When Dana Brown agreed to become vice president and general manager of the Houston Astros last January, he entered into the most unusual management situation in baseball today.
In many ways, Brown took on a job that in many ways had already been done for him.
Following the separation (it was never actually called a firing) of Jim Click in the wake of the Astros’ World Series win, team owner Jim Crane hemmed, hawed and delayed the process of hiring a new chief exec for two and a half months.
In that interregnum, decisions — including the signing of high-dollar free agent Jose Abreu — were made by a sort of kitchen cabinet that include Crane himself, former Astros star Jeff Bagwell, and other insiders.
Then in late January, with virtually all the 2023 heavy lifting done, Crane hired Brown. That means this assessment is only partly of Brown, and also partly of the collective that preceded him.
Grading the Houston Astros front office at the midway point of the 2023 season
What follows is a mid-term assessment of the Astros’s personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the team’s performance.
The standard of measurement is Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by the Astros impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved – or worsened – the team’s status this season.
A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:
1. By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.
2. By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.
3. By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.
4. By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.
5. By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.
Here’s how Crane, Bagwell, Brown and the others stack up by those five yardsticks.