Oh My Gosh The Astros Are Annoying

I mean, like, seriously, guys!

The Red Sox are 2-5 against the Astros so far this season. That’s not good. It’s odd though how good the Red Sox are against, well, everyone else that they’re so bad against this one team. We’re far enough along that I feel comfortable making the blanket statement that the Red Sox are a good baseball team, yet put silly orange uniforms on the other team and the Red Sox turn into the Bad News Bears. Or maybe not, I’ve never actually seen the Bad News Bears, but I assume they were bad considering “bad” was in their team name. Regardless, the Red Sox turn into a bad baseball team, or maybe they turn into the Bears, who are a football team. Maybe they don’t like orange uniforms? I’m confused. Let’s move to the next paragraph!

All of that, or at least the non-gobbledygook part, is what made yesterday’s win over Houston so satisfying. The Astros are really good. They can hit, boy howdy, can they hit. They have, surprising to me, a good starting pitching staff. The only thing they don’t really have is a great bullpen, but when their starter goes seven strong and their offense puts up seven runs, who cares how good their bullpen is? Yesterday though the Red Sox got to Zack Greinke and just about every other pitcher the Astros threw at them after that.

The nutty part of this game, or at least the main nutty part which excludes the double play that was a foul ball that wasn’t a foul ball, the 301 foot homer, the bizarre homer by Jose Altuve where he hit it after basically falling on his face, and the streaker that apparently injured one of the Astros pitchers, was how often the lead kept changing.

• First the Astros lead, 1-0.

• Then Boston scored two to make it 2-1.

• Then Houston scored two to make it 3-2, Astros.

• Then the Red Sox scored two to take the lead, 4-3.

• Then Houston scored four to take the lead 7-4.

• Then the Red Sox scored three to tie it, 7-7.

• Then Houston scored one to take the lead 8-7. (We are now only five and a half innings into this thing, by the way).

• Then the Red Sox scored five to take the lead 12-8.

Put on your seatbelt because this is the win expectancy chart from FanGraphs on all that.

Kinda makes you sick to your stomach just looking at it. The Astros, to their credit, never quit. There’s never a time when you think, ok, this one’s over. Two down in the ninth down by four and down 0-2 in the count Alex Bregman hit one almost to the triangle off Matt Barnes. Kike Hernandez caught it but MY GOSH can’t anything against this team be easy?! Like, at least a little bit?

The entire series felt like that. The second game was especially annoying because the Astros made a ton of hard contact and ALL of it went for hits. They had 17 hits! In one game! I’m yelling in print! And that’s after putting up 11 hits in the first game. That means they had 28 hits and 54 outs in those two games. That’s a .518 batting average! [CORRECTION: it turns out that if you do math 28 hits and 54 outs is not a .518 batting average, it is a .341 batting average. I hope you don’t come here to learn rudimentary math. My apologies for the mistake.] And they didn’t stop yesterday either, knocking out 10 more hits and scoring 8 more runs. The only difference was the Red Sox offense showed up yesterday in a way it hadn’t in the first two games.

Two things on all this: first, it’s lucky the Red Sox aren’t in the same division as the Astros because I don’t honestly think I could stomach 12 more games of this. It is extremely frustrating watching another team hit .500 [EDIT: nope] against the Red Sox and if Houston were on the schedule again I’d probably have to come up with something else to do that was more fun, like wash every dish in the house, or run backwards through traffic. Anything to avoid watching Jose Altuve homer while falling over again.

Matthew Kory @mattymatty2000

Oh my gosh the Astros are annoying

The other thing though is that, take a deep breath and let’s be honest: there is no team in baseball history that hits .500 over the course of a season. The Astros are a really good offense, any look at their stats will tell you that, but nobody is THAT good. Sorry, they’re just not. Houston is on a hot streak, the Red Sox played OK, but not spectacular and, if we’re continuing to be honest, Boston’s pitching staff was probably due for a few stinkers, which they absolutely delivered in this series.

Now if these two teams meet in the playoffs, which is the only other time they could meet as their season series is blessedly over, the Astros could absolutely reprise their We’re All Ted Williams Now performance from this past week. It could absolutely happen, but A) it’s not likely, and B) that’s way down the road from now and with Chris Sale on the mend, the draft and the trade deadline coming up, that’s not anything I’m spending mental energy on right now.

What was nice to see from yesterday’s game though was the meat of the Red Sox bullpen came in to shut down any uprising from the visitors. Adam Ottavino, Josh Taylor, and Matt Barnes combined to throw three innings of scoreless baseball, allowing just two singles, with no walks and two strikeouts. After the supercharged insanity of the first six innings, it was nice to see the bullpen come out and collectively say, “OK, enough of that garbage. You go home now.”

Speaking of things it was nice to see, Kike Hernandez hit two doubles and took a walk out of the leadoff spot. I’ll still argue he has no business there, and neither does anyone other than Xander Bogaerts or Alex Verdugo, but clearly Alex Cora has different ideas on that than I do. On days when the leadoff man gets on base though you can see the impact it has on the offense, and all the guys Cora has been running out there in the first spot of the batting order haven’t been meeting that one basic requirement of a leadoff guy, namely get on base. The Red Sox need a leadoff man who possesses that one singular skill, and right now they don’t really have one, which has lead to Cora doing this mixing and matching thing, which clearly isn’t working. At some point later this year I think things will be fixed, or improved, or at least changed, but that’s clearly not going to come before the trade deadline or thereabouts.

In other completely and totally unrelated news that I’m inserting here for no reason at all, Jarren Duran went 1-for-5 with his eighth homer of the minor league season on Thursday night for Triple-A Worcester. Duran has a .964 OPS and a .364 on-base percentage, both of which will play just fine anywhere in any lineup. He was also recently moved way up Baseball America’s prospect rankings from 86th to 29th. That says to me that a lot of the scouts who doubted him are not doubting him any longer.

Clearly the Red Sox aren’t rushing to bring Duran up, but from my vantage point they have two starting outfielders and a bunch of guys who should probably be part time players all getting regular starts in the outfield. Verdugo should be in the lineup every day, and at least right now, Hunter Renfroe should be as well. Dude has been out of his mind good for a month plus, so at least here and now, he’s starting every day. But that’s only two guys and research tells us you need three guys in the outfield. And if Renfroe turns back into a power-only pumpkin who can’t hit right handed pitching, then there’s all of a sudden a lot of available space in the Boston outfield.

That’s where Duran could (and should) come in, or up. I don’t imagine he’s on his way presently, but I’d be surprised if he wasn’t up and starting most games for the Red Sox before June is out. The Red Sox really should learn what they have in Duran, if this is a guy they can trust both for the longer term, but more importantly at least right now, for the shorter term as well. The trade deadline is coming up, and if Duran can play every day or most days for the rest of the season, that’s one position they don’t have to improve. And if he can’t, then they need to put outfield higher up on the list of positions they should look at during the trade deadline.

Also, after watching the Astros for the past couple weeks, it’s not hard to see the benefits of a lineup that doesn’t quit. The Red Sox have had lineups like that in the past, but not now. Duran could be a part of such a lineup, or at least a step towards such a lineup. Though after saying that, I should point out that yesterday the Red Sox did have one of those lineups, and yes it was just one win out of three, and two out of seven, but it was pretty sweet to watch, just the same. As it turns out, it’s nice to beat the Astros every once in a while.

Next up is four games against the Toronto Blue Jays. Toronto sits 6.5 games behind Boston, so winning the series would be a pretty big kick in the pants to the Jays. Losing it would be that same kick coming the other way.