Astros trade market for Jake Meyers is very quiet all of a sudden (maybe too quiet)

Around a month ago, most experts thought that the Houston Astros player that was the most likely to be dealt (or at least the one that would get the strongest return anyways) was Jake Meyers. There was lots of talk about how robust his market was and that the Astros saw trading Meyers as a potential avenue to address their need for starting pitching depth.

However, a strange thing has happened since then. While there have been plenty of team-specific postulating and hoping when it comes to Meyers, there has been basically no updates on Meyers' trade market or really any rumors around him at all with most of the focus shifting what is looking like a potential Isaac Paredes trade.

As to why the trade chatter around Meyers died all of a sudden, there are a number of factors to consider.

Jake Meyers' trade market may be a sign of Astros' shifting offseason priorities

At the time when the rumors around Meyers were starting to peak, the Astros still had starting pitching as an offseason priority with a very narrow path towards actually getting depth worth having. In Meyers, Houston had a potential trade chip that would be attractive to pitching-heavy teams, so exploring trades involving him made sense.

However, things are a bit different now that the Astros signed Tatsuya Imai. There are certainly still some questions about the rotation still especially when it comes to health and what exactly to expect out of Cristian Javier and/or Lance McCullers Jr., but the same level of urgency is just not there. Instead, moving Paredes appears to be the move that the Astros could actually make that would give them some payroll relief, although it may come at the cost of making the team worse in 2026.

That does not mean that the Astros won't trade Meyers this offseason. As we have seen, Dana Brown is not afraid to pull the trigger on a move that he thinks is a good deal. However, the odds that Meyers gets moved have certainly gone down and the rumor mill (or lack thereof) is making that very clear.