Alan Truex: Altuve & Co. will keep Astros bashing, but will the ‘pen hold up?

HOUSTON — Over the past four decades the Astros have had the occasional uberseason, though nothing comparable to 2017 when they were World Series champions.  But they’ve never maintained excellence for long.

In 1986 they won their division and lost a closely contested Championship Series to one of the greatest teams in history – and arguably the most disorderly — the New York Mets of Darryl Strawberry, Doc Gooden, Lenny Dykstra and Keith Hernandez, who kept a bucket of iced beers at his locker.

But a few weeks later the Astros were dismantling, as general manager Dick Wagner proclaimed, “Champions don’t repeat.”

He was more right than wrong.

In the mid-90s, Gerry Hunsicker built a team that won three straight division titles, but he knew success would not last.  “You build a good farm system and wait for young players to mature,” he said.  “But unless you’re a big-market team, you lose them in free agency.  Then you have to ride the cycle again.”

Hunsicker tired of owner Drayton McLane, who considered the country’s fourth-largest city a small market.  McLane imposed his own salary cap: half the team’s total revenue.   So Hunsicker left for Tampa Bay, where he helped put the truly small-market Rays on a cycle to the playoffs.

The Houston team that Hunsicker created faded as McLane stripped it for sale, thinking that somehow made it more attractive.  Enter Jim Crane as owner, and a slow but well-designed rebuild began that culminated in last year’s world championship, the first in the 55-year history of the franchise.

So where do they go now?  

The first sign that this time could be different: Crane opened the vault to give MVP Jose Altuve a $154 million contract extension that amounts to a lifetime deal.  He will be 34 when it expires.

Not to put too much into this.  The previous regime locked down superstars Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell but skimped elsewhere.  Hunsicker thought he had the ingredients for a world title in 1999.  But McLane drew the line on re-signing moderately priced catcher Brad Ausmus, a future big-league manager who was a leader on the field and in the clubhouse and proved irreplaceable.

Though the long term is in doubt as more stars reach free agency, the 2018 season, which begins Thursday in Arlington against the Texas Rangers, holds promise.  The Astros could be the first team since the Yankees in 2000 to repeat a world championship.  The entire lineup, which last year was by far the best in baseball, returns.

And the starting rotation improves with the trade for Pittsburgh ace Gerrit Cole.  He will start No. 4 behind Cy Young Award winners Justin Verlander and Dallas Keuchel and 24-year-old Lance McCullers Jr., who starred in the postseason with a 1-0 record, a save and a 2.61 ERA.  No. 5 starter Charlie Morton was 14-7 in the regular season and 2-1 in postseason.

No team has as much rotational depth.  Brad Peacock (13-2, 3.00) and Collin McHugh (5-2, 3.55) are ready to step in when injuries occur, as they do every year to McCullers.

The weakness of this club is its bullpen.   As an Astros executive put it: “I don’t think any team ever won a World Series with a bullpen as bad as ours.”

Indeed, Ken Giles was a reliable closer in the regular season (34 saves, 2.30 ERA) but melted down in the postseason, his right hand literally trembling at times.  His ERA was 11.74 in 7 games, and he lost his closing role to Peacock, who proved surprisingly adaptable to relief.

For all the good GM Jeff Luhnow has done, he’s been unable to procure a lefthanded reliever.  The best he has is Tony Sipp, so ineffective last year (5.79 ERA in 46 games) that he did not make the postseason roster.  The 34-year-old Sipp wasn’t much better this spring, with a 5.19 for his 9 games.

A.J. Hinch, the most resourceful of managers, insists his team can get by because James Hoyt soon will return from an oblique injury, and right-hander Chris Devenski throws a remarkable changeup (“Circle of Death”) that fades away from lefties.

That said, neither Hoyt nor Devenski inspired much confidence this spring with ERAs of 8.64 and 3.38 respectively.  Each went 0-1 for a team that finished 21-9 in the Grapefruit League, second by a half-game to Boston, for what that’s worth.

On the hopeful side, the Astros have the sport’s most underrated pitching coach in 69-year-old Brent Strom.  

Many years ago he made a winner out of Doug Brocail after he’d been 4-13 in three seasons in San Diego.  Brocail is now pitching coach for the Rangers.  He was one of Strom’s favorite projects: “He had bad mechanics just like I had.”

More recently, Strom transformed McHugh, a waiver pickup with a 0-8 MLB record, by persuading him to rely on his curveball.

More significantly, Strom reworked Keuchel’s delivery after he was 9-18.

And Morton, who wrapped spring training with 5 1/3 innings of shutout ball, credits Strom with sharpening his mechanics after he was 46-71 before joining the Astros prior to last season.

It’s hard to believe that Strom was co-managing a Tucson pet store with his wife when Luhnow found him in 2014.

Perhaps Strom can work his magic with some lefty reliever we have not yet seen.  If not, the Astros just might go all the way again by pounding the baseball, playing solid defense and letting their starting pitchers carry them to a lead that even a shabby bullpen can hold.