On Tuesday night, the Astros came away with a big win against the Dodgers, but they suffered an even bigger loss, as an ankle injury in batting practice resulted in Carlos Correa being pulled before the game. The exact extent of the injury was not initially known, with the shortstop/third baseman scheduled to visit a specialist today, but Brian McTaggart of MLB.com reported late this morning that Correa will have surgery and miss the rest of the 2026 season:
Astros source: Carlos Correa will have surgery on his left ankle and will be out for the season. A devastating injury blow for the Astros.
— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) May 6, 2026
This didn’t seem like the sort of mild sprain that’s healed by a bag of ice and a weekend spent watching old episodes of Top Chef with your foot elevated. Indeed, the initial returns Tuesday night were already pretty concerning, with McTaggart reporting that “the expectation was that Correa would be sidelined indefinitely.” Correa’s injury is to his left ankle, not his right, which appears to have been the source of worry when both the Mets and Giants put the kibosh on signing him in 2022 following team physicals.
Re-acquired by Houston last summer during the Twins’ mini-fire sale, Correa has acted as the team’s starting shortstop while Jeremy Peña is out with a hamstring strain. And with Correa off to a strong start — a .279/.369/.418 line, a 121 wRC+, and 1.2 WAR — the Astros’ latest injury is a real hit to the team as they attempt to dig themselves out of a 15-22 hole.
It’s also a significant setback for Correa, who turns 32 later this year. After missing a lot of time in the early stages of his career due to injuries, including a broken fibula in 2014 (the injury that appears to have triggered the Mets’ and Giants’ concerns) and recurring back issues, Correa was fairly healthy from 2020 through 2023. He hit the IL at the end of the 2023 season with left plantar fasciitis, though he returned in time for the Twins’ postseason run and played well. But he missed two months in 2024 with right plantar fasciitis, and only got his bat back on track in late 2025 after rejoining Houston.
As injuries go, this one comes at a particularly poor time for the Astros. One of the surprising constants of Houston’s lousy start is an offense that has actually been quite good. In fact, as of Monday night, the Astros had seen their rest-of-season offensive outlook improve since the start of the season. The team’s 183 runs scored and 116 wRC+ both currently rank fifth in baseball. The lineup’s been good enough to cover for a lot of sins, and with the rotation ranking 29th in ERA and the bullpen in last place with an ERA over 6.00, there have been a lot of sins to cover.
Even prior to this injury, ZiPS was concerned about the team’s middling depth, pessimistically projecting the Astros for playoff odds of 12.8%, with Correa set for 445 plate appearances on the system’s depth charts. After accounting for the ankle, Houston’s odds of playing meaningful October baseball have dropped to a 9.7%. (Their FanGraphs Playoff Odds are largely unchanged at this juncture, as the post-Correa roster reshuffling calls for more playing time for Isaac Paredes at third and more Yordan Alvarez at DH instead of in left. Personally, I share ZiPS’ skepticism about the team’s depth, but time will tell.) The silver lining here is that nobody else in the AL West has taken advantage of the division’s slow start to build a first-place cushion, but ZiPS sees the Astros as a sub-.500 team going forward.
It actually could be a lot worse, thanks to a second silver lining: the team’s non-trade of Paredes. Acquired along with Cam Smith and Hayden Wesneski in return for Kyle Tucker in December of 2024, Paredes manned third base for most of the 2025 season, until a hamstring injury in July knocked him out for two months. Correa took over at third two weeks later after he was traded to Houston, and Paredes DHed at the very end of the season when he returned.
With Peña and Correa cemented on the left side and Alvarez healthy, there wasn’t an obvious place for Paredes to start this year. The team has never appeared willing to try Paredes in the outfield, which is understandable; he’s had a lower sprint speed in 2026 than any primary outfielder in baseball. Paredes can probably outrun me, at least if tacos or bourbon aren’t being offered as a prize for winning, but that’s damning with faint praise. Without Paredes on the team, ZiPS would project the Astros as having a 6.3% playoff shot, just barely above that of the White Sox.
Even though retaining Paredes can mitigate the loss of Correa somewhat, he doesn’t have the all-around upside to avoid there being a real cost here. There’s also a bit of a domino effect; the value Paredes had as a Plan B on the infield no longer exists now that he’s a Plan A. With the Astros behind, they needed at least the potential for high-end performance anywhere they could get it. Just because Houston didn’t trade Paredes after months of rumors this offseason doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have been a trade option this season. Unless Houston likes Braden Shewmake or Shay Whitcomb way more than I think they do, Paredes is now basically off the table in any win-now swap. A team like the Red Sox, who have some pitching depth if they can get over their current injury speed bumps, might have been interested in a pull-heavy third baseman with power. Houston’s farm system is weak at the moment, so losing Paredes as a trade option hurts the team considerably in the short term.
Is Correa’s injury the nail in the coffin for the 2026 Houston Astros? That’s a bit premature, but we can at least say there’s a long black car with white curtains in the windows suspiciously parked outside Daikin Park.
* This article was originally published here
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