WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The Houston Astros have a habit of finding useful pitchers where nobody else is looking. Tayler Scott was a non-roster invitee in 2024 who wound up spending the entire season on the big league roster. Steven Okert repeated the formula in 2025. This spring, the name worth watching is Peter Lambert.
Lambert, 28, arrived in West Palm Beach on a minor league deal signed in November—the kind of contract that usually means a summer in Sugar Land if things go well. But things have gone better than that. In six Grapefruit League innings, he hasn’t allowed a run, has touched 96.3 mph with his fastball, and has drawn the kind of unsolicited praise from the front office that non-roster arms rarely receive.
“He’s got power stuff,” general manager Dana Brown said. “He’s looked really good.”
Manager Joe Espada has been equally direct.
“He’s having a really good camp,” Espada said. “There’s a lot of upside to his stuff. I think playing away from Colorado could help him use his pitches better and the shape of his pitches. His stuff can play much higher out of the pen. He’s definitely someone who has caught our attention.”
That last part about playing away from Colorado is the key to understanding Lambert’s story. A second-round pick in 2015, he spent his entire major league career with the Rockies, where Coors Field has a well-documented way of making pitchers look worse than they are. His 6.28 career ERA looks alarming until you factor in the altitude, the thin air, and the unforgiving dimensions of one of baseball’s most hitter-friendly venues. He did rate in the top third of major league pitchers in limiting hard contact and average exit velocity in 2024—numbers that suggest his stuff plays better than his ERA indicates.
After leaving Colorado, Lambert spent last season with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows in Japan, logging 116 innings and posting a 4.26 ERA as a starter. He called it a valuable year of work that helped him iron things out and rebuild confidence.
“It’s still a grind, just like it is over here,” Lambert said. “But the team I was on, they just let me go out there and pitch and try to iron as many things out as I could throughout the year. So it was a good year. I’m glad I did it.”
Now he’s in Houston’s pitching lab, where the organization has a well-earned reputation for unlocking what other teams couldn’t. Lambert said the Astros’ reputation for pitcher development was a major factor in his decision to sign with them, and that the coaching staff has already come to him with ideas about pitch usage and profile adjustments he’s eager to explore.
“My performance on the field hasn’t been the best, so of course I’m going to be trying to improve,” he said. “I think it’s a little bit of everything—pitch usage, changing some things up, maybe adding a pitch, maybe leaning on a single pitch.”
Lambert profiles as a swingman candidate—someone who can start in a pinch or provide length out of the bullpen, a role the Astros will value even more with Josh Hader opening the season on the injured list and a six-man rotation potentially leaving one fewer reliever on the active roster.
The Astros have done this before. They have a gift for turning overlooked arms into useful contributors, and Lambert has the stuff, the motivation, and the right address to follow in Scott and Okert’s footsteps.
Whether he turns out to be a diamond in the rough or a rhinestone remains to be seen. But right now, in West Palm Beach, he’s earning a second look.