I'm having a lot of fun playing with the new tools that tech team created, and one of the coolest ones, besides autotagging, is this news clipping tool.  It makes having a link dump post pretty use for us, so hopefully we'll just turn into your hub for all things Astros news:

• Jose Valverde threw 25 pitches from the mound and feels fine: Hallelujah
• The Astros attendance is down by about 13%, so I guess we can expect payroll to drop 13% next year to compensate.
• The Chronicle has a feature about how stellar the Astros minor league outfielders have been.  It's just a shame that the we don't have one of the better offensive outfields in the bigs right now.
• That said, I'm calling it now: Yordany Ramirez will get traded sometime late July for a bull pen arm: it's basically already a done deal.
• Sean Berry is back after his surgery—I know we all continue to wish him the very best.
• The Astros have had an above average strength of schedule so far, according to Sky's calculations.
• A collection of some pitch/fx primers for those of you who were hopefully mildly interested by the Backe piece.