Excluding Andrew Friedman, the Astros new GM that will be hired over the next month or so will probably be untested or an up-and-coming guy.
That means, you probably will not be happy with them right away. Heck, you might not be happy with them after three years. That doesn't mean whoever ends up in the job (my money is on Levine) will be wrong for it. It just means hiring a GM takes a long, long time to evaluate.
That's one of the reasons why Ed Wade still has defenders. He really didn't have enough time in his position to overcome the hole Tim Purpura and a decade of unproductive drafts dug for him. There is plenty to criticize him on for his time with Houston, but GMs have to be given more time to truly evaluate their effectiveness.
Look no further than Jon Daniels with the Rangers. Before they went on this most recent run of success, there was a movement to oust Daniels from his role as GM. He was inexperienced and people thought he didn't have what it took to run a successful team.
Now, he's being held up as the model of a good GM.
That's not even taking into account how long it will take the Astros to be competitive, especially considering how new owner Jim Crane wants to build through the farm system. That's going to take a while to see any progress from those moves.
Think about that Mark Teixeira trade that Daniels pulled off with the Braves. There were so many young players involved that it took a very long time to figure out it was going to be such a home run. In that vein, the Hunter Pence trade could work out similarly. Yes, the players have high upside, but they also were at fairly low levels of the minors at the time.
We'll discuss different candidates in the next week or so, but I wanted to make this point before we get going any further. It's hard to maintain patience with a team that's been so consistently bad lately, but it's worth saying just the same.