One stat tells us all we need to know about the state of the Astros’ pitching staff

By now, it's news to no one that the Houston Astros have some real issues with their pitching staff. Through 21 games, Houston hurlers rank dead last with a 6.15 ERA. Problems exist in both the starting rotation and the bullpen.

Both are serious issues, but the rotation deficiencies feed into the bullpen with Astros relievers throwing the fourth-most innings in baseball, in large part due to the ineffectiveness of the starters. Getting better performance from the rotation would lessen the workload on the beleaguered bullpen and allow Joe Espada the flexibility to use the handful of relievers who are performing well more and somewhat hide the scuffling arms.

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened in part because the club has used a whopping 10 different starters through its first 21 games. On average, a major league team sees between 10 and 12 pitchers start at least one game over the course of a full season. The Astros are already there, with 141 games to go.

Injuries have further exposed the uncertainty residing within the Astros' rotation depth

With Hunter Brown, Tatsuya Imai, and Cristian Javier now being joined by Cody Bolton on the IL, we've seen the injury replacement starters start to go down, necessitating replacements of their own. If you count Nate Pearson, who hurt his elbow in spring training as a starter, the Astros now have five possible rotation arms on the IL.

A 2014 study by FanGraphs found that the probability of a team having four or more starters on the IL at the same time was one percent. Even if you adjust for how the game has evolved over the last 12 years, the likelihood of a team having poor injury luck to this extreme is incredibly slim.

To a degree, you can't blame Houston for being so snake-bitten by injuries; however, there are a couple of caveats to that point. The first is that some of these guys haven't been paragons of health. When you are relying on pitchers with the injury histories that Javier and Lance McCullers Jr. have, you can't be shocked when bumps and bruises arise.

On the other hand, the Astros' quantity-over-quality approach meant that in the event of injuries (and even if everyone was healthy), the team would have to lean on some seriously unproven pitchers, and the way things have played out, failing to add a reliable veteran starter is coming back to bite them.

Given all of this, it shouldn't be a total surprise that they've found themselves in such a mess, even if the injury probability was low for an average club. The Astros aren't the average club; they're a team trying to make do with injury-prone arms and reclamation projects. It's been that way before the injury wave fully crashed down upon them.

Things might only get worse from here. As long as Brown, Imai, and others are on the IL, the revolving door in the rotation is going to go into overdrive. As the replacements struggle, the ineffectiveness will cause even more shuffling, with each new option presenting less potential than the last.

Remember the six-man rotation discussion from spring training? The struggling and overworked status of the bullpen makes the threat of losing another bullpen piece untenable. That would only make the issues on that end of the pitching spectrum worse.

The Astros desperately need a couple of these guys to step up. Spencer Arrighetti's 2026 debut provides some encouragement, but they'll need more. Mike Burrows needs to be the player they thought they were acquiring. Imai needs to get back quickly and get right. At least one of these other random dart throws needs to prove he's worth his salt. Otherwise, we could see a record-setting number of starters utilized as the Astros crash and burn.

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