FanHouse BradAusmus

Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2009.

Everyone expected the Astros to be awful in 2008 and indeed, they were out of the playoff race by more than ten games as July wound down. Oddly, Ed Wade decided to reload at the trade deadline and acquired Randy Wolf and LaTroy Hawkins. Somehow, they very nearly sprinted from Pirate territory at the bottom of the NL Central to a wild-card berth. In the end, they were derailed both by Hurricane Ike and by just not being good enough.

That's put them in an interesting situation. The general feeling is that they're going to try and reload around this team and make another run at the playoffs in 2009. That's a potentially disastrous plan, but rebuilding around middling veterans and just missing the playoffs is what general manager Wade is known for. This is an important off-season for the Astros. They're not nearly as close to contending as people think they are and what they do this winter could set the course for the team for the next several years.

Starting this year, the age of no-hit, good-D catchers in Houston was supposed to come crashing to an end. After seven years of Brad Ausmus and his career OPS+ of 7, JR Towles was supposed to arrive and provide Houston with a bat to go with great defense behind the plate. Towles is instead hitting .145/.270/.282 (for an OPS+ of 46) and that's earned him a demotion back to AAA Round Rock. At least he's taking it in stride:

"Since I wasn't playing the last couple of days, I figured it was coming," Towles said. "I guess I wasn't too surprised. I'm not happy about it, but I'm going to work hard to get back up here."

[...]

"Maybe I was thinking too much," he said. "I was trying to get things figured out and people were saying, 'Do this; do that.' I was trying everything. I think I needed to go back to the basics and work things out."

Towles cruised through the minors with a .301/.389/.471 line, showing that he's got a good approach at the plate to go with his hitting talent. It seemed like he was just over his head as a 23-year old dealing with learning a pitching staff and hitting major league pitching at the same time. It shouldn't take him long to straighten himself out in AAA and be back in Houston, though.

Roger Clemens has friends (or at least fans) in high places. Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat in the House of Representatives, called upon the FBI to stop their investigation as to whether Clemens perjured himself in front of Congress. From the NY Daily News:

Federal law-enforcement officials should use their limited resources to target serious threats to the nation, such as terrorism and organized crime, Weiner said during a conference call with reporters.

In other words, if you go after Clemens, the terrorists have won! Sorry, but I don't buy it, and fortunately the FBI doesn't either. Weiner's faulty logic reminded me of something Brad Ausmus, one of Clemens' former teammates, said last week:

Ausmus called the government's involvement in baseball's steroid issues "a little extreme." But he said not even Clemens should be spared if he is found guilty of giving false testimony.

"If being under oath is going to carry any weight, you have to have the threat of perjury, regardless of what the case is, or who the person is," he said.

He's 100% correct. If Weiner thinks this is still about steroids, he's completely missing the point. This is about something much larger: it's about upholding the integrity of sworn testimony, without which the entire judicial system goes down in flames. It doesn't matter what topic Clemens may have lied about, it matters only that it seems he did lie. Maybe he shouldn't have been put under oath in the first place, but once he was, the government has an obligation to investigate discrepancies.

Free agency started just two days ago and the Astros have already made some important phone calls, including reaching out to Torii Hunter and Aaron Rowand. GM Ed Wade revealed that acquiring an outfielder will be one of the team's biggest priorities this winter. From Brian McTaggart of the Houston Chronicle:

"We'd like to figure out a way to either get a center fielder that would allow us to move (Hunter) Pence to right, (or) if it ended up being a corner outfielder and leaving Hunter in center, that's one of the areas we'd like to address," said Wade, who has had trade talks with teams for established outfielders.
...
"Those names are going to create a lot of buzz, but really it's just procedural," Wade said. "Of the players who end up filing for free agency, I imagine we'll end up contacting over a third of the group and having some casual conversation with other guys. It's just part of the process."

Can you imagine Hunter or Rowand playing at Minute Maid Park? Instead of going all Spiderman at the wall (or in Rowand's case, crashing into the wall) they'll have to run up that little hill thing in center field -- I'd love to see those highlights.

Every year dads push their sons to play baseball, to pitch, to play shortstop, to hit home runs, all in hopes of fulfilling their own dreams of being the dad of a big league baseball player. The dads have it all wrong. All they really need to do is teach their kids to how to squat and stop balls with their chest and be just like Brad Ausmus. Despite any discernible offensive skills, only 16 players in major league history have caught more games than Ausmus has in his 14 (going on 15) year career.

Not to pile on Ausmus here, but let's look a little further into the stats than that Houston Chronicle article does. In three of the past four seasons, Ausmus has done something incredibly difficult to do: he's finished with a lower slugging percentage than on-base percentage. In his entire career, he's finished with an OPS+ of over 100 just once (OPS+ explanation here). I won't go all hardcore stat-head on you here (can you tell I'm just itching to do it?), but Baseball Prospectus 2007 estimates that the difference between Ausmus and an average offensive catcher (say, AJ Pierzynski) was about 30 runs at the plate or three wins on the field. That's a whole lot. Looks like giving up catching when I was 14 was the worst career move of my life.

Of course I can poke fun at Ausmus all I like because the the joke will always be on me; according to his Baseball Reference page (see that link above), Ausmus has made over $28 million in his career.