Astros Get Early Christian-mas Present

The Astros’ facelift continues. One week after trading star outfielder Kyle Tucker to Chicago, Houston has dived into the free agent market and come up with a replacement: first baseman Christian Walker, now the beneficiary of a brand spanking new three-year, $60 million contract.

Walker didn’t establish himself as a major league starter until he was almost 30; he spent the mid-2010s stuck behind Chris Davis, Freddie Freeman, Joey Votto, and Paul Goldschmidt, in that order. But since claiming the Diamondbacks’ first base job after Goldschmidt got traded, Walker has established himself as one of the most consistent players at the position. Over the past three seasons, he’s had wRC+ marks of 122, 119, and 119, and posted WAR totals of 3.9, 3.9, and 3.0. That downturn in 2024 was informed by an oblique strain that cost Walker the month of August. If he’d played 162 games, he would’ve been right back up around 3.9 WAR again.

The former South Carolina star is 33, a bit old for a big free agent signing, especially a first baseman, and even more especially a right-handed first baseman. But he’ll be a tremendous asset to the Astros, and sorely missed by the Diamondbacks.

You want to know why this is a great deal for Houston? Come take a look at this. Take a peek. Take a gander. This is every season of 200 plate appearances or more by an Astros first baseman since 2015. That’s when the Process ended and the Astros got good. Think about how many All-Stars have come through Houston in the past decade. And apart from a couple seasons before Yuli Gurriel’s bat speed evaporated, none of that magic has happened at first base.

I dunno, some of those Marwin Gonzalez and Tyler White seasons look OK. Are you sure we’re not just being spoiled by how good the Astros have been at the other positions?

No.

Houston has many superlative qualities. It’s Space City, the energy capital of America, the most air conditioned city in the world. But most of all, it is the Mecca of crappy first base play. Over the past three seasons, Astros first basemen are a cumulative two wins below replacement level. That’s not only worst in the league, that’s the worst number at any infield position across that time period.

Not counting DH — where like a third of the league is underwater; that positional adjustment is a cruel mistress — there are nine positions where a team has dug a full win below replacement since 2022.

Apart from the Astros, every other team on this list has been dog crap. And the White Sox are on it twice, because they’ve been doubly dog crap. If anything, it’s impressive that the Astros have made the playoffs each of the past three years — and won a World Series along the way — while saddled to this absolute millstone of a position.

With that said, it’s not like the Astros weren’t aware of their deficiencies. Walker’s reported $20 million salary will make him the second-highest-paid player on the Astros, behind Jose Altuve. It is an amusing bit of trivia, then, that even before this signing, the Astros’ second-biggest salary already went to a mid-30s first baseman on a three-year contract: José Abreu.

For those of you who didn’t follow Abreu’s brief tenure with the Astros, here’s an illustration in the form of a rocket launch:

And this wasn’t a case of the Astros signing Abreu and not realizing he’d been washed for years. The 2020 MVP was still really good in 2022; his 3.8 WAR that season was comparable to Walker’s average performance over the past three years.

Suddenly my optimism for the Walker signing is slightly less boundless.

Well, let’s talk ourselves into how this is different. First, Walker is younger now than Abreu was then. The two-time College World Series champion will turn 34 one day after Opening Day next spring, while Abreu was 36 when he first suited up for the Astros. In your mid-30s, a difference of two years in age probably matters less than how much fiber you eat and how much time you spend stretching your hip flexors, but it’s a favorable data point.

Also, Walker’s the better athlete. He’s not fast — at least not anymore. I’m sure you all remember when he won a College World Series game with his legs. Oh, you don’t? Well, it can’t hurt to watch it again.

That was fun, but those days in Omaha were a long time ago.

Back to the nearer past: Walker was the best defensive first baseman in the league in 2024, while Abreu is a bigger, bulkier physical presence, and was DHing 35 times a year starting with his rookie season. The defensive difference between the two is worth about a win per season, which is not insubstantial. It remains to be seen how that figures into his eventual decline. I’d speculate that Walker will age better than Abreu did, but that is indeed only speculation.

What’s tricky about avoiding another Abreu situation is that there were yellow flags around him at the time, certainly, but few red flags. Abreu was always more of a spray hitter and a groundball hitter than Walker. His last two years in Chicago, he did alter his game somewhat. He started walking more, and in 2022 he cut his strikeout rate by almost a quarter. At the same time, he halved his home run total from the previous year, but he also raised his batting average by 43 points and continued making hard contact at an elite rate.

When he signed with the Astros, I was under no illusion that he was still the guy who’d won the MVP in 2020 by hitting 19 homers in 60 games. Instead, I thought Houston was getting a replacement for Michael Brantley: A high-OBP line drive hitter who’d chip in maybe 20 home runs and 30 or 40 doubles. It was only after arriving in Houston that Abreu’s bat went completely.

This is a lot of ink spilled about a guy who’s no longer on the Astros, I realize, but it’s important to note the ways in which Walker is a completely different hitter. FanGraphs doesn’t have a sitewide editorial stance on individual players, but a lot of us here like Walker as a player. For me, that’s mostly due to the fact that he was one of the best players on my favorite college baseball team when they won back-to-back national championships.

But my coworkers, who had the misfortune of not attending the University of South Carolina, the selling point for Walker is that he’s a process nut. That big, bald noggin of his is a bottomless repository of hitting information, and he’s one of the more empirically savvy hitters you’ll find. See this 2023 interview with David Laurila for insight into how Walker thinks. And for insight into the real-world effects of Walker’s studies, see this 2022 story by Ben Clemens.

In 2024, Walker was 25th out of 129 qualified hitters in HardHit%, 24th (in ascending order) in GB/FB ratio, and 48th in pull rate. He strikes out a lot and generally doesn’t put up a huge BABIP, but when Walker puts the ball in play, he puts it where it’s going to do damage.

Here’s that argument in visual form. As much as I’m enjoying writing about the impact of the Crawford Boxes on right-handed power hitters for the third time in eight days — I don’t feel like I’m going batty in the slightest — here’s Walker’s spray chart from 2024, laid over the silhouette of Minute Maid Park.

Seems like Walker could do pretty well there.

Paying $20 million a year over three seasons for a 34-year-old seems like a risk. But no contender had a greater need at a single position than the Astros did at first base. Walker rated as the second-best free agent first baseman, behind Pete Alonso, and over the next three seasons, I bet the difference between the two will be smaller than you’d think.

So if this is a risk, it’s a calculated one. If you want a sure thing, you’d better be prepared to pay a lot more than what the Astros did.