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Joe Espada, whose tenure as Houston Astros manager was marked by sluggish starts followed by late-season rallies that left owner Jim Crane dissatisfied, was fired Wednesday, Oct. 14, two weeks after the Astros were eliminated in the American League wild-card round by the Chicago White Sox.

Espada's firing comes on the heels of Crane firing general manager Dana Brown on Aug. 24. Crane said at that time that Espada's status would be evaluated at the end of the season, a juncture that came quickly after the Astros were swept out of the playoffs in two games.

Tuesday, the Astros granted permission for Espada to interview for the vacant Seattle Mariners managerial job. Espada's contract with Houston expires at the end of this month.

"We are thankful for Joe’s hard work, his passion for the game, and for his commitment to the Houston Astros," Crane said in a statement released by the club. "He represented the Astros and the Houston community in the most positive way. We wish he and his family the best moving forward."

The Astros also announced several members of the coaching staff who will either depart or remain, most notably that bench coach Omar Lopez, who guided Venezuela to the 2026 World Baseball Classic title, will be offered a different role in the organization.

Espada, 51, took over for Dusty Baker after the 2023 season and guided the Astros to an 88-73 record and the American League West title in his first season. But the Astros were swept out of the wild-card round by the Detroit Tigers, missed the playoffs for the first time in nine seasons in 2025 and failed to gain traction above .500 this season, which ended in an 81-81 record that was good enough to win the AL West but not enough to save his job.

Espada had a 256-229 record at the Astros’ helm and they exited the playoffs in the wild-card round both seasons he got them there. He spent six seasons as the Astros’ bench coach before Crane tabbed him to replace Baker.

His first squad got off to a 7-19 start, yet recovered to win 88 games and the West title. Similarly, the 2026 Astros lost 20 of their first 31 games. Yet the AL West's overall ineptitude kept them in the fight.

The Astros will be looking for their fourth permanent manager in 13 years and third in seven seasons after Baker took over for A.J. Hinch following Hinch’s 2020 firing for his role in the club’s 2017 sign-stealing scandal.

The club announced that pitching coach Josh Miller, first base coach Dave Clark, field coordinator Jason Bell, hitting coach Victor Rodriguez and bullpen catcher Javier Bracamonte will return.

Coaches not being retained include third base coach Tony Perezchica, assistant hitting coach Anthony Iapoce, assistant pitching coach Ethan Katz, catching instructor Tim Cossins and game planning coach Tommy Kawamura.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Astros fire manager Joe Espada after .500 season, playoff exit

Lessons Learned from ALCS Game 1 & 2

1. This team had a long break heading into the ALCS, and looked rusty for it. It’s a consequence of being this good, but sweeping the Yankees meant the team essentially got a week away from baseball, and then the lineup — driven by the pitcher — featured short side platoon starters. Now with two games under their belt, look for the Rays offense to settle back in on Thursday on the road in Cleveland.
2. Losing Game 1 is proper kick in the butt for the Rays in a best-of-seven. The Guardians scored all seven of their runs in the final four innings of Game 1, handing the Rays their first postseason loss. Now it’s on the Rays to play up to the moment. Cash framed the winning streak ending as potentially useful motivation, and I agree! Even a top seed needs to stay locked in. Also, you know what other team lost ALCS Game 1? The 2008 Rays!
3. You need a little luck to be great. Junior Caminero benefitted from a walk the Guardians did not challenge that could have wildly changed Game 2. In a scoreless fourth, the Rays forced action with speed and contact on two outs. Chandler Simpson beat out an infield single, then José Ramírez’s fielding error on Ben Williamson’s grounder (the ball skipping through his legs on the turf) allowed the first run in Caminero. Liam Hicks immediately followed with a two-run single for a 3-0 lead—all three runs unearned. This very Rays-y small-ball inning showed how they punish defensive slips, but it never happens without that walk.
4. Bryan Baker is an all-time great Rays closer. With his save in Game 2, the All-Star Baker now owns the franchise record for playoff saves, and is the first player in MLB history to allow 0 hits and earn the save in four consecutive playoff appearances (h/t Greg Harvey).
5. Fastball Freddy firing on all cylinders. In Game 2, Peralta dialed in the Rays adjustments to his delivery and rode the adrenaline to a spectacular six inning performance, including a fastball up to 99.4 mph (averaging 96.9 mph, two mph above normal), and ripping it 71% of his 99 pitches thrown. Other than a couple curveballs, the rest was changeups, and strikeout inducing ones at that. It was an unfavorable matchup for the Guardians offense, to say the least.

Bonus: Attendance issues are back, and it certainly had something to do with prices. After much chatter online about the Rays not selling out, it was 35k instead of 42k in Game 1, and only 32k in Game 2. Those margins could have been filled if a weekday price for the 300 level in the cavernous Tropicana Field was $80 instead of $180, so there must be some sort of floor leading to strange pricing between MLB and the Rays. I can’t help but wonder if the energy behind the team’s all out media blitz to sell seats to marginal fans would be better directed at core fans who buy multiple tickets by offering discounts or clearer prices.

Before we begin looking ahead to 2027, OTM is looking back at 2026, highlighting some of the biggest, strangest, and most memorable moments that defined a memorable season. Today, we look back at a moment that is already defining the career of a young star.

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On August 31, 2026, Payton Tolle hugged a grown man. In the midst of a still-gestating career, the hug is already what defines Tolle as both a ballplayer and a man. It even broke containment and made it onto The Today Show.

Hugs aren’t anything new in baseball. Hell, homoeroticism in general isn’t anything new in baseball, which, ironically, is frequently in the case in subcultures that are otherwise outwardly homophobic. But this hug was different. It happened on the field. It happened between two opponents who had never in their lives spoken to each other. It happened as part of the game play itself, with the hug doubling as a tag-out. And in a sport where being a red-ass is point of pride, it happened with a big, goofy smile.

“The hug thing, I can go back to high school,” Tolle later said. “I used to hug the opposing coach in high school basketball whenever we would do the high-five lines… I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna make this uncomfortable. I’m gonna give him a nice hug.’ Most guys started to embrace it, but there were some that were like, ‘No, no, no.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m getting a hug here, man. I’m not running away from you until I get this.’”

Tolle’s ability to blow a fastball by just about anyone in the game is what’s going to make him a star. But his ability to embrace what so many other athletes find uncomfortable is what’s going to make him beloved.

Playing baseball in Boston is not like playing baseball anywhere else. It is genuinely important for Red Sox players — and for Red Sox stars in particular — to be comfortable with fame, if not to actively court it. Not every player is. When David Wells came to Boston for two years in the twilight of his career, he seemed like a good fit for the city. He was an established star with a big personality and a no-fucks-given attitude, and he’d already thrived in Yankees Universe, which presents its own kind of cauldron in the media capital of the world.

But Wells, as it turned out, hated his time in Boston, complaining that it was impossible for him to go anywhere without being asked to pose for a picture. In New York, even a personality as big as his was granted the blessing of anonymity outside the ballpark. He was just another celebrity in a city filled with them, a city that was home to literally millions of people who didn’t even know what Derek Jeter looked like, let alone David Wells.

It’s different in Boston. If you play for the Red Sox, you always play for the Red Sox, even as you go to the hardware store or try to grab a beer at the bar. You are one of the 26 most important people in the city, whether you asked to be or not. Players like Nomar, Mo Vaughn, and David Price struggled to handle this; David Ortiz, Pedro, and Dustin Pedroia thrived on it.

Payton Tolle is going to thrive on it. We already know this. This isn’t just because Payton Tolle is comfortable with fame; it’s because Payton Tolle is comfortable being Payton Tolle. He talks openly and genuinely about his emotions, about his faith, about the heart-breaking, life-defining death of his mother. He is not afraid to cry on camera, he’s not afraid to look vulnerable, he’s not afraid to subtly imply that a rival player is an overly intense asshole (though, somehow, he manages to do it entirely without judgement).

Tolle doesn’t seek the spotlight the way that others like Curt Schilling or Kevin Millar did. But he also doesn’t hide from it. And, more importantly, he doesn’t let it change him. That rare strength of personality is going to prove incredibly valuable as he grows into his inevitable role as Boston’s favorite son.

To be perfectly if not prematurely frank, I am already a little bit worried about Roman Anthony’s ability to handle the Boston spotlight. Anthony is already bristling and what he perceives to be unfair criticism over how he handled his injury this year. He has already pushed back against whispers that his nightlife is getting in the way of his baseball. I agree with him in both respects. Anthony has been unfairly burdened with the weight of expectations, and then unfairly criticized when his body prevented him from immediately meeting those expectations. But whether the criticism that is so often leveled at Red Sox stars is unfair or not is, unfortunately, immaterial for Anthony and Tolle. It is there and they need to accept that it’s there in order to thrive.

At this incredibly early stage of Anthony’s career, I am by no means passing judgment on whether he is going to be able to do that. But it is obvious that he didn’t have much fun this year. By the end of the season he looked like a man who was trying to shut out the rest of the world. He looked like a man who wanted to go home. He looked like a man who needed a hug.

Luckily, he knows where to find one.

The last thing anyone will remember before MLB embarks on a potentially generation-defining labor war will be the 2026 World Series. The winner will enjoy a longer-than-normal celebratory honeymoon, since the beginning of the 2027 season will almost certainly be locked out, and they will perhaps even benefit from the easiest title defense in the history of the sport, should the full season be lost in the yelling.

But first, we need a winner, and the Cleveland Guardians, Tampa Bay Rays, Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers still stand as perhaps the last four teams to play MLB baseball until 2028. Bluntly, World Series results are what got us in this mess in the first place, with the Dodgers seemingly trading for, or signing every fun player in the league, and winning the last two titles. The specter of a third in a row is a large part of why MLB owners think they can impose a salary cap on their players, a feat achieved in the modern era only by the NHL in 2005. 

To oversimplify the debate in two sentences: MLB owners believe a salary cap, which would limit and floor spending on players and exists in the NHL, NBA and NFL, would ensure better competitive balance, improve their product, and skyrocket franchise valuations and revenue. The MLB Players Association believes that a salary cap murders their unchecked leverage to negotiate the kinds of ludicrous contracts like the 15-year, $765 million deal that Juan Soto signed, as well as axing the earning potential of the next generation of players. 

In short, we’re talking about who controls the flow of money. The owners’ argument that a salary cap will massively increase TV revenue and franchise valuations is true, and eventually that money will reach the players. But a cap also permanently limits players’ ability to access that money, while the MLBPA has essentially held for its entire existence that it will accept a salary cap only when the forces of hell march on earth and Jupiter turns into a pinecone. So how will the World Series affect all of this?

It’s rare that a labor dispute is prosecuted almost entirely in the court of public opinion, but MLB’s upcoming lockout will be that kind of party. MLB has already launched a pro-salary cap PR campaign, and both sides will have to reckon with the fact that everyone will remember the World Series the whole time this negotiation is going on. 

Intuitively, one would say that anyone but the Dodgers winning — or, with the Dodgers currently down 2-0 to the Brewers, without Los Angeles even in the World Series — should destroy the owners’ argument that MLB has a competitive balance problem. Cleveland, Milwaukee and Tampa Bay all spend nothing on players. They are small markets which have looked New York, Boston and Los Angeles in the eye and said “lol, nice try.” But that interpretation is a miscalculation.

MLB owners are not dawdling buffoons who wagered their entire salary cap case on the Dodgers three-peating. That would be stupid, and these are not stupid people; these are shrewd, ruthless business operators, who understand that the amount of money they stand to gain from a salary cap is so overwhelming that they will endure a year of vilification from fans if it comes to that. I don’t believe Cleveland, Milwaukee or Tampa Bay winning it all saves us from a long lockout— in fact, I think it makes it more likely. The MLBPA will have something clear to point to as to why a cap is unnecessary, and many fans will probably agree with them; but believe me when I say the owners have the stomach for this. Do you?

Should the Dodgers win, I actually think it reduces our chances of a protracted lockout if for no other reason than how strong it makes the owners’ case that MLB needs a salary cap now and no, we can’t wait, look what the Dodgers are doing. I personally could care less if the Dodgers three-peat, and the MLB Postseason is honestly a rather-idiotic carnival game that distills literal millions of data points over a 162-game season into a crapshoot where anything can happen. Are the Guardians and Rays successful because MLB doesn’t need a salary cap and is super fair, or are they successful because the playoffs are just random? Nothing they did all year tells me either team is actually that good, so I’d lean the latter.  

The great irony of this whole discussion is it doesn’t matter. In reality, the World Series result does not change anything about MLB’s need for a salary cap. Owners will hold firm on the need for one no matter what, and the MLBPA will continue to say they’d rather go play cricket — the World Series winner just changes the air around the negotiating table, not whether we need the thing in the first place. 

So do we need a salary cap? I’ve gone back and forth on this all year, and after a full season of thinking landed exactly here: a salary cap would definitely improve Major League Baseball if we could just snap our fingers and get one. Equality of results, like, say the Rays winning, is not the same thing as competitive balance, and part of the issue with giga-payroll teams like the Dodgers is they choke out fans of small markets from getting to watch their favorite players. It was monumentally stupid that Detroit Tigers fans knew that they couldn’t keep Tarik Skubal, and monumentally stupider that Pittsburgh Pirates fans are just counting down the days until they have to trade Paul Skenes. That’s not a healthy environment, and fans of smaller market teams should be allowed to be excited about the future. 

But I’ve decided that a salary cap does not improve MLB enough to be remotely worth what it’s going to take to get it. The main beneficiaries of a cap are, simply, billionaires, and I’m not going to pound the pavement canvassing for the interests of the 0.1 percent. Spending on players is only one facet of success in Major League Baseball, and competent scouting, analytics, development and front office operations are another — ask Arte Moreno and the Los Angeles Angels how well simply buying players and ignoring infrastructure worked for Mike Trout’s career. World Series winner agnostic, the ensuing fight to get a cap could do more damage to baseball than it would improve it. So I kindly ask everyone around me… who seem to be sharpening pitchforks… to please calm the hell down.

LOS ANGELES — The Brewers bullpen might be the biggest separating factor through two games of the National League Championship Series, with Milwaukee relievers combining for 9 2/3 scoreless innings thus far in the series.

Dodgers relievers were a strength of the team, and given the current health of the staff this might be the deepest postseason bullpen the team has had in recent years. During the postseason, the LA bullpen has a 3.13 ERA with 27 strikeouts and eight unintentional walks in 23 innings. In the NLCS, Dodgers relievers have allowed four runs in 8 1/3 innings but also have 15 strikeouts.

Dodgers batters have just two hits in 30 at-bats plus three walks against Brewers relievers in the series, unable to do anything late in the game. In Game 1, Los Angeles scored its only run in the second inning, and in Game 2 they didn’t score after the fifth.

Aaron Ashby has pitched multiple innings in each game so far, totaling 3 2/3 innings. Abner Uribe was the other Brewer to pitch both games in Milwaukee, including four outs in Game 2, and he has four strikeouts in 2 1/3 innings.

Asked what his plan was for the back end of the bullpen, including closer Trevor Megill, Brewers manager Pat Murphy said on Tuesday’s off day at Dodger Stadium, “Keep throwing them out there. They can rest next year.”

After a beat, Murphy added, “Familiarity to a team is a thing. You have to be conscious of that too. We’re not going to go forward without other people stepping up. Some other people have to step up.”

So far the Brewers have used six pitchers in relief, including starting pitcher Dustin May for an inning in Game 2. The active pitchers Milwaukee hasn’t used yet — aside from Game 3 starter Robert Gasser — are right-handers Antonio Senzatela and Chad Patrick, plus left-handers Shane Drohan and Kyle Harrison.

Here’s a look at the Brewers relievers who have pitched, along with the Dodgers batters they faced.

	Megill	Ashby (L)	Uribe	Hall (L)	Romero (L)	May
Betts	G1	G1	G2			G2
Freeman (L)		G1, G2		G1		G2
Smith		G1, G2	G1		G2
Ohtani (L)		G1, G2	G1		G2
Teoscar		G1, G2	G1			G2
Muncy (L)	G1		G1		G2
Pages	G1		G1, G2
Tucker (L)	G1	G1	G2
Edman (S)			G2
Kiké		G1
Rojas		G2
De Paula (L)	G1

“I think the best solution is to catch a good lead and keep those guys in the pen. But with that, you’ve just got to find a way to stack some good at-bats and find a way to get some outfield grass,” manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday. “They’re all different, Uribe to Ashby to [DL] Hall to Megill, they’re all different. So I can’t really answer one specific answer. You’ve just got to compete against those guys. They’re very good.”

On the Dodgers side, they’ve used eight of their nine relievers already with only closer Edwin Díaz having not appeared in the series. This gets back to the Dodgers rarely leading at all in this NLCS, and never late, at least so far.

	Scott (L)	Vesia (L)	Phillips	Sasaki	Stewart	Henriquez	Bubic (L)	Wrobleski (L)
Chourio			G1	G2	G2	G2
Turang (L)	G1				G2*	G2	G2
Contreras	G1*				G2	G2	G2
Bauers (L)	G1, G2	G1					G2	G2
Vaughn	G1*	G1
Mitchell (L)	G1, G2	G1, G2					G2	G2
Pratt			G1	G2	G2	G2
Lara (S)			G1
Ortiz			G1
Yelich (L)	G2						G2	G2
Frelick (L)				G2	G2	G2
Hamilton (L)				G2	G2	G2

The asterisks above in the table of Dodgers relievers are for intentional walks, when a pitcher “faced” a batter but didn’t really face the batter. William Contreras and Andrew Vaughn were intentionally walked with Tanner Scott on the mound in Game 1, and Brice Turang was intentionally walked with Brock Stewart pitching in Game 2.

With at least two and potentially three days in a row at Dodger Stadium, let’s see how the relievers are used over the next three games, and if any familiarity creeps into any results.