Looking at 5 Players from the Houston Astros This is really a boring organization; I actually had difficulty coming up with five interesting players. But after scraping the bottom of the barrel:

Miguel Tejada-I just wanted to mention again that aside from the hard and soft evidence, Tejada has been on a multi-year decline in SLG and overall PX rating from BaseballHQ, and it may be asking a lot for him to turn it around.

Wandy Rodriguez-The NL version of Ervin Santana, I think both are likely to turn a corner this year. Wandy had a xERA of 4.04, a very solid number, 7.8 K/9IP and 3.1 BB/9IP, all very solid rates. He has an ongoing problem with his strand rates, which has been hurting his value since every year he has an actual ERA higher than his expected ERA. If he can learn to pitch better from the stretch he could return a very solid profit.

Jose Valverde-The only point of interest here is that he was very lucky last year in his strand rate with an 82% rate. As a result he had an xERA of 3.30, so some regression could be expected. He is still a top closer.

Ty Wigginton—He may be the winner of The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Being Underrated. He has a very stable skill set, consistently hits flyballs in the range of 35%-40% and will have uncontested playing time. There will definitely be guys drafted ahead of him who will produce at a lower level at 3B.

Hunter Pence—Beware of overrating him. He had a sharp difference in his first half and second half production, and he still has a questionable eye, with 96 K and only 26 BB in 484 plate appearances. That is a lot of strikeouts for a young player and he still struck out once every four at-bats against righties. Don’t pay for a .500 SLG.