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Astros Place Brian McCann On DL, Select Juan Centeno’s Contract

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The Astros have placed catcher Brian McCann on the seven-day concussion disabled list, retroactive to Saturday, and selected the contract of fellow backstop Juan Centeno from Triple-A, per Brian McTaggart of MLB.com (on Twitter).

McCann is now the second prominent Astro to hit the DL since Saturday, joining ace Dallas Keuchel on the shelf. Like Keuchel, McCann has thrived for the 29-14 Astros, owners of the majors’ best record. McCann, whom Houston acquired from the Yankees in an offseason trade, has slashed .269/.365/.454 with six home runs and as many walks as strikeouts (17) in 126 plate appearances. On the defensive side, the 33-year-old has continued a careerlong trend of serving as a plus pitch framer, according to Baseball Prospectus.

Fortunately for the Astros, they do have a quality reserve behind McCann in the power-hitting Evan Gattis, who has also performed well this season. Centeno, an offseason minor league signing, will back up Gattis. The 27-year-old Centeno has been great this season at Triple-A, where he has slashed .368/.395/.487 line in 83 PAs, though he hasn’t been nearly as successful in the majors. In 258 big league PAs, including 192 with the Twins last year, Centeno has hit .236/.290/.338. Behind the plate, BP ranked him among the majors’ worst framers in 2016.

Astros Interested In Gerrit Cole

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  • The Astros are “very interested” in Pirates righty Gerrit Cole.  Houston has been checking in on top-tier starters for months, so it makes sense that the team would have an eye on Cole’s availability.  Peter Gammons recently suggested that the Astros (and Yankees) may be the only contenders who could actually afford a Cole trade, given Houston’s deep farm system and the giant return that the Pirates will surely demand for their controllable young star if Cole is indeed shopped at the deadline.

    [SOURCE LINK]

Astros To Place Dallas Keuchel On 10-Day DL

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The Astros will place ace Dallas Keuchel on the 10-day DL with a pinched nerve in his neck, MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart (Twitter link) and others reported.  Left-hander Ashur Tolliver will be recalled in a corresponding move.

The injury doesn’t seem particularly serious, as Keuchel is expected to only miss one start since the DL stint was backdated to Wednesday.  In his last start, on Tuesday, Keuchel threw just 70 pitches over five innings (his shortest outing of the season), though he still held the Marlins to two runs and earned the victory.

After a disappointing 2016 season, Keuchel has shown early signs of returning to his 2015 Cy Young Award-winning form.  Keuchel has a 1.84 ERA, 7.63 K/9 and a league-best 67.1% ground ball rate over his first 63 2/3 IP of the season, and was named the AL Pitcher Of The Month for April.  There are a few red flags for Keuchel — a .215 BABIP, 88.2% strand rate and a career-high 19.4% homer rate — but overall, ERA predictors are still pretty rosy (3.27 FIP, 2.87 xFIP, 2.97 SIERA) about the lefty’s performance.  Despite the lack of missed bats, Keuchel is excelling at generating weak contact, with 31% of his balls in play rated as ’soft’ contact by Fangraphs and only 20.8% rated as hard contact.

Astros Likely To Target Starter, Lefty Reliever This Summer

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The Astros are lining up to pursue pitching at the trade deadline, Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports writes. Houston has its sights set on a quality starter and left-handed reliever, per the report. That hasn’t really changed since the winter, of course, though the team has posted the best record in baseball to this point even without having made the desired upgrades. Rosenthal discusses some possible targets, but it seems that the ’Stros haven’t yet fixed on any particular paths to adding these pieces. General manager Jeff Luhnow did recently tell MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart that the team doesn’t feel any urgency to rush into early trades thanks to its excellent start to the season, so the Astros may well wait to see how the full landscape of the trade market develops before pursuing upgrades.

Astros Release Minor Leaguers Yuhl, Freeman

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  • Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle reports that the Astros have released Triple-A righty Keegan Yuhl and Double-A lefty Michael Freeman (Twitter links). Yuhl, 25, had a solid Double-A season in 2016 but has been torched for 58 earned runs in 46 Triple-A innings since being promoted on the heels of his strong Double-A output last year. Freeman, also 25, had a seemingly encouraging 3.15 ERA with Double-A this year but walked 16 batters (against 14 strikeouts), hit three more and threw three wild pitches in just 20 innings. He was Houston’s seventh-round pick as recently as 2015.

Astros Notes: Trade Market, Devenski, Paulino

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At 24-11, the Astros are the best team in baseball through the season’s first five and a half weeks — a blistering start that, according to GM Jeff Luhnow, will allow the team to remain patient on the summer trade market. As Luhnow explains to MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart, he doesn’t feel any urgency pushing him to rush into the summer trade market. “We jumped on Scott Kazmir two years ago early in the trade season, and there’s pros and cons to that,” said Luhnow. “…but other pitchers came available — namely, David Price — that had not really been available early, and so if you really want to know what the landscape looks like completely, you kind of have to wait until the end.” Luhnow tells McTaggart that he still plans to be highly active in trade talks from now through the non-waiver deadline, but the GM doesn’t sound anxious to augment his club, especially with Collin McHugh and pitching prospect David Paulino on the mend from injury. “As long as we continue to play well, there’s no urgency to solve a problem right now.”

A bit more on the Astros…

  • Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports takes an excellent look at Astros powerhouse Chris Devenski — one of the game’s most quietly dominant relievers. Devenski, nicknamed “The Dragon” by his manager in Double-A (Houston will give away bobbleheads of Devenski riding a dragon later this season), Devenski has followed an unlikely path to his current status as one of Major League Baseball’s best bullpen weapons. The right-hander was a 25th-round pick by the White Sox back in 2011 before being dealt to Houston as a player to be named later in the 2012 trade that sent right-hander Brett Myers to Chicago. Devenski wasn’t protected from the Rule 5 Draft by the Astros following a solid-but-not-dominant 2015 season in Double-A, which Luhnow describes to Rosenthal as “a bad decision with an OK outcome.” Luhnow concedes that Houston took “too much of a risk” in leaving Devenski unprotected, though he’s surely thankful for how it worked out. In 131 1/3 MLB innings since Opening Day 2016, Devenski has a 2.12 ERA with 10.0 K/9 and 1.7 BB/9. Teammates Brian McCann, Josh Reddick, Will Harris, George Springer and others all rave about Devenski’s talent and work ethic, and Rosenthal’s column (which I’d highly recommend reading in full), is stuffed with quotes effusing praise for “The Dragon.”
  • Top prospect David Paulino (mentioned by Luhnow as an “important piece” in the McTaggart interview above) made his 2017 debut at Triple-A Fresno after missing five weeks with a bone bruise in his elbow, as Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle writes. Paulino finished the 2016 season in the Majors and opened the season on the Major League disabled list, so he’s technically pitching on a rehab assignment. Based on Kaplan’s writing, it doesn’t sound as if Paulino will be an immediate option for the team once his rehab clock is up; Kaplan notes that he’ll eventually be activated and formally optioned to Fresno. In the meantime, Paulino will continue accruing MLB service time.
  • In light of Rosenthal’s Devenski column and Paulino’s return to the mound, I’ll also point out that Paulino was acquired as a player to be named later in a trade for a reliever; Houston nabbed Paulino, who entered the season as a consensus top 100 prospect, as a PTBNL in the 2013 trade that sent Jose Veras to the Tigers. At the time, Paulino was a 19-year-old GCL prospect that was rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. He’s very clearly elevated his stock, having tossed 90 innings with a flat 2.00 ERA, 10.6 K/9 and 1.9 BB/9 across two minor league levels in 2016 (plus five more shutout innings in the Arizona Fall League).

Astros Release Edison Frias

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  • The Astros have released righty Edison Frias, the Houston Chronicle’s Jake Kaplan reports (Twitter link).  The 26-year-old Frias has some respectable numbers (4.07 ERA, 7.6 K/9, 2.71 K/BB rate) over 425 career innings in Houston’s farm system, though he has been hit hard at the Triple-A level this year, with a 7.71 ERA in 23 1/3 frames.  Pitching in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League is likely a factor, though Frias hasn’t helped himself with a 5.8 BB/9 that is more than double his career average.

Astros Looking At Starters, Left-Handed Relievers At Deadline

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  • The division-rival Astros, meanwhile, are said to still have interest in acquiring a “front-line starter” — not that there’s any reason to believe that could happen before the summer. Of course, Houston has re-discovered its own ace to some extent, with a resurgent Dallas Keuchel looking good thus far. Heyman notes that the southpaw was approached “last winter and spring” about an extension, with the sides seemingly making some progress before talks fizzed. The possible deal would’ve gone beyond Keuchel’s arbitration eligibility, per the report, though there was no consensus on the specifics surrounding a potential club option. Keuchel’s iffy and injury-filled 2016 season presumably quashed any possibility of a revival of the discussions this past winter, though perhaps that could again become a possibility in the future.

Reddick Discusses Time With A's, Signing With Astros

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  • Though Josh Reddick is happy to be a member of the Astros and excited for the next four years in Houston, the right fielder said today on CSN Bay Area’s Athletics Insider Podcast that he hoped last summer to sign an extension with the Athletics (transcript via CSN’s Joe Stiglich, where readers can also find the full audio). “It was definitely somewhere I really wanted to make it happen,” said Reddick of Oakland. “Once we realized the numbers weren’t gonna line up, I think I knew deep down it wasn’t gonna happen because I didn’t hear back from them after I counter-offered what they offered me.” Reddick, who inked a four-year, $52MM deal with Houston this offseason, divulged that the A’s never offered a guaranteed four years in extension talks. He also expressed some lingering surprise that the A’s sold off so heavily in the 2014-15 offseason — the winter in which they dealt Josh Donaldson, Jeff Samardzija and Brandon Moss.

Brady Rodgers Undergoes Tommy John Surgery

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Astros prospect Brady Rodgers underwent Tommy John surgery this morning, the club announced. The right-handed pitching prospect will be out until sometime next season as he rehabs.

Now 26, Rodgers earned a spot on the Houston 40-man in advance of the 2015 Rule 5 draft. Unfortunately, it’s reasonably likely he’ll end up losing that slot once it comes time for the Astros to make some tough decisions in advance of this year’s Rule 5 draft at season’s end.

Rodgers went on to throw quite well at Triple-A in the 2016 season, posting a 2.86 ERA with 7.9 K/9 against just 1.6 BB/9 over 132 innings while earning his first MLB call-up. The majors weren’t as kind to Rodgers, who was tagged for 14 earned runs on 15 hits while issuing seven free passes against just three strikeouts over his 8 1/3 frames. But he had responded with an excellent opening to the 2017 season at Fresno, with 16 1/3 innings of 1.10 ERA ball.

For the ’Stros, the loss of Rodgers takes away an easily accessible depth option. He can be moved to the 60-day DL to clear 40-man space, and as Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle writes, there are a variety of other potential rotation fill-ins also on hand.

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