Astros insider just said what fans are thinking about cause of Houston’s collapse

It is abundantly clear that there is no shortage of sources of blame to pass around in the wake of the Houston Astros' stunning collapse this season. The front office had some notable misses when it came to moves (Christian Walker, promoting Cam Smith too quickly), some important players failed to live up to expectations, and the offense as a whole played exceedingly poorly in the second half. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the Astros have dealt with more than their fair share of injuries this season.

There are some obvious examples here. Yordan Alvarez missed most of the 2025 season first after dealing with a lingering hand injury and then with a late-season ankle sprain. Josh Hader was on his way to a terrific year before his shoulder gave out. Houston could have perhaps weathered the loss of their best hitter and their closer if everyone else played well and stayed healthy, but that absolutely did not happen.

In fact, according to analysis from The Athletic's Chandler Rome, the Astros were hurt by injuries more than any other team in baseball.

While there is a lot of blame to go around, the numbers suggest that injuries were a primary cause for the Astros missing the playoffs

This isn't a qualitative take that "just looks right", although losing most of Houston's rotation, a chunk of their bullpen, and multiple really good hitters for long stretches certainly passes the eye test. If you take a closer look at the actual numbers, like Rome did, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the sheer number of Astros injuries would have cost Houston a pretty comfortable division win, assuming nothing else weird happened.

Both Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus have leaderboards regarding how many wins teams lost over the course of the season. While each site calculates things differently, the one thing that remained true is that the Astros were at the top of both rankings. Fangraphs had Houston lose out on 17.6 fWAR due to injuries this season, while BP had the Astros losing 12 games because of them. However you choose to do the math, it looks rough for Houston.

Of course, that doesn't mean that if the Astros had stayed healthy, those players would have played well. These are just projections after all, and the teams ahead of Houston in the standings had their own injury issues they had to deal with as well. However, it would have been nice to see what the Astros could have done if they were close to full strength for a significant portion of 2025. Sadly, we will never know now.

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