Trey Mancini is one hour away from blasting his first home run as Astro at Crawford Boxes inside Minute Maid Park.
Cristian Vazquez will soon be steering Jose Orchidi through five unexpected runs on his way to another home win that brings the leaders of the American Western League closer to the Yankees.
Seattle, Minnesota, and New York have all taken important steps during the frenetic trade deadline. San Diego reversed a super team in the NBA by adding young basketball player Juan Soto in a blockbuster. The Astros star of James Click has kept pace with the best of Major League Baseball, once again balancing the needs of the present with the promise of the future. With three new players added to Dusty Baker’s 2022 roster and an afternoon game scheduled before a road trip to Cleveland, Click’s first answer is an admission in the form of a joke.
Maybe he can get some sleep now. Can.
Then the Astros General Manager returns for a third year to work with the best record in AL until October approaches each day.
“The hardest part of it for me is that we have to be different than we were two years ago, three years ago,” said Klick, sitting inside a booth that former general manager Jeff Luno used to watch regularly for Astros games, because if we just run the same program, we’ll have to Everyone has to catch up.” And so it gets stressful. You have to give up on the idea that we “solve baseball”. Baseball will never be solved. But we have to constantly get ahead not only of the other 29 teams but of ourselves.
“How can you strike this balance in the success we’ve had here and not change what makes us successful, but at the same time not feel good and let yourself magnify and your process get old and you wake up and everyone else is the next three years? It’s a tough mindset.”
Do you click enough on the deadline?
Does GM ask itself or keep moving forward with a sport that never stops?
He was honest, charismatic and funny during an interview addressing everything from the Astros’ interest in Soto to Lance McCullers Jr’s potential late-season return and Click’s relationship with veteran manager Dusty Baker, who doesn’t quite fit in with the GM on paper but has produced a 0.588 winning percentage and two championship appearances. AL during a partnership that began after the signal-stealing scandal changed the Astros forever.
In the Click-Baker era, the Astros have continued to win and win, all while reshaping their image and gradually restoring believers across the country.
“It has always been very helpful for me in all walks of life to try to be around people and talk to people who have come up in different environments, different parts of the country, different backgrounds, completely different countries, different schools of thought,” Klick said. All those different sounds.” “Dusty and I are 30 years apart. He obviously played and has been in the game for a long time. I haven’t played and I’ve been around the game for not long. We have very different paths. I think it’s very helpful to have a different point of view.”
Pre-game music and intros flourish across the playing field. Two days after the deadline that could ultimately determine the Astros’ season – Atlanta beat MLB’s Houston 4-2 during the 2021 World Championships, in part because the Braves won by that deadline – the click indicates moves the Astros or He could have done it making this year.
A highly analytical mind resides at the heart of the Astros era of baseball.
We make a post-mortem decision on everything. A project we do is one. Discussing the process that began during our Tampa Bay days, Click said, we are setting a deadline for Trade One now.” Everyone involved in Deadline Trade puts their own thoughts on what we did well, and what we could have done better. They will send it to me. I will review them. And then we’ll all just sit down and talk about it, and how we can improve the process.”
Have the Astros considered trading for Soto, a 23-year-old defensive player under the control of the club who already has 119 professional players and a batting average of 292, but could soon secure his first $500 million MLB contract?
“The mission is to explore,” Klick said. “Fortunately, we have some good footballers, left corner players on this list. And so it wasn’t something we spent a lot of time on, to be honest. But the job is to explore.”
It is methodical and process oriented in discussing players, moves and deadline decisions.
“I think we achieved our primary goals. From that perspective, we accomplished what we needed to get done. The unacceptable scenario was not doing anything,” Klick said. “We have three guys who were at the top of our list and three guys who I think would fit in well at the club. … There were definitely some things I was hoping to achieve that we couldn’t quite get to but that would be true of any trade deadline.”
He’s excited to discuss the Astros.
Continuing organizational success has now tied 2015 to 2022, while other teams tore up winning rosters, and could extend into the later years of this decade.
“I don’t want to say that getting to the top is easier than staying at the top,” Klick said. “But in many ways, you get there and staying there can be more difficult or difficult.”
A franchise that survived the fire of 2020, when the Astros* were the sport’s most hated team, has re-emerged with a vastly new batch of field talent that still has Jose Altov, Alex Bergman and Justin Verlander at the core.
“It’s just a wonderful testament to the players on this team and the people out there who play the game — and the people who identified, explored and developed it — that we’re able to sustain this through it all,” Click said. “I can’t think of a more impressive group of players at the club than these guys.”
Is this the best Astros team Click has been a part of?
Entering Saturday, Team Baker was 70-38 and only half a game behind the Yankees for an AL record high. In franchise history, the winning percentage comes with just 648 points after the 2019 Astros, who won a club record 107 games before falling to Soto’s Washington Nationals during the last stand of the A.J. Hinch and Lohno era.
“Look, the benchmark for success here is incredibly high. So for me to sit here and say this is the best team we’ve had in the three years I’ve been here, we’ll find out in October, frankly,” Klick said. “But in terms of promo depth, in particular, I think this is the deepest show team we’ve had in the three years I’ve been here.”
Could McCullers join the Astros and give Baker another arm?
“Every time he says, ‘Yeah, I feel normal’, it brings us a lot closer. And we’re very close,” said Click, who checks in regularly with the McCullers the morning after the start of minor league rehab.
With every newly promoted name and every trade, the Astros are taking more of a Click picture. The first year was chaotic and unprecedented, but the Astros almost won the pennant. Last season, they won 95 games and hosted the first game of the Fall Classic.
Is Houston starting to feel like home to GM for the third year?
“It is,” said Klick. “Some of it is just a return to the normalcy we’ve had in life. My family finally felt comfortable going out, back to the normal things that make you feel like part of the city. And that took longer here than we would have liked.”
“My kids are settled in school, they have staff, they have their friends all over the neighborhood and you can see them running with everyone. So just that side of it makes you feel like this is home.”
Minute Maid Park echo and hum. Another first pitch is approaching. 2022 Astros are waiting to take the field again.
Bunting (2005, 2017, 2019, 2021) is eye level with the wing. Only one of the gold medals, though, the Astros lost two wins, two wins from their second World Championship last year.
How competitive is Click?
Laugh. He says the question is hard to measure.
Click then tells a story about a family card game for UNO that ended abruptly after he played a winning hand, when he should have dealt his son easy.
Click’s fires burn brighter with another Astros win and October approaches.
“There are very few people in this game who can say, ‘I won the world championship,'” he said. “I will do everything I can. I will burn the candle on both ends to do this. It is very important. The only thing more important than that is my family.”