Astros insider’s brutal quote about Houston’s pitching staff is a savage reality check

When it comes to the Houston Astros' pitching staff, there is no shortage of opinions and proposed solutions. Some fans and experts are already proposing trade deadline moves or promotions from the minor leagues that Houston needs to make to add pitching help. Others are quick to blame the front office and manager Joe Espada while calling for their ouster. Then you have the crowd that is picking apart every move the Astros have made with the benefit of hindsight. It is exhausting.

On the pitching side, nearly everything has gone wrong, and that creates a lot of noise to sift through. Roster moves, injured list stints, and general incompetence have all converged on Houston early this season, and parsing it is kind of impossible. Finding the right path forward is like finding a needle in an entire field of hay.

That is, of course, assuming there is a "right path" that can even be taken. In a column for The Athletic, Astros beat writer Chandler Rome was chronicling the impacts that Lance McCullers Jr's injury could have on the team. In that piece, there is a quote that says, "No right choice exists when managing baseball’s worst pitching staff,” which hits home hard.

Chandler Rome just absolutely nailed the Astros current pitching situation in one simple quote

As brutal as it is, Rome is pretty much spot on. For all of the "options" the Astros have available to them at the moment, how many of them are remotely likely to fix what is a pervasive problem? Even if Houston traded for Paul Skenes right now, they would still need multiple starters along with him, and that assumes they could even afford to trade for him. If Josh Hader were magically healed tomorrow, he would still be only one guy. What do you do about the other 3-4 bullpen spots that haven't risen to the occasion?

McCullers Jr. is, in all likelihood, down while his finger heals, and both Hunter Brown and Cristian Javier are hurt for the foreseeable future. Mike Burrows has been a bit of a bust, and Tatsuya Imai is trending towards being a total disaster. Spencer Arrighetti and Peter Lambert are fine, but they are being followed by a bullpen that is easily the worst in baseball. Does anyone here think that Imai figuring things out and/or Hader getting healthy fixes those problems?

As Rome put it, the Astros don't have good choices right now. Period. They have to either get lucky to turn things around or accept that this is absolutely not their year. The latter almost certainly means that Dana Brown will get fired and probably Joe Espada as well, and that assumes they survive until the end of the season. Whether they like it or not, this just seems like the way that things are going to be.

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