rewrite this title 2026 Season Preview: Houston Astros

Most Recent Playoff Appearance: 2024 (Lost ALWC to Tigers, 2-0)

Just barely missing the playoffs one season does not a cold streak make. But it’s hard to look at the 2025 Houston Astros and resist the tempting question: Is the era of Astros dominance over? Has the stalwart, implaccable force of the AL West, the guardian of the ALCS gates, truly become just another team?

Consider the personnel that brought this Houston franchise to dominance in the mid 2010s. All of the top leaders have moved on—GM Jeff Luhnow (out of MLB), Manager A.J. Hinch (Tigers), Scouting Director Mike Elias (Orioles), and Farm Director Pete Putila (Braves)—as well as many if not most of their lieutenants. Some of these departures were casualties of the team’s cheating scandal, but more were victims of the club’s success, hired away for promotions.

Perhaps it’s confirmation bias to think one bad year is a sign of the end times. But the change in leadership is nonetheless striking. With expiring contracts in the front office and dugout at the end of the 2026 season, the turnover may well kick into a new level.

Unlike the mid-2010s organization, the current group is not being fed with a decade of high-round draft picks. It is now a farm system we rank 27th best among the 30 teams. They used a franchise-record 36 different pitchers in 2025, and had only two pitchers cross the 90 IP mark. And yet it was their offense that likely hurt them more, scoring the 21st-most runs in baseball, while posting their worst offensive numbers (101 DRC+) since 2020. The big sluggers were hurt; the young hitters were uninspiring.

But despite it all, this was still a winning team in 2025, a team just three games out of first place and excluded from the final Wild Card spot on a matter of a tiebreaker. There’s a lot of green on that graphic up there. It’s a team we, once again, forecast to be a winning club, a team in the thick of the playoff hunt. They’re no longer the dominant force of the American League, true, but pity the team that looks past them on the schedule.