Astros right-hander Ryan Weiss cleared waivers and has been assigned outright to Triple-A Sugar Land, the team announced Wednesday. Houston designated him for assignment over the weekend when selecting Raynel Delgado‘s contract from Sugar Land. Now that he’s cleared waivers, Weiss will stick with the organization as non-roster depth.
Weiss, 29, made his big league debut with the Astros this season. The former D-backs farmhand parlayed a breakout 2024-25 performance in the Korea Baseball Organization into a one-year, $2.6MM deal with the ‘Stros. Weiss turned in a 3.73 ERA in 16 starts with the KBO’s Hanwha Eagles in 2024 and a 2.87 ERA across 178 2/3 innings last year, all the while showing strong strikeout, walk and ground-ball rates.
The signing hasn’t panned out as hoped. Weiss has appeared in nine games as an Astro, two of them starts, and posted a 7.62 ERA in 26 frames. He’s fanned a roughly average 22.9% of his opponents but also issued walks at an unacceptable 15.3% clip. More problematic is how homer-prone Weiss has proven against big league hitters; in his 26 frames, he’s faced 131 hitters and surrendered eight long balls. That’s an average of 2.77 round-trippers per nine innings. Put another way, he’s surrendered a homer to 6.1% of the batters he’s faced.
Weiss’ performance in Sugar Land hasn’t been better. He’s pitched 20 1/3 innings there and been tagged for an 8.41 earned run average. He hasn’t been quite so homer-prone or given out quite as many walks, but he’s fanned fewer hitters and struggled badly with men on base.
There’s still time for Weiss to turn things around, but Houston’s early return on that minimal investment isn’t anywhere close to what the team hoped. Weiss had already been pitching at the Triple-A level for more than a month, and he’ll now head back to the Space Cowboys and try to pitch his way back into Houston’s big league plans.
