The Launch Angle

Tomorrow marks the the start of another season of Houston Astros baseball. The staff of the Launch Angle offers their perspectives.

Clack: 87-75, 2nd place AL West

Time to think about our personal predictions for the 2026 season. And this is one of the more difficult seasons for projecting the Astros. This is due to several reasons: (1) Framber Valdez signed with the Tigers; (2) It’s the second year without either Alex Bregman or Kyle Tucker; (3) Uncertainty about the quality of likely pitching from recovering injured pitchers like Josh Hader, Cristian Javier, and Lance McCullers Jr.; and (4) A revamped rotation with new Asian signees (Weiss and Imai) with uncertainty as to how they will transition to the MLB.

I’m going to predict an Astros’ 2026 record of 87 wins, the same as last season. This is approximately the same as the ZIPS projection and somewhat higher than the 84 – 85 wins projected by Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs (F-WAR method). That puts the Astros on track for around 50-50 odds of making the playoffs. I am tempted to believe a more optimistic record like 88 – 89 wins. So, I’ll just predict the Astros will make the playoffs, probably as a Wild Card.

Seattle will probably win the division. But I’m skeptical of the Mariners winning more than 89 wins. I think Cal Raleigh had his career year and will regress fairly hard. I also think that their strongest component, pitching, will also noticeably regress. I expect the Sacramento A’s and Texas Rangers to battle over 3rd place in the AL West, with the A’s getting the 3d place ticket with 83 wins.

I have a pretty good feeling about the Astros’ rotation, despite the loss of Framber. Brown is no longer in the shadow of Framber Valdez, and should come into his own. I think Imai and Burrows will be very good, and Weiss will contribute above our expectations. I like the pitching depth that the Astros have acquired. Don’t be surprised if Blubaugh is a strong contributor who either ends the season in the rotation or as a key high leverage reliever. In simplistic terms my forecast of the same record as last year is based on a full effective season of Yordan Alvarez which offsets the WAR erosion caused by losing Framber Valdez. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a mid-season acquisition for the outfield raises the Astros W/L record above 87 wins.

I am a little concerned as to whether age will start to reduce Jose Altuve’s production. The potential production of young players like Loperfido, Cole, Smith, and Matthews also falls in the “your guess is as good as mine” category. But we only need an upturn in production from one of the four guys to keep things intact. For Christian Walker, the question is: Should we expect his first half or second half 2025 performance?

Finally, I’ll note that Joe Espada will have to earn his salary for the team to succeed. He will have his hands full trying to move Paredes into effective positions on the diamond, combined with shifting other position players to accomodate Paredes. I can’t predict how that will work out, but it will require strong managing. However, most good teams would love to have this “problem” and would figure out a way to maximize player resources.

Bilbos: 85-77, 3rd place AL West

The 2026 Astros have lots of questions attached. And in my experience observing baseball for 60 years, that doesn’t usually turn out well. 

Most analysts say starting pitching depth is the team strength. But objectively, they have only one proven starter with no caveat attached. That, of course, is All Star Hunter Brown. Newly-acquired Tatsuya Imai may be the best thing since the incarnation of that other Japanese player currently in LA – and you gotta love a guy who joined the Astros to beat the Dodgers – but this year is Imai’s MLB debut… A question mark. 

Imai will be the #3, Number two, Mike Burrows, at 26, has 99 career innings. Behind them a bevy of return-from-injury question marks: Cristian Javier, Spencer Arrighetti, Lance McCullers.  

Then there’s the bullpen. Closer Josh Hader starts the season on IL. He ended last season on IL. When will he return? Will he be Hader? 

We can’t overlook the age question marks. Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, and Christian Walker are all on the back side of 30, each coming off their worst seasons in years. Are we to believe that being another year older means getting better at this point in their careers? 

On the other end of the age spectrum, we’re expecting big production from sophomore Cam Smith. Is his ceiling as a hitter really that high, and will he reach that ceiling in year two of his career? The league figured him out in the second half of last year. Will Smith figure the league out this year? 

What about the infield logjam. Possibly the team’s second-best hitter, Isaac Paredes, will likely be fighting for playing time with big-contract-veterans occupying all his positions. 

Finally, there’s Yordan. Is this batting monster, this terrorist of major league pitching, too fragile to survive even half a major league season? If so, it’s curtains for the 2026 Stros. 

If most of these questions are answered in a positive manner for the Astros, they will have a chance to challenge a very strong Mariners team to re-capture the AL West. They have a better chance at Wild Card. 

I predicted a third-place finish last year. They came in second but third in Pythagorean won loss. They could finish first in the AL West this year, but so much has to go right. I’m saying third place again. And watch the As, or whatever they’re called these days. 

L4Blitzer: 83-79 (+/- 5 wins), 2nd place AL West

Perhaps we are finally seeing the fall of the Astros Empire. Last season saw the squad collapse to miss out on the playoffs by some unfortunate tiebreakers. It was the first time since 2016 that the MLB postseason did not have the Astros, and it felt…weird. Perhaps even crazier is that the team that supplanted Houston’s spot in the AL West, the Mariners, almost got to their first World Series, and that said Mariners seemed primed to remain atop the AL West for the foreseeable future. Granted, Houston had some of the worst luck with injuries, losing more players and playing time to the IL than any other roster in the league. One would hope that Houston’s medical staff is undergoing some major refit/revamping. That will go a long way to determining whether Houston can get back to the postseason. However, for the first time in a long time, it is hard to call Houston an actual World Series contender. Other teams have loaded up on the type of talent that Houston held in spades (with some of that Houston-based talent migrating to other squads) during the peak of its dynastic run.

That is not to say that Houston is bereft of talent, destined to join the race for the #1 overall pick in the MLB draft. Even with last season’s uneven play and major injury attrition, they still won 87 games. They still have guys like Pena and Hunter Brown. If they can stay healthy and hold off the reach of Father Time, Altuve, Alvarez, Correa and Walker offer some of the more experienced and dangerous bats in the game. Houston loaded up on pitching depth in the offseason, adding Burrows and Imai during the offseason, along with a full offseason for McCullers and Javier to get healthy. However, this squad is limited in its overall talent depth. They already face the prospect of starting the season without Hader, which will impact a relatively uncertain bullpen.

Perhaps Smith can take that next step, having gotten his rookie lumps out of the way, and perhaps one of the many bodies that manned the outfield this spring can rise up. Maybe Houston can finally trade Paredes for some roster balance, or he will find himself a regular, as injury and age attrition resolve the infield logjam.

IF, and that is a big IF, the Astros’ key contributors remain relatively healthy and play to their potential, a playoff berth is very much in play. IF the squad can get into the postseason dance and can get a few arms and bats hot at the right time, this squad COULD make a run. Yet, it is just as likely that Houston spends the season hanging around .500 and the periphery of playoff contention but condemned to spend a second straight year out of the postseason, only to face even more questions about the future of the franchise and roster (hence the rather wide record spread). With both Espada and Dana Brown in the last year of their contracts and without either receiving any sort of extension, depending how 2026 ends, this team could be entering some very uncharted waters.

Hammer: 88-74, 2nd Place AL West

For a long time, the Astros have been the kings of this division, but it’s been years and the Luhnow brain trust and talent pipeline has slowly withered away. The team is still talented enough to pull off a playoff run, especially if Alvarez finds a way to stay healthy. For the first time though, it seems to be a valid question instead of a foregone conclusion. After narrowly missing last year, the Astros lost key players like Valdez and the roster aged another year. I think Imai will be my pleasant surprise pick, and I believe he will outperform the predicting mid-4’s ERA, with an elite strikeout rate. I’m most hopeful for a bounceback season for Altuve, although at 36, the projections of him repeating last years 113 wRC+ seem more likely than a rebound to previous glory. I think Alvarez’s health and Cam Smith returning to a form most similar to the beginning of last season will be keys to success.

mhatter106: 85-77, 2nd Place AL West

“While I’m here, the window will always be open,” Jim Crane promised. From 2017 to 2022, the window was gaping. Wide enough for Ace Ventura to stick his upper torso out while he drove and felt the headwind. Open so that the whole neighborhood could hear what was our car stereo.

If it’s still open today, well, it’s not letting a whole lot of oxygen circulate. It’s maybe cracked an inch or two, and we are the panting dog left in the back seat of the car. It’s not a whole lot of fun, and to survive, everything needs to be just right. If it gets too hot out, we’re toast. If our owner gets delayed 15 minutes in coming back to the car, we’re done. But if that cloud stays in front of the sun and we catch a little breeze coming in, we’ll be okay.

That’s where the Houston Astros are right now. This is not a bad team. Heck, if Pena is in the opening day lineup, it’s even a good team. The problem is that it’s not that far from being a mediocre one.

Everything needs to line up just right for the 2026 Astros to take the west and be a pennant contender. Yordan has to immediately look like pre-2025 Yordan. Pena’s finger needs to not hamper him. Jose Altuve needs to fight off the aging curve. Someone in the outfield needs to produce. Imai needs to emerge as legitimate #2, Burrows a #3 and somewhere between a Javier who has lost his invisiball, a McCullers who can’t locate, France, Arrighetti and Gordon, a back end of the rotation needs to be found. Somewhere in there, fortune needs to smile so hard at a questionable bullpen that you’d think it was fighting Batman.

Oh yeah, and nobody had better get hurt. So sure, if all that happens, I think the Astros will be great.

The other thing that concerns me is that this clubhouse is not the same as it was in the peak of this window. Dan Szymborski takes every part of every team, adds them up and arrives at ZIPS projections for each team’s win-loss record that usually isn’t too far off the mark. From 2017-2022 (excepting 2020), his projections for the Astros missed by a lot, however. The sum of the Astros’ parts was much greater than the whole. From 2023 on, his projections have been pretty much accurate. The sum of the Astros’ parts was exactly what the whole was. It makes me think that it’s not just the amount of talent that has left the organization. Something else has left too.

But I hope not.

Exile in St. Louis: 89-73, Wild Card

Hey, let’s not lose our swagger around here. This team was snakebitten last year but looked pretty good when it all clicked. Losing Framber is huge, but he had his worst season of the decade and we replaced him with Imai and Burrows. And we still have something in the holster for a potential trade. The Astros ride a bounce-back season from Yordan, a nice sophomore return to form from Cam Smith, a little Loperfido, and another All-Star caliber Pena season to an above average offense, along with a deep pitching staff and the best back end bullpen in baseball to a season-long dogfight with Seattle. The 40-man is deeper and this team still has some juice. And I’m never gonna bet against Jose Altuve.

Theo Gerome: 89-73, 2nd Place AL West

I feel like I’ve seen a lot of doom and gloom around predictions for the Astros in 2026. And I don’t know that I can blame it all; the 2025 team missed the postseason for the first time since 2016, suffered from a rash of bad luck along the way, and in the offseason lost long-time ace Framber Valdez, continuing a multi-year run of high-profile free agency departures. 

And yet… I feel like it’s important to remember that somehow, the 2025 team wasn’t nearly as much of a disaster as it felt like at times. In last year’s preseason predictions, I guessed that the squad would finish with an 88-74 record, good for second place in the AL West and a Wild Card spot. The end result was instead 77-75, good for second place in the AL West and missing out on the last Wild Card spot by a tiebreaker. That one game difference was incredibly consequential, but this team was more or less where I expected.

Of course, how the 2025 team got to that end point was extremely unusual. If I had known going into the year that Yordan Alvarez would miss over 110 games (not to mention his as poorly as he did in the first few weeks of the season), that Yainer Diaz would be a below-average hitter, that Jose Altuve would struggle in the outfield, that Christian Walker would take several months to heat up, that Chas McCormick would play so poorly that he would get demoted, that Framber would somehow go on a protracted meltdown to close out the season, that Josh Hader would go down at a critical point, that Lance McCullers Jr. would return from injury looking totally spent but still rack up substantial innings anyway, that the rest of the rotation as a whole would continue to get generally bad luck on the injury front… Frankly, that all sounds like a disaster scenario taken together. I think if you had just told me the Yordan tidbit prior to my 2025 prediction, I would have knocked a full 5 wins off my estimate, let alone any of the other news. 

And I think that’s why I… actually feel somewhat optimistic about 2026? Don’t get me wrong, this version of the team is still a far cry from the 2022 Championship team. But taking a team that missed something like 18 Wins Above Replacement due to injuries* (far ahead of anyone else) all the way to the brink of the playoffs feels like a big deal, and it provides a very obvious answer to the question “where will your potential improvement in 2026 come from?” Even mediocre injury luck in 2026 would be a huge step up over what the team got in 2025, and hopefully the new medical team can manage that. 

*I also strongly suspect the Astros were also missing out on some additional value in the form of “guys playing through injuries, especially during that desperate stretch run”. Take a look at Isaac Paredes, who we thought was certainly done for the regular season at least. By some miracle, he returned for that final stretch… only to go .185/.241/.296 in eight games. Jake Meyers couldn’t even make it to season’s end before going back on the IL, and hit .204/.271/.204 in the fifteen games he mustered in between those stints. I have a hunch that Yordan was playing through some issues at the start of the season before his first IL stint; his slash line for those first 29 games was a bizarrely poor .210/.306/.340, and his 19 games after returning saw him immediately turn things around, to the tune of a .369/.462/.569 line. And this isn’t even counting Altuve, who gutted out the whole season but was apparently playing through a foot injury (which could explain his poor performance in August and September).

Really, there are other areas for improvement, too. New acquisitions Mike Burrows and Tatsuya Imai looked strong in Spring Training, as did Cristian Javier. Hopefully those three will be able to cover for Framber’s departure. And Hunter Brown’s stellar 2026 showed that the team would still have an ace, at the very least. 

On the offense, getting anything from Yordan in 2026 would obviously be an improvement, and a full season at his peak alone would account for a full 4-to-5 Win swing. A full season of Carlos Correa could also be massive, and even better health for established guys like Jeremy Peña, Jake Meyers and Isaac Paredes could contribute a few wins here or there. And between potential growth from Cam Smith or Yainer Diaz, or late-career bouncebacks from Walker or Altuve, or young players like Brice Matthews or Zach Cole or Joey Loperfido establishing themselves… 

I don’t think all of those bets will come up in the team’s favor, but I do think there’s a lot of potential upside there and just a few of them paying off will make a big difference. And it does give them a lot of room to try different configurations out, if one thing or another isn’t working. If, say, Walker isn’t panning out, Paredes starts more at first; if LMJ looks spent, Spencer Arrighetti is staying warm down in the Sugar Land rotation; and so on. Having plenty of options with potential upside and finding the best fit for the moment seems like it was the strategy this offseason, and I think it makes sense. 

Even with the improvements, I’m left in a similar place that I was last season. I think this still looks like a better team than the Rangers and Athletics right now, even with their retooling (the Angels are also here); conversely, I don’t think it’s enough to catch them up to the Mariners, not unless a whole bunch goes right in Houston or wrong in Seattle. I think the total gains for the team will be enough to offset any potential shortfallings, leaving them up a win or two… let’s go with an 89-73 record, second place in the AL West. 

The bigger question for me is: will that be enough to make the postseason? The AL this year feels like it’s heavy with good teams; the Orioles, Red Sox, and Tigers all made splashy moves to improve over the offseason; the Blue Jays had a great 2025 and brought in Dylan Cease to replace Bo Bichette; the Yankees and Mariners are starting from strong 2025 seasons; I like some of the moves the Royals, A’s, and Rangers made… but realistically, they can’t all be better in 2026 than they were in 2025, there aren’t enough wins to go around for that. Somebody is going to be losing out here.

And that’s where I think the Astros and their flexibility are at an advantage, actually. If Aaron Judge goes down for an extended period, I don’t know if the Yankees could recover from that. Ditto the Royals and Bobby Witt Jr., or the Orioles and Gunnar Henderson, or the Rangers with Corey Seager… But if the Astros already almost made it work in 2025 with Yordan missing most of the year; they seem to be better suited to working around that type of singular, major blow, possibly because they’ve already had to do that and built the roster accordingly. (Now, if they see the kind of widespread injuries that cost them 2025, that does look pretty bleak, but I’m also not sure if any of these other teams could survive that either.)
Realistically, since expanding the postseason, 89 wins has been enough to claim one of the last two Wild Card spots. There are a lot of other contenders, but as long as the Astros can hit that mark, they’re fine. So I’ll predict they make it in. Will they go far once they’re there? Well, who can say this far out, we have no idea what state every roster will be in by the end of the year, anything can happen in October, etc.… but right now, I’ll say they at least make the Division Series.

Cody Poage: 85-90 wins, Wild Card

My expectations for the Astros as the 2026 season comes into closer view are relatively subdued. To be clear, I do have some hope that we can see this team back in the postseason, possibly even winning the AL West once again. But it feels like a handful of factors have to break their way instead of, you know, multiple players breaking on the Astros.

Even with improved injury fortunes, this roster remains unbalanced to me, particularly on the position side. The infield remains crowded, and I have reservations about whether the musical chairs arrangement with Isaac Paredes will ultimately work out. In the short-term, especially if Jeremy Peña isn’t ready for Opening Day? Sure, fine. Across a 162-game season? Consider me doubtful. Hopefully, Jose Altuve can stave off Father Time a bit longer, and Christian Walker can replicate his second-half production. But if Carlos Correa can rediscover some of his past hitting prowess and Peña can replicate his breakout at the plate in 2025, then I feel better about this lineup than I currently do.

That said, an infield surplus is better than whatever is happening in the outfield at the moment. Other than Yordan Alvarez’s bat, in the instances when he plays left field, and Jake Meyers in center, there isn’t much value to glean from the outfield at present. The overall success of this group depends on some of the younger guys. Cam Smith has the tools, but will those traits translate into consistent success? Zach Cole’s swing-and-miss tendencies have been on display in camp. Can Joey Loperfido carry over some of his offensive improvements from Toronto back to Houston? There’s also the question of whether Meyers can come close to showing that his offensive production prior to his hamstring injury last summer wasn’t a fluke.

The best part of the roster is the pitching staff, plain and simple. Even without Framber Valdez, the rotation still features Hunter Brown, who was a Cy Young finalist last season, along with a couple of new faces in Tatsuya Imai and Mike Burrows. Cristian Javier may never fully recapture his 2021-22 peak powers, but he is further removed from Tommy John now. Lance McCullers Jr., in likely his last chance, has flashed higher velocity in Grapefruit League starts compared to the majority of his 2025 appearances. Spencer Arrighetti and Ryan Weiss are options as sixth starters when the rotation inevitably expands in April.

For the bullpen, it might be a little while before that unit is close to full health. Josh Hader and Bennett Sousa will open the season on the IL, unfortunately. But the Astros do have options to absorb those innings, with Bryan Abreu leading the charge as the closer for the time being. But the front office has addressed the lack of depth that hampered last year’s staff, so hopefully that is less of a problem in 2026.

The 2026 season is incredibly consequential for the Astros, more so than the usual campaign. Both Dana Brown and Joe Espada are in the last year of their respective contracts. Another down season will most likely seal their fates as the organization searches for a new direction. Even a postseason appearance won’t guarantee another year for them. However, I think this team has enough in them to win 85 to 90 games, likely enough to secure a Wild Card spot and possibly the AL West title if certain things break right for them in the division.

Feature photo courtesy Pixel Pete.