2025 ZiPS Projections: Houston Astros

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Houston Astros.

Batters

The 2024 season started terribly for the Astros, with a 12-24 record in the early going and most of their projected rotation on the IL. The hole the team dug was deep enough that even with them playing solid ball after early May, the Astros didn’t get above .500 for good until the end of June. Still, nobody in the AL West managed to take advantage of Houston’s weak start. The Astros built a comfortable lead throughout August, and though the Mariners never fell hopelessly behind in the race, they never made Houston really sweat either.

The team faced two major challenges this offseason: figuring out what to do at third base with the departure of Alex Bregman, and making sure that they didn’t start the 2025 season with a train wreck at first base. The first issue is one Houston has faced before; with the notable exception of Jose Altuve, most of the top contributors to the 2010s Astros have departed in free agency. It’s a testament to the team’s farm system that Houston could lose Carlos Correa, George Springer, and nearly a full rotation’s worth of very good pitchers without a retooling year. On the offensive side, developing Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Jeremy Peña made up for these impressive losses. Bregman isn’t the last loss, either. Altuve is under contract for basically the rest of his career, but a substantial part of what remains will likely consist of his decline phase, because time always win.

The Astros didn’t have a new Bregman coming up through the system, so they traded the final year Tucker to the Cubs for Isaac Paredes, who has three years of team control remaining. ZiPS believes the swap is a good one. ZiPS has park effects for pull/spray types and sees Paredes and his pull-happy tendencies as more valuable in Houston than he would be practically anywhere else.

The other challenge the Astros effectively addressed was finding a real short-term solution at first base, signing Christian Walker to an inexpensive three-year deal. When José Abreu collapsed as a player a couple of years ago, Houston appeared to be caught flat-footed, leaving way too much playing time for Jon Singleton. But ZiPS thinks Walker’s short-term is a bit safer than Abreu’s was entering 2023.

The outfield still projects as average or better at all three positions despite Tucker’s departure, but if the depth charts are accurate, manager Joe Espada is going to have a real juggling job on his hands. It wouldn’t take many unpleasant surprises, such as Chas McCormick not having a bounce-back season or Jake Meyers seeing an erosion in his defensive numbers, for the whole thing to fall apart. Houston’s farm system is far weaker than it was in the late 2010s, so they’re kind of working without a net. Dang it, I should have made a trapeze analogy instead of a juggling one!

Speaking of the farm, ZiPS isn’t the least bit sold on Jacob Melton; his minor league performance was underwhelming for a prospect with a predicted power upside, and he isn’t a big plus defensively in center. And there’s just not much there elsewise, at least for a projection system to cling to. The Astros don’t have a single offensive player under 26 projected to be worth 1 WAR if used in the majors in 2025. ZiPS only really sees Brice Matthews being >50% to peak as a league-average player, and that’s a guy who ZiPS gives a 54-point OPS edge to compared to Steamer. This slowdown in the development cycle is the biggest long-term danger to the Astros.

Despite all the ifs, ands, and buts above, I expect the Astros to have a very good offense in 2025.

Pitchers

ZiPS sees Houston’s rotation as a real plus, more than Steamer currently does. Like the lineup, the Astros have done an impressive job of finding new talent to replace the guys they’ve let walk. Historically, they’ve done something that most teams struggle to do consistently, in that they’ve accumulated a lot of live, interesting arms, and transformed them from throwers into pitchers. Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier, and Ronel Blanco in particular were never considered top prospects, but they came out of the system as shockingly complete pitchers. Hunter Brown had more buzz around him than that trio, but the team turned his early struggles around pretty quickly, and now he projects as a solid no. 2 guy.

Valdez, Brown, and Blanco make for an impressive top three, and as long as those guys stay healthy, Luis Garcia, Lance McCullers Jr., Hayden Wesneski, and Spencer Arrighetti (with a couple spares for the inevitable injuries) should be more than enough to cobble together a solid back of the rotation, even accounting for Garcia’s and McCullers’ injury concerns. This is a very Los Angeles Dodgers-type approach, and as long as you don’t roll snake eyes too many times in a row, it can work marvelously.

The bullpen is pretty solid, but the back-end depth is enough to keep ZiPS from ranking the Astros with the Twins or Guardians. ZiPS agrees that the front five of Josh Hader, Ryan Pressly, Bryan Abreu, Tayler Scott, and Bryan King make for a robust unit. What ZiPS doesn’t like as much is the three or four pitchers after this quintet, with the exception of Shawn Dubin. For lack of a better term — and since I like to make jokes that three people will get — the Kaleb Ort Cloud projects as middling-to-mediocre, and ZiPS would be happy to see Houston add an arm or two over the next month. Forrest Whitley, of course, may still have some real upside remaining as a reliever, and him breaking out wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

The Astros’ projection won’t match that of the best National League teams, but right now they project as the American League’s best, about one to two wins better than the Orioles and Yankees on the strength of their spare starting pitching, which ZiPS sees as deeper than what the other two teams boast. It doesn’t make them overwhelming favorites in the AL West, but with the Mariners and Rangers failing to take big leads forward, ZiPS still sees the Astros as a tier above their divisional rivals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.