Who's Going to Play Second Base
The Astros have 4 candidates to start at 2B, each with unique strengths. Who they choose will tells us a great deal about what the front office and coaching staff values.
The Astros spent the offseason addressing their infield, adding Isaac Paredes via trade and Christian Walker via free agency. But in doing so, they created an issue in their outfield.
The team may have address the outfield issue by moving Jose Altuve
solved the issue of offense in left field by moving Jose Altuve there. Altuve has now started 9 of the 810 Spring Training games he has played the field in left. And that leaves a different question for the Astros front office to address before Opening Day. Who is playing 2nd base?
4 Candidates
There are 4 potential candidates to be in the Opening Day lineup at 2nd base—Mauricio Dubon, Brendan Rodgers, Luis Guillorme, and Shay Whitcomb. Each has some particular strength that the front office and coaching staff could prioritize.
The table below lists the four candidates and some relevant statistics for each of them based on ATC projections.1 The stats are projected weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+), walk rate (BB%), strikeout rate (K%), isolated slugging (Iso),2 defensive fWAR contribution (DEF), and plate appearances (PA’s).
The table helps show the individual strengths of each candidates:
The balanced candidate—Mauricio Dubon
Dubon represents the best balance of skills between the four candidates. He’s projected to have the 2nd highest wRC+ and the second highest DEF rating. Dubon may also be the vibes candidate, as he has been on the team since 2021 and is popular with fans and in the clubhouse. He seems to be player who has earned the starting job in the minds of many.
The plate discipline candidate—Luis Guillorme
Guillorme is a veteran utility infielder. He shows the best plate discipline metrics of any player, with a projected 10.4% walk rate. He also has the least power, with a projected Iso of .053. Guillorme may also be considered the platoon candidate, as he is the only left handed hitter in the competition and one of the few on the potential big league roster.
The power candidate—Shay Whitcomb
Whitcomb is an Astros farmhand who made his major league debut in 2024. He hit 25 home runs last season in Sugar Land and 35 home runs in 2023 across two levels. The projections pick this up, as he has the highest Iso of any of these candidates. Whitcomb might also be considered the upside candidate. A different projection system—ZIPS—measures every player as a potential full-time player and projects Whitcomb to have the highest fWAR of these candidates at 2.5. A big difference is that ZIPS projects Whitcomb to be an above average defender at second, based primarily on minor league numbers. Systems that focus more on major league numbers are more down on Whitcomb after some shaky defense in Houston in 2024.
The projections candidate—Brendan Rodgers
Rodgers has been the long-time starting second basemen for the Rockies. Based on the ATC projections, Rodgers has the highest wRC+ and the highest DEF rating of any of these four. If projections are right, that should make him the best candidate, providing the best offense and defense of the candidates available. As a free agent, Rodgers targeted the Astros when he saw that the Altuve to left field experiment had legs and thus second base might be open.
Changing Philosophies?
None of the candidates is a slam dunk to win the job. I’m more interested in who gets the job less for the effect it may have on the Astros fortunes this season (it will likely be very slight) but for what it says about how the front office and the coaching staff are thinking about the team and the organization.
From a review of these numbers, it seems that Rodgers is the best candidate. Giving him the job would show the front office trying to scour the market to find the best candidate for the job and to squeeze out the most value.
Giving Whitcomb the job would show the team’s trust in its own player development system. In many ways, this would look like how the Astros have done things for most of the Golden Era, trusting its own players (e.g. Chas McCormick; Jake Meyers;) to fill holes created by the departure of others, rather than needing to go outside of the organization to get an older player to fill a roster spot.
Giving Guillorme the job would increase Joe Espada’s flexibility and he could do more to mix and match players and take advantage of platoon matchups.
Giving Dubon the job would probably play the best in the clubhouse, though Dubon is of course needed as a utility player and would still need to fill in occasionally at shortstop and center field.
An Ongoing Competition
Of course, that Dubon will be needed at other positions tells us something else about the choice over the next week to pick an Opening Day second baseman—it is not a permanent decision.
None of these candidates are lock down, every day players, and there is no reason not to revisit the second base situation throughout the season. And that includes the fact that these second basemen are also in competition with outfielders such as Taylor Trammell and Ben Gamel. If one of those outfielders spark, the Astros still can return Altuve to second base.
Broadly, I am paying attention to the second base battle for two reasons. The most important is what is says about what the current front office and coaching staff values. Each of the four candidates represents a different strength. And secondly, what the front office will do over the course of the season to improve the position, if needed.
There are 7 different projections available at Fangraphs. I chose ATC because it is an average of projections, taking a wide number of available projections and creating a weighted average of them to create a single projection. It is thus a mid-point projection.
This calculation is simple. You subtract batting average from slugging percentage. It thus isolates how much slugging, or extra base power, a batter has.