Depleted Houston Astros Given Bleak World Series Probability by Expert

The Houston Astros won their seventh consecutive full-season AL West championship in 2024, but the consensus is forming around the club that the days of World Series contention are behind them.

Mar 5, 2025; West Palm Beach, Florida, USA; Houston Astros second base Jose Altuve (27) celebrates with teammtes after hitting a home run against the St. Louis Cardinals during the fourth inning at CACTI Park of the Palm Beaches. / Rich Storry-Imagn Images

A new-look Houston Astros team is gearing up for the 2025 regular season, and for the first time in about a decade, they are not a consensus frontrunner to win the World Series in November.

A massive amount of talent was jettisoned from the roster this winter, most notably outfielder Kyle Tucker, third baseman Alex Bregman, starter Justin Verlander and reliver Ryan Pressly.

All four of those players had become franchise cornerstones in Houston, and now they are gone, joining the likes of George Springer, Carlos Correa and Gerrit Cole before them.

But it would be foolish to act as though this team has no talent. Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez are still here to lead a potent lineup, and they're joined by the emerging Yainer Diaz as well as power-hitting newcomers like Christian Walker and Isaac Paredes.

Framber Valdez and Hunter Brown lead a starting rotation that should receive major reinforcement in the returns from injuries of Cristian Javier, Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr.

But in an MLB.com article in which experts Mike Petriello and Will Leitch drafted teams by their thoughts on their likelihood of winning the World Series, the Astros slid all the way to No. 15, where Petriello reluctantly took them.

"Entering 2024, it was popular to wonder if we were seeing the final year of the Astros Dynasty, given the advancing age and contract status of some of their stars," Petriello wrote. "While that didn’t prevent them from winning the AL West for the seventh consecutive full season, it did also come with their lowest (non-2020) winning percentage since 2016, which was also the last year that Alex Bregman wasn’t their full-time third baseman."

Petriello and Lietch's placement of the Astros here actually flies in the face of popular predictive models. PECOTA, for example, gives Houston a 5.1% chance of emerging as World Series champs, good for the eighth highest odds in MLB.

Instead, the team ranks the Astros behind teams like Seattle Mariners (4.1% on PECOTA), Detroit Tigers (0.7%) and Arizona Diamondbacks (1.6%).

There is no question that the Astros are not as formidable on paper as they have been in the past, but there is clearly something that the predictive models are picking up on with this team.

If the starting rotation is fully loaded and healthy come July, it will be hard to win a series against this club with a tough customer on the mound every night, a top-heavy but solid bullpen behind them and a lineup filled with legitimate power threats.

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