Astros’ turnaround may have been spurred by unlikely source, but pieces were always there

The Athletic’s piece on Houston Astros starter Spencer Arrighetti is a good read, and the core premise is one worth taking seriously. A young pitcher speaking up in a struggling clubhouse is the kind of leadership that can absolutely move the needle. It’s hard to argue that. 

But the part that gets a little bit lost in narratives like this is that the Astros weren’t some hollowed-out group of has-beens waiting to be rescued by a motivational speech. This is a team with a good roster that got buried under an avalanche of injuries that caused many writers to be thrilled to write an obituary before we even got to May. 

They had a tough weekend series against the Brewers, but a 7-3 road trip before it pulled them to within 2.5 games of the AL West lead. We’ll see how they respond after losing the most recent series, but the kind of run they’ve been on doesn’t happen simply on vibes. It happens when there are players to back it up. 

Astros' turnaround is fueled by Spencer Arrighetti's leadership and a roster built to compete

The injuries were real and kind of devastating. Hunter Brown and Cristian Javier both missing time was and is massive. Tatsuya Imai’s early-season struggles and injury added to the rotation disarray. For a time, it looked like everything that could go wrong was going wrong. The Astros leaned on their bullpen, which also struggled, and it just snowballed from there. Outside observers saw a team that was floundering alongside an actually bad team in the Angels and assumed the roster was the problem. But that was always a misread. 

The talent was there, just not healthy. Yordan Alvarez, when he is right, is one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball. Jeremy Peña, Christian Walker, and Alvarez, along with guys like Cam Smith and Isaac Paredes, theoretically form a legitimate top of the order that should carry a team even when the pitching underperforms. And we’re finally seeing that maybe the early start was just that, an underperformance, and not a sign of larger issues. 

Arrighetti’s 2026 performance deserves every word of praise it’s gotten. We wrote earlier this month about how good he’s been. The short version is this: The Astros nearly traded him for two months of Dylan Cease last summer. The front office balked because they genuinely liked him more than Cease, or at least more than two months of Cease. Right now, that looks like one of the best (non-)moves of Dana Brown’s tenure. 

In a season where the rotation has lost the majority of its arms, Arrighetti has stepped up as a consistent starter, throwing a low-90s fastball paired with an outstanding curve that keeps hitters off balance. It’s old-school pitching sequencing in the best possible sense. 

The leadership side of it is real, too. Arrighetti has been building toward this role for a while. He was one of the players most intentional about bridging a gap with Imai, taking a business-oriented approach to connecting with his new teammate. After his rookie season, he was already being discussed as someone who would take a more vocal approach and become a guiding hand for younger players. This is just a continuation of something that’s been developing for a bit. 

The angle of the clubhouse speech is compelling because it’s human. Everyone loves when a young player steps up, says something, and the team responds. Baseball writers love it, fans love it, and so it becomes a bit thing. Things are clicking, and the timing can be traced back to that speech. 

What made the clicking possible was the fact that the organization had an infrastructure to respond when someone stepped up. And that infrastructure allowed Arrighetti stepping up to be more than empty words. In May, the Astros went 15-14, which is nothing special, but far better than the 8-18 in April (12-20 when adding in March). It just sort of showed that the footing they found was always there to them. 

The outside narrative had Houston circling the drain in mid-April. The Astros didn’t get that memo. The reality is that the AL West (and the AL as a whole) is such a mess that nobody is truly out of it, even the worst of the worst. The team was never truly that broken. They just needed to get a little healthier and find something to play for. Arrighetti helped provide the latter, while the former would always take care of itself. 

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