Correa who? How Jeremy Pena replaced an Astros icon, without the team losing a step
THIS WINTER, THE Houston Astros were at a fork in the road.
Their longtime shortstop, Carlos Correa, was one of the faces of the franchise, a player who stood up for the clubhouse amid the criticism the team faced from its trash-can-banging, sign-stealing scandal. He was one of the first players the Astros chose during their years of tanking under Jeff Luhnow’s front office, a No. 1 overall pick with high expectations who had lived up to his promise in the major leagues.
But Astros GM James Click knew re-signing Correa would cost the team resources that could instead go toward building depth. When Click came to Houston in 2020, he hoped to create a sustainable winner in the model of the Los Angeles Dodgers and his previous team, the Tampa Bay Rays. Signing Correa to an expensive, long-term contract would chip away at that vision.
More importantly, the team already had a succession plan in mind: Jeremy Peña.
Peña had been in Houston’s system since 2018, when he was drafted in the third round. He was playing in Triple-A by 2021, ranked as the 48th best prospect in baseball by ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel ahead of the 2022 season. On Opening Day, Peña became the first player other than Correa to start at shortstop for the Astros since 2015, but the rookie has picked up where his predecessor left off — as a key cog in a team playing in its fourth World Series in six years.
Peña, who Tuesday became the first rookie shortstop to win a Gold Glove, has sparked the Astros with his offense, too. On the biggest stage, he’s put together an incredible stretch, hitting .333/.357/.648 with four homers in 12 postseason games, including the go-ahead homer in the 18th inning of Game 3 of the ALDS against the Seattle Mariners. He won ALCS MVP honors against the New York Yankees with homers in Games 1 and 4. On Thursday, he became the first rookie shortstop in MLB history with a hit in five straight World Series games — and the first ever to hit a home run in the Fall Classic.
In other words: Correa who?
“[Peña] wasn’t trying to be anybody but himself. He said that from day one,” teammate Alex Bregman said. “He understood how good Carlos has been and what he meant to every single person in here. His only focus was just to be Jeremy and he’s stuck with that the whole year. He’s trying to play his game and leave his legacy.”
And while Peña’s performance catapulted him into the Rookie of the Year conversation, his poise allowed him not just to replace a franchise player, but to come through in October.
“I felt confident in my abilities,” Peña said. “Not just defense, not just hitting. I felt like I could do a little bit of everything. I knew I could hit. I knew I could run. I knew I could throw, could field. It was a matter of getting the opportunity and taking advantage.”
WHEN THE ASTROS envisioned Peña taking over for Correa, they imagined a player who would be ready to play elite defense on Day 1. After all, he’d been perfecting his glovework since his summers growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, where Peña and his older and younger brothers, Austin and Carlos, created a game they called “Big League.”
The rules of “Big League” were simple: Throw the ball hard off a concrete wall and field the quick bounceback cleanly to earn a point. If you grabbed 10 ground balls in a row, you’d get 10 points and a spot on a minor league team. The next 10 grounders might send you up a level, from short-season ball to High-A, and so on. But if you missed one, you’d be demoted. The winner was the first brother to make it all the way to the major leagues.
“We would be playing for hours and we’ve caught like 600 ground balls, not even thinking about it,” Peña said. “We were just having fun. My older brother [Austin] was always the first to get to the big leagues. I would be stuck in Double-A and my little brother would not even be signed.”
When the New England winters came, Peña found another wall — this one in his family’s basement — and threw a yellow batting cage ball against it, to work on his hands. He’d pick up balls barehanded, backhanded — any way he could to improve.
“Baseball, you gotta have your foundation,” Peña said. “You gotta have your fundamentals. When you play games like that, then you have that in your back pocket. You know you can dive and throw the ball from a knee.”
When Peña showed up to baseball tryouts at Providence’s Classical High School as a freshman, head coach Ken Wnuk didn’t hold back. Wnuk always liked to put infielders to the test immediately, hitting grounders hard and seeing how they reacted to bad bounces on the particularly patchy baseball fields of the Northeast. Peña handled them with ease.
“I don’t pussyfoot around with ground balls,” Wnuk said. “But he made all the plays, all the throws and I’m just thinking, ‘This kid is f—ing good.'”
When University of Maine head coach Nick Derba first scouted Peña as a high school sophomore, he saw a fluidity to the shortstop’s hands, with footwork and instincts exceeding his expectations for a 16-year-old player.
“He was a Double-A shortstop as a sophomore in high school,” Derba said. “I watched him take one ground ball and I thought he was the best defender in the country.”
The Peña family’s affinity for baseball, though, didn’t start with three young boys finding creative ways to play the game they loved.
It started with Peña’s father, Geronimo, an infielder for St. Louis and Cleveland who played his last game in the major leagues in 1998, a year after Jeremy Peña was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
When Peña was nine, the family moved to Providence to be near family. There, Peña truly began his love affair with baseball, often heading out with his dad to field hundreds if not thousands of ground balls in a single session. At McCoy Stadium in nearby Pawtucket, the former home of the Boston Red Sox Triple-A affiliate, Peña would watch players like Dustin Pedroia, Jon Lester, Josh Reddick and Daniel Nava make their mark.
“I grew up a big fan, but I also wanted to be in it,” Peña said. “I would go to a game, and while everyone’s rooting for the home runs, I was paying attention to the pre-pitch hop, what players were doing, how they were moving. I was watching what the players were doing on deck, watching the little things.”
His father, a big league role model under the same roof, shared stories from his career, giving his son a sense of the baseball lifestyle and work ethic it would require to follow his childhood heroes to the majors.
“It gives you a sense that it’s possible,” Peña said.
The Atlanta Braves saw something in Peña, selecting him in the 39th round of the 2015 MLB Draft. Peña chose to not sign, and instead headed to the University of Maine, where he’d earn a spot on the America East Conference All-Rookie team. He spent his summers playing in the New England Collegiate Baseball League with the Plymouth Pilgrims, then later with the Chatham Angels in the Cape Cod Baseball League, where he was named an All-Star.
After a breakout season in his junior year, Peña was drafted by the Astros in the third round of the 2018 draft. Derba — who himself was selected in the 30th round of the 2007 draft by the Cardinals, and made it as far as Triple-A — has seen many players get drafted. But Peña’s goal, he said, was about more than getting drafted, and more, too, than even reaching the major leagues.
“He hadn’t gotten to where he wanted to be yet,” said Derba.
WITH THE LARGER plan of replacing Correa in mind, the Astros added Peña to their taxi squad during the 2021 postseason, hoping to expose him to the pressure of the big leagues, even if only from the bench. They wanted him to absorb the veteran influence of Jose Altuve and Bregman. Just a few months later, after seeing him adjust so well to the major league clubhouse, Click felt comfortable moving forward with Peña at shortstop for 2022.
“He just looked the part of a very talented major league shortstop,” Click said. “Letting go of Carlos was obviously a very difficult decision. Not easy by any means, but these are the kind of things we have to do in order to keep this franchise winning, to be able to withstand the inevitable losses.”
The expectation for Peña was that he was going to be a defense-first shortstop. With the strength of the Astros’ lineup, hitting like Correa wasn’t a requirement.
But Peña’s game proved to include some pop, too. The rookie hit .263/.310/.454 with 13 homers in the first half, and ended the season hitting .253/.289/.426 with 22 homers — tied with Correa for sixth among all MLB shortstops. His 4.8 bWAR wasn’t far off from Correa’s 5.4.
“We were extremely confident that he would be able to hold down shortstop from a defensive position and add value that way,” Click said. “The offense — not that it was gravy, but it gave us high confidence of where the floor was for him.”
Peña’s success has been a part of the Astros’ evolution into a perennial juggernaut, a player development factory with established veterans and young rising stars like Yordan Alvarez, Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier. Correa went on to sign with the Minnesota Twins for a $35.1 million annual salary, and, because of Peña, the Astros haven’t missed a step at shortstop.
He’s a crucial part of the Astros’ lineup, and his homers in big October moments have come as no surprise to teammates like designated hitter Trey Mancini.
“The way he carries himself is like a 10-year veteran,” Mancini said. “Just so cool, calm, collected in every situation. The first day I met him, I remember I got traded over [from Baltimore] and I kept forgetting this kid’s a rookie.”
Astros manager Dusty Baker was immediately impressed by the way Peña handled the media attention, unusual for a player who did not come up as a highly touted prospect.
“You could tell by his brightness in his eyes and his alertness on the field that he wasn’t scared and he wasn’t fazed by this,” Baker said. “Boy, he’s been a godsend for us, especially since we lost Carlos.”
Peña certainly wasn’t fazed in Game 5 of the World Series, homering and driving in two runs to help put the Astros one win from a championship.
“What he’s done this year was similar to when I saw a young Andruw Jones as a young player with the Braves against the Yankees [in the 1996 World Series],” Baker said. “Every once in a while these guys come along, not that often, but it just goes to show you, I mean, his future is very, very bright.”
Now, Peña finds himself on the cusp of baseball history.
“You dream about this stuff when you’re a kid,” Peña said of playing October baseball. “Shout out to my teammates. We show up every single day. We stayed true to ourselves all year. We’re a step away from our ultimate goal.”
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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