What Steve Cohen, Mets can learn from Astros

Since the Guggenheim group took over a decade ago, the Dodgers have won eight straight NL West championships, three NL pennants and a World Series. With the Astros making their second-straight World Series appearance this week and the fourth since 2017, it’ s worth taking a look at what has made the club so successful in that time span and how the Mets could adopt...

It’s no secret the Mets view the Los Angeles Dodgers as a barometer for success. The Mets view the organization as a sustainable juggernaut in the same mold as the one they would like to become.

Since the Guggenheim group took over a decade ago, the Dodgers have won eight straight NL West championships, three NL pennants and a World Series. They won 111 regular season games this season and have All-Stars at nearly every position, many of which are homegrown. The club has a robust analytics department and the budget to be able to sign the top free agents each winter.

It’s an enviable operation, right down to the celebrities that dot the stands behind home plate. But for all of the success, the club routinely falls short of playoff expectations. If the Mets really want a team to emulate right now, maybe it should be the Houston Astros.

With the Astros making their second-straight World Series appearance this week and the fourth since 2017, it’s worth taking a look at what has made the club so successful in that time span and how the Mets could adopt some similar philosophies.

Few other teams have had the kind of success the Astros have in identifying, drafting and developing talent. There was plenty of controversy surrounding the decision to tank in order to get draft picks from 2006-2015, and they did miss on a few of those picks as well. But the pipeline is absolutely flowing and has been for nearly a decade.

At the plate, there are veterans like Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel, who came to the Astros in 2016 after a standout career in Cuba who were all developed in Houston’s system, impact bats like Yordan Alvarez and Kyle Tucker, and role players like Chas McCormick and Jeremy Peña, the latter of which was drafted out of the University of Maine. Orono isn’t exactly a baseball hotbed.

The pitching group is just as deep with Christian Javier, Framber Valdez, Jose Urquidy, Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr.

Just an embarrassment of riches.

This is a ridiculously deep group of talent all identified and developed by the Astros themselves. The Mets — and every other team in baseball, for that matter — should find out what the Astros player development department is doing and then do exactly that.

The Houston-grown players have allowed the club to lose key players like Carlos Correa and Gerrit Cole and still remain competitive year after year, especially when it comes to pitching.

The entire staff is adept at suppressing home runs and limiting big innings. Just ask the Yankees, who were frustrated by their inability to get any offense going in the ALCS. The team that finished the regular season with the fourth-highest OPS in the league and hit more home runs than anyone else hit just .162 in the ALCS and struck out 50 times in four games.

The Astros have mastered the art of maximizing pitcher abilities. They’ve helped Javier learn to command the insanely high rise on his pitches. McCullers almost never throws fastballs anymore and Valdez uses his curveball earlier in counts.

The managers and coaches put their pitchers in the best spots to succeed based on matchups and game planning. The lack of a left-handed specialist in the bullpen is evidence of this. The Astros don’t have a true, dominant left-hander in the bullpen despite the fact that manager Dusty Baker thought the team needed one when he came to Houston in 2020. When put in the right spots against the right hitters, their right-handed pitchers could get right- and left-handed hitters out equally as well.

And, of course, the Astros have future hall-of-famer Justin Verlander, who has acted as a mentor of sorts for some of the younger pitchers.

Max Scherzer is playing a similar role for the Mets and they have a few younger pitchers who may be ready to step into bigger roles next season in left-hander David Peterson and right-hander Tylor Megill. But the minor league system isn’t producing at nearly the same rate as the Houston system. Maybe it will over time, but for now, the Mets have to supplement and general manager Billy Eppler said the club plans to do exactly that this winter.

The Mets are also using a manager from the same era as Baker. There has been a trend back toward old-school skippers in recent years, especially with teams plagued by controversy. Baker and Showalter have proven to be steadying presences, with Baker guiding the Astros to the World Series one year after the fallout of the sign-stealing investigation and Showalter leading the Mets to a 101-win season this year.

The Astros are doing all of this with a lower payroll than the Mets and Dodgers. Maybe Cohen shouldn’t be repeatedly targeting David Stearns, the Milwaukee Brewers president of baseball operations who resigned Thursday, or Dodgers executive Josh Byrnes. Instead, maybe Cohen should look to bring the 44-year-old Click — whose contract will expire after the World Series — to Queens.

()