5 most hated Houston Astros players of all-time

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Every franchise has a few names that are culturally verboten, prone to provoke spitting or cursing whenever they're mentioned, regardless of the player's talent or how much he's done for a franchise. Some, like a certain never-Hall-of-Famer with an alliterative name, have more complicated legacies, while others, like a certain major-leaguer-turned-Survivor-contestant, will always be known simply as garbage human beings. There are all of those in the middle, as well, players who just never amounted to what fans expected them to be, players who became trade chips and then victims of circumstance, and so on.

Here are 5 of the most hated Houston Astros of all-time

The Houston Astros are a pretty old franchise that, especially in recent years, has had its fair share of controversy. Controversy always breeds dialogue, dialogue frequently breeds vitriol, and vitriol finds a way to persevere. Here are five of Houston's most hated players of all time.

Mike Fiers

We're starting off with a bang: former Astros starting pitcher Mike Fiers, who played for Houston in 2015 through 2017 might be the most hated Astro by the team's own fan base. If 'Houston' and '2017' being so close together in this context worries you, it probably should.

In 2019, Fiers' revelation of the Astros sign-stealing operation to Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of the Athletic sparked their investigation and led to the watershed expose that made the Astros the most hated team in baseball. Despite Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman being the only remaining Astros from their marred, championship-winning 2017 season, the scandal continues to make them an incredibly easy team to root against, even now.

Wider reactions to Fiers' betrayal of his former team were mostly positive, but he still drew criticism from noted guy-who-will-do-anything-for-his-team Pedro Martinez, who called Fiers a bad teammate. Whether or not it was the right thing to do in a broader moral sense, it definitely had consequences for the team Fiers left behind in Houston (he left the Astros to spend a short-lived stint in Detroit in 2018). Even if they weren't material (none of the Astros involved faced disciplinary action of any kind), the Astros' reputation was incontrovertibly changed by Fiers' reveal.

Roberto Osuna

Major League Baseball likes to project a squeaky clean, America's Pastime, take your kids to the ballpark kind of image, but sometimes players don't get the memo. Naming a whole passel players who have struggled to be decent human beings, usually and especially toward women, doesn't do anyone any good, so we won't do it here — it's likely that a few examples of good baseball players who might not be good people have popped into your head already anyway. Certainly, neither does employing them after the league has taken disciplinary action against them for domestic violence, but the Astros didn't seem to care much about that when they acquired Roberto Osuna.

Osuna was picked up from the Blue Jays while serving a 75-game suspension for domestic violence against his former partner. Actual charges by law enforcement in Toronto were later dropped for some strange, seemingly purely procedural reasons, and the Astros decided that he'd be a good addition to their team anyway.

It seems that not even baseball is exempt from an argument that sounds a lot like separating the art from the artist, because Osuna stayed with the team for two years before he refused Tommy John surgery and was outrighted by the team in 2020. Putting Osuna on the roster was a misguided thing to do right from the start; not only did it end badly for all parties, it projected a noxious message from Astros management about the team's attitude toward women.

Jesús Alou

Here's a refreshing change of pace: in the case of Jesús Alou, distaste from Houston fans has less to do with his personal life and more to do with his ability on the field. In 1968, Alou, the youngest of the Alou brothers, was selected to be part of the very first Montreal Expos team, but was promptly traded to the newly renamed Houston Astros (they were previously the Houston Colt .45s) for two-time All-Star and two-time recipient of MVP votes Rusty Staub.

Staub went on to spend three years in Montreal, all of which were All-Star years, and receive MVP votes twice again. He became beloved in Canada; he was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2012, had his number retired, and hit for an OBP of .402, which is an Expos record. Meanwhile, Alou languished in Houston for seven years (non-consecutively — he retired as an Astro in 1979 after bouncing around the league and spending some time in Mexican leagues), never once an All-Star, never mind receiving MVP votes. He was a pretty good contact hitter (.282 BA), but hardly walked (.313 OBP) and couldn't hit for power (.366 with 32 career home runs).

Malice toward Alou really boils down to the outcome of a mismatched trade — misguided but not altogether Alou's fault. If the player Houston lost to Montreal had been less exceptional than Rusty Staub, Alou probably could've been forgotten altogether instead of being remember poorly.

Jim Clancy

Jim Clancy's arrival in Houston is another result of a misguided front office decision that ultimately led to him being remember with very little fondness by Astros fans. Clancy spent 12 seasons in Toronto, 1977-1988, where he was fine but not great, posting a 4.10 ERA. Clearly, the Blue Jays valued his consistency and the sheer amount of innings he could pitch per season, otherwise they wouldn't have kept him so long, but after a disappointing 1988 season, they finally let him go in free agency.

Clancy started 26 games for the Astros in 1989 to a 5.08 ERA and was relegated to a bullpen role for the rest of his three year tenure in Houston, where he developed a reputation for blowing games whenever he came in. In three years, he pitched 278 innings for a 5.02 ERA. He was traded to the Braves in 1991, where he only pitched 34 2/3 innings. Ultimately, he retired in 1992 after signing a minor league deal with the Cubs.

Shawn Chacón

Clubhouse cut-ups aren't necessarily uncommon in baseball, but ones that lead to scary physical altercations very much are. The Astros had one of their own in 2008, when pitcher Shawn Chacón engaged in a screaming match with GM Ed Wade before resorting to choking him and throwing him to the ground. Chacón had been struggling, to say the least, in June of that year; he posted a 9.35 ERA in three starts, turned his back on his pitching coach when he came out for a mound visit, and was demoted to a relief role on the 19th.

His confrontation with Wade took place less than a week later on the 25th, and he was placed on waivers the very next day. Unsurprisingly, he cleared wavers and his contract was terminated, meaning he lost almost $1 million he stood to make from the rest of his year in Houston. Despite making an attempt at a comeback that led him to sign a minor league contract with A's, Chacón never pitched in the majors again.

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