The Farm System Looks Barren At a Moment of Big Need
With a second championship core reaching free agency, the Astros will need the farm system to produce high-quality regulars. Farm system rankings indicate this is unlikely.
The Astros need their farm system to produce high-quality regulars and especially need that right now.
Of course, the Astros need to do this for the same reason that every MLB team does: young players are the best value in baseball. Young baseball players cannot freely negotiate a contract and, as a result, make less than their market value. After six seasons of service time, a player is free to negotiate a salary with any potential employer, and thus, finally be paid appropriate to the value.
The Astros have been successful in their Golden Era not just by having excellent players, but by having excellent cost-controlled players. Homegrown stars were the core of the 2017 World Series team and then another core replaced them and won a ring in 2022.
This article is not about how major league teams need to develop cost-controlled players. It is about how the Astros need to develop cost-controlled players from their farm system right now because that second core of World Series winning players is about to reach free agency.
Replacing the Second Core
The second core was made up of players such as Kyle Tucker and Framber Valdez. Tucker was traded this offseason before he is eligible to be a free agent after this season. Valdez is also a free agent after the season and is likely to be pitching elsewhere in 2026. Tucker will also be a free agent after 2025
For the Astros to succeed in the near future, they will need to develop players who can replace Tucker in the everyday lineup the way he (essentially) replaced George Springer. And they will need to develop rotation arms to replace Valdez the way he replaced Gerrit Cole.
The alternative to this is what we saw in the 2025 offseason. The Astros made a big-ticket signing, inking Christian Walker to a $20 million a year contract for 3 seasons. ZiPS projected Walker to be worth 5.4 fWAR over the next 3 seasons, which works out to paying $11M per win. That’s about the going rate this offseason on the free agent market on for a win. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be better to pay a young player less than a million dollars to do the same thing, if not more.
The other thing we saw this offseason was the Astros trying to address their needs by dumpster diving. The Astros have signed Ben Gamel for $1.2M and Brendan Rodgers to a minor league contract to compete for a spot on the roster. The reason the Astros can offer these players such small dollar contracts is because they are not good enough players for teams to want to sign them to better contract. In short, the Astros are trying to catch lightning in a bottle with one of these veterans to address the hole in their outfield created by the trade of Kyle Tucker.
One can of course hope that Jim Crane chooses to cut into his profits to increase the payroll and sign or trade for more players at full market value. But to be realistic, we know he sets a budget for his team—which is apparently at the luxury tax threshold this season.
To win with budget limits—even those that are relatively high like the one Crane has set for this season—requires a team to get value from cost-controlled players, i.e. the ones it brings up from its own farm system.
A Poorly Regarded Farm System
With the need for new every day players from the farm system established, I can now address the question of whether the farm system is likely to to produce such players.
To answer that question, I turn to the various farm system rankings and analyses. Four different baseball publications reviewed each team’s system this offseason.
At Baseball Prospectus, Jeffrey Paternostro writes up Zach Dezenzo and Brice Matthews as players who “could help the 2025 roster”, Cam Smith as “an extra first round pick” and that the bats after those three are “intriguing, if flawed.” Paternostro notes that while he likes the Astros top pitching prospects (Anderson Brito and Ryan Forcucci), “you’d much rather they be the fourth and fifth-best pitching prospects in your system rather than one-two.” Overall, Baseball Prospectus ranks the Astros as the 21st best farm system in the majors.
But here’s the problem. That’s the good review.
The staff at Baseball America writes that “the cupboard has been bare in Houston for a few seasons” and that Dezenzo, Matthews, and Melton offer hope only as “a strong group of platoon hopefuls.” Baseball America ranks the Astros as the 29th best farm system in baseball.
As does Keith Law of The Athletic. Law notes that Hunter Brown, selected in the 2019 draft is “the last Astros draft pick to generate 1 WAR of major-league value” and that the front office has “drafted a lot of position players who project as platoon or extra guys, and a lot of pitchers who project as fifth starters — often guys with command but not stuff — or middle relievers.”
Fangraphs also ranks the Astros as having the 29th best farm system. Dan Szymborski is not involved with the prospect ranking team at Fangraphs, but instead uses his ZiPS system to project how players will do in 2025 and beyond. Those projections not only find that the “Astros don’t have a single offensive player under 26 projected to be worth 1 WAR if used in the majors in 2025,” but also that it “only really sees Brice Matthews being >50% to peak as a league-average player.”
In short, the reviews of the Astros farm system are not good. You can dismiss one evaluator as biased or having preferences that short change the Astros, but it’s hard to say that about four of them, Heck, Szymborski uses a computer to make his evaluations, and while I’m plenty skeptical of the value of AI, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hate the Astros.
For years, I have heard Astros say that farm system rankings always say the Astros have a poor farm system and the Astros always outperform those rankings. And brother, do I hope you are right.
Because the rankings show that the Astros will have great difficulty producing high-quality regulars from their farm system over the next season or two, precisely at the time when the need them the most.