A Call to Arms
As free agency begins, the Astros are short on innings
More than once over the last few posts, I’ve mentioned the Astros’ dearth of arms as we settle into free agency.
The thought occurred to me that presenting this information in graph form with actual numbers might make it easier to understand and comprehend just how significant the problem is.
Counting 3 position players, Houston used 36 pitchers last season to cover 1,442 innings.
Fifteen of those players - from Framber Valdez to John Rooney are no longer on the 40-man roster, leaving the Astros with 1,046 of the 1,442 innings (72.5%) still on their 40-man.
That sounds pretty good, but the issue is that 7 of those arms, fully a third of the 21 remaining, ended the 2025 season on the Injured List and are in some form of recovery.
Those seven are: Spencer Arrighetti, Ronel Blanco, Josh Hader, Kaleb Ort, Bennett Sousa, Brandon Walter and Hayden Wesneski.
Removing their innings leaves us with 727.33 innings (50.4%) “healthy” innings from 2025.
Some of those pitchers are closer to returning than others, but how confident are we that Ort, Walter, or Sousa will be 100% ready to go in the spring?
We don’t know, but even if we took the optimistic approach and went with 1,000 innings on the current 40-man, that still leaves us more than 450 innings - 50 nine-inning games - that need to be covered.
Nearly a third of the season.
There’s an obvious hole in the starting rotation where Valdez was, but what doesn’t show below is that there are huge question marks about three arms that opened last season in the rotation and were injured: Arrighetti, Blanco and Wesneski.
They were replaced by others still on the 40-man, but the best performer of the replacements, Brandon Walter, was himself injured.
That leaves us with just less than half of 2025 “healthy” starter innings.
The Astros have signed Nate Pearson and Peter Lambert (not on the 40-man), but those feel like long shots, despite the Astros’ history of making something out of very close to nothing (Alexander and Walter among them).
If last year showed us anything, it’s not just that you need arms to cover the 450ish innings, that’s the minimum. There will be injuries big and small along the way to 162 and those will need to be covered, too.
I’m not generally an alarmist, and truth be told, I’m not sure where this ranks among their Major League peers, but it feels like Houston is headed for trouble in 2026 unless this is addressed this winter and perhaps next spring, too.
Thanks for reading!