Growing Jake Meyers trade buzz creates dangerous dilemma for the Astros

The Houston Astros are willing to listen to trade offers for Jake Meyers, and the list of suitors is starting to pile up. The crop of free-agent center fielders was uninspiring at the start of the offseason, and Cedric Mullins coming off the board and signing with the Tampa Bay Rays has made a thin crop that much thinner.

In a perfect world, the Astros can sell high on Meyers, who still has two years of team control and is coming off a career year that saw him slash .292/.353/.373 while playing stellar defense. The hope, then, is that Meyers' elevated value could attract a reasonably priced arm for the rotation in return.

However, there's some risk. The Astros don't have a ton of depth, so trading Meyers could simply open another hole that Houston doesn't have the resources to fill. On the flip side, if they hang on to Meyers and he regresses to his career norms with the bat, they'll never have an opportunity like this again.

The Jake Meyers trade buzz is creating a conundrum for the Astros in center field

There's some good news. The Astros have not one, but two, potential successors for Meyers chomping at the bit to take over. The bad news? They're not sure if they can truly count on either of them.

First is Jacob Melton, Houston's No. 2 prospect. Melton showed out at Triple-A Sugar Land, posting a .286/.389/.556 in 35 games. Melton got the call to the bigs on June 1, but like almost every other Astro, he quickly succumbed to injury. When he came back, things did not go well, and he finished the major league portion of his year with a .157/.234/.186 line and no homers in 78 plate appearances.

The sample size is small, but the 25-year-old's performance was concerning.

The other option is fellow 25-year-old Zach Cole. He's not as highly-touted as Melton, but he has impressive raw tools ranging from power to speed. A September call-up, Cole turned a lot of heads in his brief taste of major league action, though the experience wasn't without concerns.

The 2022 10th-round pick struck out 38.5% of the time over his 52 plate appearances. That's not a new concern for him, either. Cole spent the majority of his season at Double-A Corpus Christi, where he posted a 36.3% K-rate over 82 games. His performance at Sugar Land was better, coming in at a still-elevated 27.9%, but again, that came in just 15 games.

With this duo of Melton and Cole, the Astros have a lot of potential as well as two lefty bats that can bring balance to the lineup. With that comes a lot of inexperience, uncertainty, and risk. At minimum, with Meyers, the club knows it will receive stellar defense and an acceptable, if subpar, bat. With these two wild cards, the array of outcomes is endless.