From dynasty to rebuild: the Houston Astros must finally face their new reality

Anyone that has taken a survey level Psychology class has covered the stages of grief. Essentially, the textbook idea is that people start in a certain stage and then move through other intermediate stages before they wind up landing in acceptance. Officially, it moves from denial, to anger, to bargaining, to depression, and then finally to acceptance. At least that is what the textbook says.

In point of fact, that stages are never that clean. Some of them blend together and sometimes you may skip one or return back to another. There also is no set time table for how long these stages are supposed to take. In this case, we have to first define what exactly has died. The Houston Astros as a dynasty are dead. Of course, many observers would claim that happened in 2023 or 2024 and that would tend to feed the denial portion of the proceedings.

I think most thinking fans know that all of this was going to come to an end someday. Players get too old to perform well or they become too expensive to keep. You have to be extremely lucky to have a Joe DiMaggio follow a Babe Ruth and then a Mickey Mantle follow DiMaggio. Those things don't just happen on the regular. Every great dynasty in sports has an expiration date. You can stave off death with deft moves in the offseason or great player development, but eventually everything dies on the vine.

Knowing and accepting are two different things. This is usually where the anger and bargaining come into play. We blame Dana Brown for bad moves or Joe Espada for mismanagement. Those things can be true independent of the death of dynasty. A part of adulting is realizing that more than one thing will always be true at the same time. So, we get angry with them and then practice the bargaining by making "if.....then" statements. If Carlos Correa had been healthy it would have been different. It they hadn't done such a horrible job of preparing Tatsuya Imai for the big leagues then he could have been a contributing asset. If Brent Strom had been here all year then maybe Mike Burrows wouldn't have struggled so much. All of these things could potentially be true, but they also obfuscate the reality that the end is nigh.

The most important thing when you get beyond the anger and bargaining is to allow yourself to be sad. It's an end of an era, and while there will be remnants of the old (Jose Altuve and Correa), those things will have to live in our memories from now on.

From there, we can finally move onto the more healthy approach of accepting the end of the Astros Dynasty and reacting accordingly.

This is where it pays to go back into our more distant past and realize how this whole thing got started. No, Jeff Luhnow is not walking through that door. Furthermore, the scorched earth philosophy he employed will not work again because of changes in the rules and other structural considerations. However, now is not the time for a caretaker general manager. You aren't tasked with keeping the machine together. You are tasked with building a new one.

You can and should continue spending upper middle class money while you do it. The fans in Houston deserve competitive baseball in the process, but you can do both if you are strategic in how you do it. It begins by asking the very salient question: who among these players is a part of the next great Astros team? We will be asking that question through the fall in advance of the winter meetings. If they aren't a part of that future then they should potentially be moved. If they are then extensions should be considered. Definitely allow yourself to be angry and depressed.

Then, let's get to work and rebuild this thing.

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