Jim Crane's Bad Year

A year after running off James Click, owner Jim Crane remails the key baseball decision maker for the Astros, despite hiring Dana Brown as GM. The first year under this arrangement did not go well.

At the trade deadline in 2022, James Click worked out a deal to address a hole in the Astros lineup at designated hitter/left field by acquiring slugging catcher Willson Contreras from the Cubs in exchange for Jose Urquidy. On advice from manager Dusty Baker, Jim Crane vetoed the deal, forcing Click to look elsewhere for help at designated hitter (Trey Mancini) and backup catcher (Christian Vazquez).

With hindsight, we know the deal would have had little impact on the fortunes of the 2022 Astros. The team was so far ahead in the American League that no deadline deal could have cost the team the 16 games by which it won the division and the seven games by which it outpaced the Yankees for home field advantage in the playoffs.

The team rampaged through the playoffs thanks to its dominant pitching staff. But Urquidy contributed almost not at all to those efforts—he threw only three mopup innings in the blowout loss to the Phillies in Game 3 of the World Series. The Astros offense was modest during the playoff run, and Mancini in a deep slump (1 for 21 in the playoffs). Contreras could only have helped the run scoring efforts at designated hitter, and then would have been a free agent after the season.

If the vetoed Urquidy-for-Contreras deal is not important to the 2022 Astros, it is important to understand because it shows an inflection point in the thinking of owner Jim Crane. He had decided to listen less to his analytically inclined general manager and instead follow his own counsel. After years of letting his general managers be the dominant voice in his front office, Jim Crane decided to be the leading voice in his front office.

The results of this choice have been mostly, but not universally, harmful over the following 15 months. The Astros front office has made a series of mostly poor decisions that hampered the team’s efforts on the field in 2023. And pretty much all of the blame for that falls at the feet of Jim Crane.

I’ll examine Crane’s decisions below—which are mostly bad but have some clear highlights. Then I’ll try to explain what effects they will have for the future and assess whether Crane will continue to dominate the baseball decision-making of his team.

Crane’s Bad Decisions

The vetoed Urquidy-for-Contreras deal was reported the day after the World Series victory. Six days later, the Astros announced that James Click would not be signed to a new contract and that they would be searching for a new general manager. The choice to veto the trade signaled that Crane was listening less to Click and presaged his exit. The article reporting the vetoed trade, written by Jeff Passan of ESPN, also noted that “new voices, such as Astros Hall of Fame first baseman Jeff Bagwell, grew in prominence.” Another important voice in Jim Crane’s ear has been another Hall of Famer, Reggie Jackson.

In discussing the decision to jettison Click, I wrote that “this is a short-sighed and self-centered decision by Crane that has the potential to harm the long-term future of the Astros.” That holds up 12 months later.

Crane knows less about baseball operations than does Click, his replacement Dana Brown, or pretty much every other even modest level front office executive. He is relying on advice from two people who until 2023 had never worked in any serious way in baseball operations. Crane had the option to step back and let the people who know baseball best run his baseball operations department. He did not choose to do that last offseason, and the best evidence indicates he has continued to be the loudest and final voice in the team’s baseball decisions.

After the team and Click “parted ways,” Crane elected not to appoint an interim GM to run his offseason or quickly try to hire a GM to run the Astros offseason. Heck, he could have fired Click back in August—since winning the World Series wouldn’t do it, we can safely say there was nothing Click could have done to save his job—and conduct his GM search toward the end of the season so his new GM would be ready to run the Astros offseason.

Instead, Crane put himself in charge of baseball operations for the 2022-23 offseason. In addition to getting rid of Click, he also fired Scott Powers, an assistant general manager who is rumored to have taken poorly to Crane vetoing the Urquidy-for-Contreras trade. The team’s top assistant general manager—Pete Putila—had left the Astros right before the playoffs to make a lateral move to be the #2 man in the Giants front office—a curious move which signaled that things were amiss in the Astros front office.

Crane elevated two veteran members of the front office—Bill Firkus and other guy—to assistant general mangers. This was another curious move, as it would not allow his new general manager—whenever he was hired to identify the people who worked best with him for the job.

Owner Jim Crane has made himself the indispensable man in the Astros baseball decision making process. It has not gone well.

Crane’s Offseason

Crane thus put himself in charge of the Astros 2022-23 offseason rather than a seasoned baseball executive.

It did not go well.

The front office identified two clear areas where the team needed to make an addition—first base and left field. They signed Jose Abreu to play first base for three seasons and Michael Brantley to a one-year contract to play left field. They also signed their own free agent reliever—Rafael Montero—to a three year contract.

Both individually and collectively, these three moves did not work out. Abreu slashed .237.296/.383 for a .680 OPS at a premium offensive position. Montero had a 5.08 ERA over the course of the season and allowed opposing hitters an .835 OPS. Brantley was injured most all of the season. He completed a minor league rehab assignment in May, but was not healthy. He returned to the IL until late August. His shoulder still caused him problems, limiting him to 57 at bats in 15 games. Collectively, the three of them were collectively 0.4 runs below replacement level. Instead of acquiring contributing players, the Astros acquired three players who were no better than flotsam playing in the Pacific Coast League.

Could the Crane led front office have anticipated these problems? In the casteof Montero, possibly. Like most all relievers, he has a volatile history from year to year, though he was coming off an outstanding 2022 and the adjustments made by the Astros player development team had made clear improvements. The error seemed to be putting too many resources in the bullpen, as Montero’s joined Ryan Pressly and Hector Neris as expensive bullpen options.

In the case of Abreu, it’s easier to forgive the Astros front office. A number of teams—the Guardians, Padres, and Red Sox—were also after Abreu and they apparently made the same evaluation mistake the Astros did. Abreu hit better in September (.835 OPS with 7 home runs) after coming off of a stint on the IL in August for back soreness. Perhaps Abreu’s power outage on the season was the result of an injury, and now diagnosed, he’ll provide more value moving forward.

The hardest to defend in retrospect is the signing Brantley. Since he had played for the Astros in 2022 when he underwent surgery on his shoulder, the Astros should have had the best information of any team on his health. But signing Brantley and hurrying him back in May indicates they knew less than they thought. Failing to properly evaluate the medicals of Abreu—another team’s player—is understandable. Failing to properly evaluate the medicals of their own player in Brantley is much harder to explain.

Some have criticized the Astros front office for failing to sign another starting pitcher this offseason, and the injuries to Lance McCullers, Luis Garcia, and Jose Urquidy certainly compelled the Astros to go deep into their starting pitching depth. I am more forgiving of this decision. First of all, it would have been difficult to convince a free agent to sign with the Astros when they had no starts to offer this offseason. And second, JP France filled in admirably, recording a 3.83 ERA in 23 starts.

But overall, the Crane-led front office biffed the offseason. Instead of finding contributing players (like the Rangers front office did), the Astros offseason literally produced no value and making the job of winning the AL West more difficult than it should have been.

Hiring a GM

Crane said when he announced Click’s departure that he did not want to remain head of the baseball operations department and would hire a general manager to replace Click. He fulfilled the second part of that promise, hiring Dana Brown on the eve of Spring Training as the team’s general manager. Brown is a longtime executive with a strong background in scouting. He had interviewed for general manager jobs before, and thus, seemed to be viable candidate to be a major league GM. That did not apply to several of the candidates who also reportedly interviewed for the job. Brown taking the job seemed to be an encouraging sign.

But when Brown was hired, I wrote “it is still unclear how autonomous Brown will be as a GM.” I noted that Crane had promoted his own choices for Assistant GMs, which showed that ‘Brown’s autonomy as GM is limited at the beginning of his tenure.” As a result, I said that Brown would be “a spoke on the wheel in the Astros decision making…but he will have to work together with Crane, who wants more influence, Bagwell and Jackson, who have Crane’s ear.”

In short, Dana Brown had limited power as GM. Over the course of the season, more evidence emerged showing Brown’s limited influence. But the person who showed more influence than I thought in January was Dusty Baker. Brown made multiple public statements urging Baker to play particular players more. Going to media to call for lineup changes is clear evidence of the GM’s weakness, and so was Brown’s statement in June when discussing his desire to see more at bats for Yainer Diaz “"I’m not in Dusty’s shoes. I’m not writing the lineup. It’s his job and it’s his call.”

I covered Baker’s rationale for his decision making in 2023 in my last post. In this post, the important point is the fact that Brown had to publicly urge his manager to play particular players is an inversion of most other front offices, where the general manager has more power than the manager. And the ultimate responsibility for that structure falls on Jim Crane, who had set up Brown to be a GM with modest power and his manager to have the final say on lineups.

The Verlander Trade

Players who have bad years can turn things around and finish strong, which is what we say with Jose Abreu. And Jim Crane’s final move in 2023 was actually quite strong and made a big difference to the team winning the division and going deep in the playoffs.

That move was trading for Justin Verlander. As I noted at the time, the cost was steep—the Astros traded their two best prospects from a very thin farm system. And the move put the Astros all-in to win in 2023 and 2024.

Verlander made eleven starts for the Astros in 2023, stabilizing the team’s rotation. He had a 3.31 ERA in 68 innings and while his strikeouts remained lower than in recent years (8.3 per nine innings), he lowered his walk rate. He made three playoff starts, starting Game 1 in both series. And he pitched very well in two of those starts and the Astros winning two of his starts. Verlander had a 2.95 ERA in 18.1 playoff innings.

The long term costs of the Verlander deal still exist, but the deal was designed to help the Astros in the short run and to match the Rangers move for Max Scherzer. It met those goals, even if the Astros fell short of winning the World Series.

And that move goes on Crane’s ledger, not Brown’s. It was clear from the action of the trade that, as Chandler Rome of The Athletic wrote last week, that “anyone who watched the team’s trade deadline understands Crane engineered the deal for Justin Verlander.”

The move for Verlander also showed that Crane, not Brown, and frankly, not Bagwell or Jackson, was still the most important man in the Astros baseball decision making process, despite having hired a general manager.

And while, Crane’s run in charge of Astros baseball operations has had more misses than hits, acquiring Verlander was a positive for the 2023 team.

Will Change Come?

The Verlander trade does help Crane’s ledger as the key baseball decision maker for the Astros, but it does not put the record to the positive side. He has overall harmed the team’s chances of winning in 2023 with his poor decisions in the offseason.

And the reasons for this are clear—Jim Crane knows less about how to make baseball decisions than any other head of baseball operations. On every other team, the head of baseball operations is a seasoned baseball executive who knows more about baseball than Crane, but also about the process of making player personnel decisions in baseball. It’s been the focus of their intellectual and professional life. Crane has one of those on his payroll in Dana Brown, but instead of empowering Brown, Crane has kept the decision making power to himself.

Crane does not lack for knowledge of how to make baseball decisions, as he’s been the owner of the Astros for over a decade now. But of course, he focused on business before that and has focused primarily on the business side of running the Astros before 2022.

Crane has also chosen to lean on Jeff Bagwell and Reggie Jackson as close advisers. Neither has spent their post-playing careers deeply steeped in front offices and trying to learn about baseball operations. Instead, they have mostly made personal appearances and lived off of being Hall of Fame baseball players. It’s a good living, and I do not begrudge them for it. But that’s not the experience that readies them to make key decisions on a team’s acquisitions. And many of those decisions are based on having detailed knowledge of the capabilities of minor league prospects and when and how their skills will translate at the major league level. Bagwell and Jackson have done nothing in their careers to make anyone think they can do that with any skill.

Crane’s choice to elevate himself to making most of the baseball decisions and to rely on two people who have not immersed themselves in baseball decision making is baffling on its own. No other team in baseball has an owner so involved in the basics of baseball decisions, and none rely on essentially outside advisers as much as the Astros.

It is also baffling because there was no reason to make this change. The Astros were the most successful franchise in baseball from 2017 to 2022, winning five division titles, four pennants, and two World Series crowns. Jim Crane looked at that and thought, “Things need to change.” It was baffling last year when it happened—as I wrote at the time.

A year later, it is even more baffling, in large part because it is clear that the Crane is—as I described him last year after the Click move—”the indispensable man” in baseball operations. That’s just as true today as it was 12 months ago when he moved on from Click. And 15 months ago when Crane vetoed the Contreras-for-Urquidy trade.

We can only hope that changes soon, even if we have little reason to expect that it will.