Astros insider is taking team to task for their injury issues (and he is 100% right)

The talk track coming out of the Houston Astros organization is that the team might be in the playoffs right now if not for injuries. If only the club could have stayed healthy, they'd have likely made the postseason dance. If only they'd had Yordan Alvarez for more than 48 games. If only they hadn't lost three different starting pitchers to Tommy John surgery. If only...

It's true that the Astros were besieged by injuries. All told, 28 different players spent time on the IL this season. Some of them were Houston's biggest stars, like Alvarez, Jeremy Peña, Isaac Paredes, and Josh Hader. Jake Meyers missed significant time during his breakout season, too. Many, many players did.

To an extent, injuries are part of the game across the league. Houston wasn't the only team that had to try to overcome the injury bug, though they may have suffered more than most. Who got injured and when mattered too. Losing Alvarez for the second time, just as he was raking again with only two weeks left in the season, was devastating. Seeing Luis Garcia go down in just his second start after a 28-month battle to return to the mound was heartbreaking.

This is all very true. But the elephant in the room is how the decisions the organization made contributed to or significantly worsened the injury epidemic, as The Athletic's (subscription required) Chandler Rome correctly points out in his recent column.

Astros insider Chandler Rome points out the organization's role in the injury epidemic

In his column, Rome pointed out the organization's failure to properly diagnose Yordan Alvarez's hand injury the first time. The club originally diagnosed the slugger with a strained muscle in his hand, only coming to the conclusion that something more was at play after he still felt pain following a batting practice session nearly a month after the injury initially occurred.

Rome wrote, "Though Brown acknowledged organizational missteps in the handling of slugger Yordan Alvarez’s right-hand ailment, he did not elaborate on what — if anything — the franchise could change about the way it handles injuries or injury recovery."

There's the key. There doesn't seem to be a plan on how to prevent this from happening again. The Astros were also at least partly responsible for Jake Meyers injury as well. Per Rome, "No two players better personified Houston’s problematic response to injuries than Alvarez and center fielder Jake Meyers, who injured himself on July 9 while running out to his position before first pitch. Meyers had sustained a right-calf injury a few days earlier, tested it out that afternoon under the watch of Houston’s athletic training staff, and was deemed ready to play."

Doesn't look good, does it?

Brown also claimed in his press conference that injuries are an "industry-wide problem," which begs the question, then why is it being floated as an excuse for the Astros' collapse? After all, if heightened injuries are something that every team has to deal with, then why wasn't Houston able to overcome what presumably was a level playing field?

This isn't the first time that Rome has rightly called out the Astros for their handling of injuries. The club only performed imaging on Alvarez's injured right hand soon after the injury occurred, when inflammation could have impacted the accuracy of the scan, and then again after he felt pain after swinging the bat nearly a month later. Why weren't additional scans performed earlier, which could have identified the issue more quickly and expedited his return?

At the time Alvarez's fracture was uncovered, Rome wrote, "Nowhere in Brown’s team-written biography does it describe any medical education in his past, yet he sat atop a bench on Saturday afternoon attempting to explain how a $2.8 billion entity has now twice failed to discover a fracture in one of its franchise players." Ouch!

The harsh truth of the matter is that if the Astros want to use injuries as the excuse for their 2025 failures, then they need to acknowledge their culpability in allowing the repeated injury waves to occur. They're at least partially responsible for the slow healing of some of their biggest stars, which certainly impacted the win-loss record.

By the sound of it, Houston doesn't have much of a plan, at least not one that they're willing to share, on how to prevent this moving forward. If they don't make significant adjustments, they can't be surprised if they suffer the same fate in 2026.

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