First series loss since late-April early-May vs MIN. Injuries taking a toll, but we're getting healthier with Altuve's return tomorrow.
Annoying. Can’t score to save our lives. All those injuries starting to weigh us down... guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.
@CheezeyBoy22 with my thoughts. Farm kids could only keep it up for so long. (And the remaining healthy regulars Brantley, Breg, Cheerios, Reddick are playing damn near every day, probably wondering when their break is.)
We were getting kinda lucky for a while there with our mostly AAA lineup. Finally catching up to us a bit. Couldn’t be a better time for us to be getting both José and Springer back over the course of the next week or so. Go win tomorrow and get on to NY.
This has been a fun little experiment watching our backups keep us winning. I'm ready for the real thing now.....
This is giving me severe 70's flashbacks when the Reds used to curb stomp the Astros regularly. One of my first baseball memories was George Foster hitting an incredible two homers in one game in the Astrodome.
Verlander's having a bit of a weird season. He's giving up fewer hits than ever in his career - but he's on pace to give up the most HRs by a large margin. 20 of the 60 hits he's given up this year have been HRs. And he's given up a total of 31 runs the whole year with 20 HRs.
If there is truth to the "new baseball/juiced baseball" theory, it makes sense a flyball pitcher like Verlander is more affected than others and homers spike. I mean he doesn't really seem to have changed his pitch selection/strategy much right ? Still working the high part of the strike zone, still throwing just as hard. Is he using the fastball a bit more % wise compared to previous seasons than the slider and curve ? It's hard to figure out how he could be pitching better (which he seems to be) than ever yet giving up so many HR...
It feels like the team as a whole is in a depressed state. The overall energy is low. The will to do things...like win...is weak. They're just kind of drifting along listlessly. It feels a lot like, well, how I feel a lot of the time, which is why I make the comparison. And I do think groups to a certain degree can experience the same symptoms of depression that individuals can. For example, in a struggling company, it's hard to keep morale and hopefulness up. Another thing I have lots of experience with. It's been a sucky time for the team. A lot of their best players are injured. Guys are tired. The relief pitching is taxed. The starting pitching is struggling. A lot of the call-ups probably are nervous as hell about how much longer they'll get to stay and how their play affects that. I'm sure the team as a whole feels worse than a lot of teams about the whole affair, because they're all so close. Hopefully Altuve coming back (possibly tomorrow) will give them a much-needed morale boost. As they tell you in little league, a huge part of the game is mental. The older I get, the more I realize how true that is.
Julia speaking (with and without words) the truth about Skyline "chili" was the best part of this game. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, we could have signed him when we drafted him out of HS, then we would have traded him during the teardown, and now we could trade for him back now that he's useful. Devenski makes coffee nervous. Welcome to the new era of baseball. I believe the count is now 17 solo shots and 3 2-run HRs.
So of the replacements, only Straw played yesterday. He walked as a PH, and came around to score. Damn it farm kids for scoring every time you come to the plate.
