HOUSTON — Josh Hader is back where his chase for championships began, completing the sort of full-circle journey only baseball seems to author. The Houston Astros acquired him 11 years ago and dropped him in Davenport, Iowa, with their High-A affiliate in Quad Cities. By September, the 19-year-old with floppy hair and a fierce fastball held the club’s fate in his left hand.
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“Threw seven shutout innings and gave us the first ring (for) the minor-league affiliates,” Astros bench coach Omar López said this weekend.
López made his full-season managerial debut for that River Bandits club. No. 1 pick Carlos Correa manned the left side of the infield while fellow first-rounder Lance McCullers Jr. threw 104 2/3 innings in the rotation. Seventeen major leaguers appeared in at least one game for the 2013 Midwest League champions — a title Hader cemented in the championship game.
“We pretty much grew up for a few years just playing with each other and winning championships,” Hader said. “I think that was the culture that this organization has that they want to win, and a lot of those guys made it to the big leagues and most of them are still in the big leagues. So it just tells you what this organization is about and really what every guy on that team is. I think that’s what built my career is the competition alongside each other.”
Hader constructed a career that contains five All-Star appearances and a place atop the sport’s reliever hierarchy he doesn’t seem ready to cede, a foundation formed by the same franchise that let him go. Two years after Hader clinched that championship, Houston shipped him to Milwaukee in the worst trade of its otherwise elite era.
“We’ve had seller’s regret for a while getting rid of him,” McCullers said.
Righting that wrong would not come cheap. No relievers in this free-agent market are, a fact Dana Brown finally acknowledged last Tuesday. That afternoon, after the team announced Kendall Graveman would miss the season after shoulder surgery, Brown and his lieutenants began a blitzkrieg. Seventy-two hours later, Houston made Hader its highest-paid free agent since 2006.
“There’s just a lot of full-circle moments that involve the Astros and just everybody around the organization. That was one of the places that we really had in mind. Like, why not be here?” Hader said. “We’ve had a connection before, and this is an organization that really (prides) themselves on relationships, to be together and be a part of a big family.
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“It’s a special place here, and obviously they’ve done great things for so many years now. To be a part of that for five more, that’s something that really got us excited.”
Monday morphed into more of a reintroduction than a formal announcement. The franchise last saw Hader as a 21-year-old kid cruising at Double-A Corpus Christi. He met his wife, Maria, while playing there. She helped calm their infant son, Lucas, as he fidgeted throughout his father’s time atop the dais.
A big day for Houston. pic.twitter.com/rNHHqZGgGc
— Houston Astros (@astros) January 23, 2024
Hader’s rationale for returning to Houston is straightforward. Hader became a stalwart for a small-market Milwaukee club trying to shock the baseball world before joining a star-studded San Diego team torpedoed by dysfunction. Both became postseason contenders, but neither could reach a place the Astros seem to permanently reside.
“When you start this game and the career of playing baseball, the end goal is to win the ultimate thing and that’s the World Series,” Hader said. “When a team has already done that multiple times and they know how to get there and they know how to take it all the way through the playoffs, you can learn something (from) that in your career. I think that’s the one thing I was missing in my career that I could benefit from them, and they felt I could help them, as well.”
Hader spent most of Monday at Minute Maid Park, completing his physical, signing his contract and satisfying a slew of media requests. He met manager Joe Espada, who called his new reliever a “humble, family guy.”
“You could just hear the competitive nature that he has,” Espada said. “As a manager, how exciting it is to have a lead in the fifth (or) sixth inning and having those guys in the back end on a team that scores runs and plays good defense. He made us that much better today, and that excites me.”
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Espada can now navigate a game’s final nine outs with some combination of Hader, Ryan Pressly and Bryan Abreu, a trio Hader acknowledged is a “scary one.” Though stature and salary suggest otherwise, Espada has already evaded questions about whether Hader is his closer. The first-year manager must balance Hader’s arrival with the accomplishments of incumbent Pressly, whom the club kept abreast during its frenzied pursuit of Hader.
GO DEEPER
Astros talked to Ryan Pressly before signing Josh Hader: 'That's the right thing to do'
On Monday, Hader said he’s never met Pressly but did recently call him for “a conversation just introducing each other.” Asked whether he signed with an expectation to be Houston’s closer, Hader replied, “We signed here to win baseball games, to win a championship.”
He added: “Like Dana said, Ryan’s in the same boat and we’re all in the same boat to do whatever we can and win ballgames and take it to the final step.”
Hader has been known to enjoy certain preferences as his ascension has continued. He has not recorded more than three outs in a regular-season game since 2020. He recorded four outs once in the 2020 postseason and once more in the 2022 NLDS. When asked whether he needs a defined role to feel “comfortable,” Hader acknowledged that his game is “routine-based.”
“I think this game is a routine-based game. I think when we all have the same goal in mind, you make things work and, like I said before, the commitment that the Astros made to me, it’s the same commitment that I’m going to make to them,” Hader said. “Moving forward, we’re going to do anything we can to win.”
Whether Hader records three outs or more, pitches in the ninth or before it, his arrival sends a clear message the Astros are not willing to lose their foothold atop the American League. Hader always had intentions of helping them establish it. Eleven circuitous years later, he can now assist.
“You know how this baseball journey goes,” Hader said. “Things happen. For Houston at the time and for the Brewers, they were in a position where they needed players now. I think that’s kind of how it goes sometimes where there’s a part of your career where things happen for a reason.
“For us to be back here and be able to just join a great team that’s already put together from the top down, I think we all share the same goals and passion, and that’s to win (multiple) World Series. We’re just really excited to be here.”
(Photo: Jeff Curry / USA Today)
