Lance McCullers and Shifting Public Sentiment
Lance McCullers was one of the Astros most popular players when he was on the mound. That changed while he has been out injured. I explore why this happened and why it could change back.
No Golden Age Astros has seemed to embrace his adopted hometown more than Lance McCullers.
Raised in Tampa, born to a father who played for 4 teams across a 7 year major league career, McCullers Jr. has played for only one team in his now 10 seasons in the majors. He has moved to Houston, where his two daughters were born, and has taken to our home town and made it his own.
How much has he made it his own? In the wake of Carlos Correa signing with an Astros fans asked him on social media “Lance, can you promise to never leave us.” McCullers responded “I'll be here as long as they will have me. Bury me in the H.”
“Bury me in the H” quickly became a catchphrase for the 2022 Astros. A quick Google search of the term brought me link to highlight videos of the 2022 World Series with that title, T-shirts and vinyl stickers with the phrase, and McCullers repeating the phrase throughout the 2022 season.
It also crystalized something that had been apparent for a long time. McCullers was one of the most popular players on the Golden Era Astros, and for good reason.
McCullers was one of the prospects that Astros fans put their hopes in during the rebuild and he paid off that hope, debuting in 2015 and immediate becoming a rotation staple as that team won the team’s first playoff berth in a decade. McCullers became a postseason legend, finishing off his 4 innings of shutout relief in Game 7 of the ALCS with 24 straight curveballs.
McCullers is also one of only 2 Golden Era Astros sign a contract for 5 free agent years—seemingly the maximum Jim Crane is willing to sign. He’s not going anywhere, unlike so many of his teammates in the past.
McCullers also seemed popular because he was one of the only Golden Age Astros who truly seemed to like talking to the team’s media. And since the media are a conduit to the fans, McCullers rose in popularity as a result.
Today, the idea of McCullers as one of the team’s most popular players seems a figment of the distant past. McCullers has not pitched since the 2022 World Series. McCullers elbow was hurting him in Spring Training 2023 and he was forced to have elbow surgery that season. He’s been rehabbing ever since.
That was not McCullers’ first elbow surgery. McCullers injured his elbow in 2018, and, after delaying it so he could pitch in the bullpen in that year’s playoffs, had Tommy John Surgery after the season. He missed all of 2019. He missed subtantial parts of 2017 with an injury, and of course hurt himself in a Game 4 win in the 2021 ALDS, leading McCullers to miss the first 4 months of the 2022 season.
McCullers now seems to be associated more with his injuries than his pitching exploits or playoff heroics. Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but in baseball, it seems to be the opposite. Absence makes fans question why a player is not present. If a player is always injured, it raises mockery from fans. It often raises questions of why the player cannot stay healthy, or, in cases like McCullers’, why it takes him so long to rehab from his injuries.
The answer as to why players get injured and have a tough time coming back from rehab is probably some combination of luck and genetics. Some elbows can better stand the rigors of throwing a 100 pitches as hard as possible every fifth day than others. And we have little understanding of why some elbows survive through this stress more than others.
Such scientific based answers may be the closest to be correct, but they hold little weight with fans. For understandable reasons, we want our players to always be available.
An individual player’s popularity thus can wane for reasons outside of his control. McCullers’s elbow is a good example of this. When his elbow is healthy enough for him to pitch and to give smiling interviews to local reporters, he is a beloved Astros. When his elbow betrayed him, McCullers' reputation among fans suffered.
These observations lead me to a couple of bigger thoughts about injuries and player popularity. The first is about the fleeting nature of popularity. As we learn in a wide variety of contexts, popularity does not stay forever. It changes.
And in baseball, it changes primarily based on results. Lance McCullers was popular in part because he is the best interview of any Astros of the recent years and his rhetoric flattered us as fans more than any other player. But that popularity was primarily on his skills as a pitcher. When healthy, McCullers has been an excellent pitcher—a 3.48 career ERA, an All Star nod in 2017, an ace-like performance at the top of the rotation in 2021, and those 24 straight curveballs leading to a pennant.
His popularity has declined because he has not been available to do any of that since the 2022 World Series. Our image of McCullers has shifted from a hometown hero to a guy who can never get on the mound based the reality that he cannot get on the mound. While I think this change is unfair, I also find it very easy to explain.
My other big thought is about how my personal preference toward analytical thought often leads me to push against the dominant narrative among fans.
I have always viewed the popularity of McCullers through a jaundiced eye. Saying “Bury me in the H” is a great way to build popularity, but I find that ephemeral in many ways. McCullers was one of the few Astros to get a contract offer from Jim Crane that he found good value. The business decisions of Jim Crane made Lance McCullers available to say “bury me in the H,” rather than players such as Carlos Correa and George Springer, who Crane did not pursue in free agency because he did not want to pay them market value.
Today, I find fans questioning McCullers to be just as curious and odd. Of course McCullers wants to be on the mound pitching. He’s a pitcher; it’s not just his job, it’s his identity. I get why people are frustrated that McCullers is injured. But I don’t get why that affects his popularity. He’s just as frustrated himself.
Part of my willingness to push against popular sentiment on baseball playes is my own interest and willingness to follow baseball from a front office standpoint. A front office has to make good decisions on a player’s abilities and market values. Players are commodities in this type of thinking and like any commodity, they can be bought and sold on the market. Teams should move on from players—even fan favorites—to squeeze out marginal value in an effort to win more baseball game—and to create more opportunities for players to become playoff legends like McCullers.
Of course, my choice to keep a level of emotional remove from Astros players put me odds with the majority of fans. We love the Astros because we are emotionally attached to the Astros. It’s our team, and always will be. And we love it when players express a similar emotional commitment to our team. We feel understood. And most don’t want to think about the business of baseball contracts, with its focus on unemotional terms such as “maximizing value,” “aging curves,” and “staying under the collective balance tax threshold.”
Lance McCullers will take the mound in Astros uniform in a game with meaning for the first time since Game 4 of the 2022 World Series. I will be cheering for him because for all of my emotional remove, I want the Astros to win. They’re my team, despite having lived on the West Coast in my 20s and now on the East Coast throughout my 40s and 50s.
And I have enough emotional attachment to my team and its guys that I’ll be rooting for McCullers not just as a player wearing my team’s uniform, but as a player who has gone through a lot to get to today.
I’ll be cheering for him to do well because I’d like the Astros to win this game, and because the team could use rotation help throughout the season as it tries to win the division and a playoff spot.
But I also know this. Just as popular sentiment changed against Lance McCullers, it can change back. If McCullers pitches well, he’ll return to being one of the team’s most popular players. Things can change on that front, hopefully for the better.