Jeff Luhnow: “We will outperform the expectations”

Danny Knobler spoke with Astros’ general manager Jeff Luhnow about the outlook for his rebuilding team:

Everyone is talking about the Astros, and the only topic is how bad everyone is convinced they’re going to be. “We will outperform the expectations,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said with some confidence, and also with a smile.

I’ve done a dozen or so radio spots in the past couple of weeks and the Astros have come up in five of them. Each time the host asks me “so, how bad are these Astros gonna be?” with his suggested answer being something like “historically awful, or rift-in-the-space-time-continuum awful?” I’ve had people suggest to me with a straight face that this could be a 120-loss team.

I don’t think the Astros are going to be good. Not even a little bit. But there’s no way on Earth they’re going to be as bad as a lot of people think they are because people are thinking they’re going to be one of the two or three worst teams of all time.

Just playing the odds here and suggesting that I’d take the under if you put the over/under on their losses at “1962 Mets” because that kind of thing just doesn’t happen very often.