With Justin Verlander now residing in the Big Apple, the Astros projected rotation, deep as it is, isn’t quite as formidable as last year’s edition. At least at the top. FanGraphs’ projections currently rank Houston’s starters 13th in baseball based on fWAR (12.5), between the Giants and Dodgers.
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Regardless of how confident you feel about this particular group of starters, those projections were always going to take a hit as soon as the reigning AL Cy Young winner officially signed elsewhere. For as fortunate as the Astros have become at replacing star-level players, the fact of the matter is that one can’t replace Verlander with an exact carbon copy, at least in the short-term.