3 moves Astros must make immediately after Winter Meetings

Add a depth option who can run

During Winter Meetings, Dana Brown and Joe Espada named speed and base-running as areas where the team needed to improve. The Astros had a 77% success rate on stolen base attempts, below the league average rate of 79%, and were also under the league average 117 total stolen bases with 107. It seems unlikely that this can be solved purely by the players already on the roster; lineup staples like Yordan Alvarez, Alex Bregman, Jose Abreu simply aren't going to run often, if at all. Players like Kyle Tucker, Chas McCormick, and Corey Julks could certainly work on baserunning and be encouraged to steal more, but the latter two may not be everyday players next year.

This is why players like Tim Locastro, who has made a career on coming off the bench as a pinch runner. His 2023 Baseball Savant page is a little astounding; he's unqualified in almost every non-running category because he simply didn't appear outside of a base-running context enough to qualify him to be ranked. MLB is toying with a "designated pinch runner" in the Atlantic League, which if it's ever implemented would force a lot of teams' hands on adding speed, but the Astros should just do it anyway. The new rules are clearly allowing teams like the Diamondbacks and Reds to play a specific brand of fast baseball, which the Astros need to be able to keep up with better going forward.