The Houston Astros have a knack for embarrassing April. Despite often being viewed as the favorite or second favorite in the AL West every year for the past decade, the Astros are last. he didn’t they had a losing record sometime in the second half of April 2019. But year after year, they tend to get a strong second wind. Except for 2020, for obvious reasons, they haven’t finished with fewer than 87 wins in a season since 2016; Overall, Houston has the second-most wins in baseball since the start of the 2017 season. In the midst of those previous mediocre starts, speculation has stuck around the Astros. This time… not so much.
To see the last time the Astros started this badly, you don’t have to go back too far. In 2024, they hit their nadir after 26 games, at 7-19. I wrote then, as I do now, about the hole they were digging for themselves. Although it was still a battle to get back to the AL West – they actually did get back to the AL West – they actually did, by default – the speculation didn’t go sour. ZiPS projected that the Astros would win 88 games heading into that season, and despite their 7-16 record at the time I wrote that article, the computer still thinks they will continue to win games at the previously predicted rate.
ZiPS Median Projected Standings – AL West (4/22/24)
| The team | W | L | GB | Pct | Div% | WC% | play% | WS Win% | 80 of | 20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas Rangers | 86 | 76 | – | .531 | 41.0% | 18.3% | 59.3% | 5.1% | 94.1 | 79.2 |
| Seattle Mariners | 85 | 77 | 1 | .525 | 30.7% | 19.2% | 50.0% | 3.8% | 92.1 | 77.4 |
| The Houston Astros | 83 | 79 | 3 | .512 | 23.1% | 17.9% | 41.0% | 3.5% | 90.3 | 75.2 |
| Los Angeles Angels | 75 | 87 | 11 | .463 | 5.1% | 7.1% | 12.2% | 0.4% | 82.3 | 67.3 |
| Oakland A | 61 | 101 | 25 | .377 | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.2% | 0.0% | 68.6 | 53.6 |
SOURCE: Me
ZiPS does not have the same hope it had in 2024.
ZiPS Median Projected Standings – AL West (4/27/26)
| The team | W | L | GB | Pct | Div% | WC% | play% | WS Win% | 80 of | 20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle Mariners | 87 | 75 | – | .537 | 48.9% | 18.2% | 67.1% | 7.0% | 93.5 | 80.3 |
| Texas Rangers | 83 | 79 | 4 | .512 | 28.3% | 20.2% | 48.5% | 2.7% | 90.3 | 76.5 |
| Athletics | 79 | 83 | 8 | .488 | 15.8% | 15.6% | 31.3% | 0.9% | 87.0 | 72.5 |
| The Houston Astros | 75 | 87 | 12 | .463 | 5.0% | 8.0% | 13.0% | 0.5% | 81.7 | 68.1 |
| Los Angeles Angels | 72 | 90 | 15 | .444 | 1.9% | 3.5% | 5.4% | 0.1% | 78.1 | 65.0 |
Source: Yes, it’s still me
This time around, ZiPS doesn’t even think Houston is a .500 team all the way, let alone that it will end up close to its preseason projected record. The Astros had a deep rotation in 2024, especially compared to today, and during that time, virtually all of their starters were injured. But ZiPS thought enough depth would filter back in the coming weeks to get the team back on track. However, in 2026, ZiPS only likes the Houston pitcher, Hunter Brown, and a few days ago, general manager Dana Brown said that Brown will not return until June, and that is if there are no hiccups.
Making the Astros have a sub .500 record is not something ZiPS usually does. While I don’t have offseason projections for every calendar date, I do have monthly updates, and the last time they were expected to finish with a losing record was the 2015 preseason, when they had a 77-85 projection for the year. It points to the actual date by starting several other simulations, the last one before 2026 when Houston was expected to be a losing team during the rest of the season almost 11 years ago, on April 26, 2015, when a win over the Oakland Athletics improved the team’s record to 10-7 and 4% of the season’s 92 wins.
The 2026 Astros weren’t as bad as their offense was. They lead the American League with 5.21 runs per game, and their wRC+ of 118 ranks fourth in baseball, to go along with 5.7 WAR for players at their position, and good for fourth in the majors. With this in mind, the Astros should not engage in offensive surgery to turn their season around. Instead, if Houston is going to make it to the top, their pitching will have to improve.
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If you’ve been unlucky enough to follow the election night coverage, you may have seen various news desks offering benchmarks for a candidate to beat in states or regions to be on target to win. I would do the same kind of thing with ZiPS, so I asked it to estimate what Houston’s ERA staff would need to give a team a 50% chance of making the playoffs.
ZiPS Rest-of-Season ERA Benchmarks – Houston Astros
TLDR: To be a coin toss to make the playoffs, if the offense performs as expected, the Astros need their pitching staff to collectively beat their projected ERAs by about half a run per nine innings. This is true whether or not you are using ZiPS projection or combined Steamer/ZiPS Depth Charts projections. Just to show how difficult that is for a team to do, I averaged the 2025 preseason ERAs in innings pitched, and compared those to the team’s final ERAs for that year.
ZiPS 2025 Team ERA Projections, Projected vs. The real thing
| The team | The ERA team | Estimated ZIPS ERA | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas Rangers | 3.49 | 4.33 | -0.83 |
| The Milwaukee Brewers | 3.59 | 4.07 | -0.48 |
| The Cincinnati Reds | 3.86 | 4.35 | -0.48 |
| Kansas City Royals | 3.73 | 4.17 | -0.43 |
| Chicago White Sox | 4.28 | 4.63 | -0.35 |
| The Pittsburgh Pirates | 3.76 | 4.09 | -0.33 |
| San Diego Padres | 3.64 | 3.91 | -0.26 |
| Chicago Cubs | 3.81 | 4.00 | -0.19 |
| The Boston Red Sox | 3.72 | 3.91 | -0.19 |
| Cleveland Rangers | 3.70 | 3.88 | -0.18 |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 3.79 | 3.96 | -0.17 |
| New York Yankees | 3.91 | 4.01 | -0.11 |
| The Houston Astros | 3.86 | 3.88 | -0.02 |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 3.94 | 3.94 | 0.00 |
| The San Francisco Giants | 3.84 | 3.80 | 0.04 |
| The New York Mets | 4.04 | 3.94 | 0.10 |
| The Detroit Tigers | 3.97 | 3.85 | 0.13 |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 3.95 | 3.81 | 0.14 |
| Seattle Mariners | 3.87 | 3.68 | 0.19 |
| Miami Marlins | 4.60 | 4.34 | 0.26 |
| Louis Cardinals | 4.30 | 4.04 | 0.26 |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 4.19 | 3.87 | 0.32 |
| Athletics | 4.71 | 4.28 | 0.43 |
| Los Angeles Angels | 4.89 | 4.44 | 0.45 |
| Baltimore Orioles | 4.62 | 4.00 | 0.62 |
| Minnesota Twins | 4.55 | 3.88 | 0.67 |
| The Arizona Diamondbacks | 4.49 | 3.81 | 0.68 |
| The Atlanta Braves | 4.36 | 3.65 | 0.71 |
| Washington Nationals | 5.35 | 4.55 | 0.80 |
| The Colorado Rockies | 5.99 | 4.85 | 1.14 |
Only one team, the Texas Rangers, beat the ERA projection by more than half a run. The Brewers and Reds came close, but fell a little behind when adjusting for the fact that ZiPS thought the league-wide ERA would be 0.12 higher than it actually was.
Now, consider the possibility that Houston’s offense not only performs as expected, but instead reaches its 75th-percentile projection. The pitch will still need to exceed its projection of 0.33 runs per game, which means that even in a situation as good as this lineup, this team will still be underperforming.
On a basic level, the Astros need to find better pitchers among the guys who aren’t currently seen on the Depth Charts as contributors, and they need to find them now. Ethan Pecko is very interested in interior options, and as a Towson native, I can’t help but root for him. He’s currently working his way back from thoracic outlet syndrome, and while he’s done very well in his major league rehab, he likely won’t be around until later this summer. If he came back, he wouldn’t be enough on his own to fix this slave, even if he had a Chase Burns-esque debut. AJ Blubaugh and Colton Gordon are also producing as quick game changers. Houston will probably need to get a pitch, but where does it come from? This has been a strange season so far, because many of the worst teams (Astros, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies, Blue Jays, Royals) were expected to be contenders. That means there aren’t many teams that want to sell early. But even if they are, these other clubs that have not done well could be a tough competition for those players in the division.
Time is not on Houston’s side, in the short or long term. The short-term challenge is obvious, but the long-term is almost as difficult. The Astros are second in baseball in wRC+ for players over the age of 30 (129), and Jose Altuve and Christian Walker are both at ages when a near decline is most likely. Their two main offensive players in their 20s, Jeremy Peña and Yordan Alvarez, are free agents after 2027 and 2028, respectively. At the end of last season, our scouting team ranked Houston’s farm system 29th out of 30 teams. The best solution would be to retool the services, perhaps by trading anyone who didn’t sign this year. Then, assuming there is a pre-closing window to make free agent signings as it was in 2021, entertain the elite available with a generous one-year deal, with the hope that many of those players will want to revisit free agency in the expected general winter after the 2027 season. But truth be told, this doesn’t really sound like something the Astros could do.
However shaky it is, this could be the most important moment of Brown’s tenure as GM. The Houston Astros are in dire straits, and none of the options look particularly appealing. Some problems don’t have good solutions, and if they can’t put one together, we could be looking at the end of a successful dynasty in Houston.
