HOUSTON — Baseball’s best pitching staff is in a patchwork state, held together by two nearly-forgotten depth pieces and another pitcher who arrived at spring training in February without a professional start on his resume since 2019.

Still, back then, first-year Astros general manager Dana Brown took one look at Ronel Blanco during a Grapefruit League outing and asked his pitching coaches to stretch Blanco back out as a starter. The staff obliged. Few could have envisioned how crucial the conversion would be. 

Blanco will make his second major-league start on Wednesday at Rogers Centre against the Toronto Blue Jays as part of the team’s recently-expanded rotation. The six pitchers in it represent the totality of Houston’s available starting depth, demonstrating the toll May’s injuries took while authoring a damning indictment on the decision to ignore the problem in the offseason.

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“I think we’re in a position that we may have to acquire some more depth at the end of the day,” Brown said earlier this week, offering the season’s biggest understatement to date.

That the team still boasts baseball’s lowest ERA is a testament to the organization’s pitching development infrastructure, major-league coaching staff and catching trio of Martín Maldonado, Yainer Diaz and César Salazar. Having American League Cy Young contender Framber Valdez atop the rotation helps, too.

Reinforcements behind Valdez and Cristian Javier won’t arrive until or around the Aug. 1 trade deadline. Until they do, one must wonder how sustainable this setup can be. 

Brandon Bielak will bring a 1.45 WHIP and 5.15 FIP into Monday’s series opener against the Blue Jays. The two starters who will follow have their own issues: Blanco primarily throws two pitches, which could present problems after one trip through an order, while Hunter Brown is a rookie on pace to throw more innings than any season of his career. 

The Astros are in no position to be picky. These are their six starters for the foreseeable future. Here is a look at the state of it all.

If José Urquidy, Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr. stayed healthy, Hunter Brown could have been the Astros’ swingman/sixth starter hybrid, allowing the team to better monitor his innings while tailoring a plan for his first full major-league season.

That’s in an ideal world. The Astros don’t live there. Brown, who boasted 20 1/3 innings of major-league experience before the season, is now a rotation mainstay en route to uncharted territory. He’s thrown 62 1/3 innings across 12 starts, sports a 3.61 ERA and is striking out 10.7 batters per nine innings. Among all rookies, only Arizona outfielder Corbin Carrol has been worth more wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs. 

Brown is showing no signs of fatigue or wear but is compiling the type of big workload that must be monitored throughout the season. The 24-year-old right-hander threw a career-high 130 innings last season between both the major and minor leagues. He’s now on pace to pitch at least 170 during the regular season — before a possible pivotal role on a playoff pitching staff.

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“With everybody, we view their work through a lens of wanting to get the best out of them through the entire season,” pitching coach Josh Miller said. “There’s not a specific limit. There’s not a governor, so to speak, but we’re going to monitor it and be smart and know that maybe cutting him an inning or two short when it makes sense in any given game could pay dividends in the long run for the season and into next year, too.”

Blanco’s third pitch

Blanco threw 94 pitches during his starting debut on Thursday against the Angels. Eighty-eight of them were either four-seam fastballs or sliders. 

Relievers can often thrive throwing just two pitches, but if Blanco wants to stick as a starter, he must vary his arsenal. Either his changeup or curveball must blossom into a more consistent third pitch to help navigate lineups two or three times. Blanco threw three changeups and three curveballs against the Angels. Each secondary pitch generated a swing-and-miss. 

“The changeup and curveball are options for him and probably going to be more opponent-dependent,” Miller said. “We probably put them on an equal playing field in their best versions. They’re average, maybe even slightly plus pitches, just a little bit inconsistent.”

Whether Blanco even makes another start after Wednesday is a mystery. Initially, the team indicated it would remain in a six-man rotation just through this stretch of 17 consecutive games, which ends Sunday. 

It could behoove the team to stay in a six-man rotation. The Astros play nine games in a row starting with the June 13 series opener against the Nationals — but neither Miller nor manager Dusty Baker has committed to any plans beyond the Blue Jays series. 

They could also shrink back to a five-man setup and keep Blanco on the roster as a long reliever/swingman who stays stretched out in case they ever wanted to go back into a six-man. Perhaps Blanco could throw well on Wednesday and inspire a longer look in the rotation, but both J.P. France and Bielak are throwing well enough to keep earning their opportunities every fifth day. Sunday, France allowed only one run on three hits and a walk over seven strong innings against the Angels in a 2-1 loss. 

“France actually has good stuff, I said it from Day 1. I think the stuff is really good, so I think that’s sustainable,” Dana Brown said. “I think Bielak, it comes down to if he continues to throw the good changeup and command the baseball, we do a good job of catching the baseball, I think he’ll be fine. He measures up very well across the league among a lot of fifth starters.”

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Not mentioning Valdez in a pitching status report feels shortsighted. He lowered his ERA to 2.16 with seven scoreless innings on Friday night against the Angels, outdueling Shohei Ohtani for the second time in six starts. Both of Ohtani’s pitching losses this season have come against Valdez and the Astros.

Watching how Valdez attacked Ohtani the hitter is a more illustrative example of his overall evolution. Ohtani came to bat in the third inning with the tying runs aboard and one out. Valdez threw him three consecutive cutters — the newest pitch in his arsenal. Ohtani swung through one, spoiled the second foul and tipped the third one into Maldonado’s glove. 

Valdez started throwing the cutter prior to last season. The Astros were concerned about his ability to land his curveball for strikes and sought another pitch he could use inside the strike zone.

“If teams can game plan to spit on spin, spit on soft and be ready for a sinker, it gave them a leg up,” Miller said. “Him throwing the cutter as a strike pitch last year, we saw what it could do. This year, he’s changed it into a quasi-strike pitch, but he’s also used it as a putaway pitch, too. Like a really power slider-like pitch that can get under the zone. It’s been great.”

Underlying metrics suggest Valdez’s cutter is performing slightly worse than last season — it had a negative-5 run value last year and it is at 1 early this season — but the way in which he’s using it is clearly different. 

Miller mentioned the pitch’s newfound putaway ability, but Valdez seems far more inclined to throw it against right-handed hitters, who often have an opposite-field approach against his curveball/sinker-heavy arsenal. He threw 82 total cutters to right-handed hitters last season. After 12 starts of this one, right-handed hitters have seen 87 cutters.

“When you got the slow curveball splitting the plate and coming down and in, the cutter keeps guys honest from trying to go out there and hit the ball to right field,” Baker said. “Everybody knows what a great sinker he has. That’s what the cutter does — any time you can force the hitter to decide inside or outside.”

(Top photo of Hunter Brown: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)