Astros started with the tank, as the Astros demurred from chasing extra wins to focus on player development in his early years. It lead to the rise, when the Astros entered their golden era. Since 2020, the Astros have been in a maintenance phase—maintenance to stay at the top is still maintenance.

Each of these eras has been steered primarily by the team’s general manager. Luhnow managed the tank and the climb, as his unorthodox methods proved effective not only in developing players from inside the Astros system to become stars, but also in identifying players from other organizations who could contribute heavily in Houston. In his brief time as GM, James Click showed an ability to evaluate AAA players without huge prospect pedigree and identify those ready to be major leaguers, and those he could trade for future value.

The future is unknowable, so we do not know where the Astros are headed in the near future. But it seems that we do know who is at the helm. Jim Crane has made himself the pivotal man in the Astros decision making apparatus. Dana Brown is obviously important, and Crane and Brown have the assistance of an entire front office of talented baseball executives.

But the next era of Astros baseball will be defined primarily by where Jim Crane wants to take it. In fact, he’s already starting to define it.

1. Major League Baseball ended up suspending luxury tax payments in the 2020 season as part of its reaction to…well, you remember, no matter how many times you try to forget 2020.