I don't blame Hinch for this. Every pitcher has been exhausted and none are performing. The fact we are still "in it" with all that's happened is amazing, really.
Seriously. This hour 3 days ago this city was riding high on both teams and both have been thoroughly embarrassed since then. Like what in the actual f@#k did this city do to deserve such routine disappointment?? And I swear if I see the ******* texas rangers win a title I will personally go down to MMP and burn it to the ground.
Not sure how you can say that when the first two months of horrendous play completely torpedoed this season. I'll agree that adding a legit TOR pitcher or two and addressing 1B will do wonders but this team certainly had their fair share of mental lapses.
Except it didn't. Sometime in June or early July, the Astros led the Wild Card race. It's not like they weren't able to overcome the horrible start - and they did it with half a season to go.
The Astros could've had a bigger lead in June or early July. They'd been healthy besides McCullers up to that point. Then, injuries hit and we had no cushion. As bad as we played against Fort Worth all season, May-April was easily the worst and set a terrible tone. Giles also had his worst suckage then too.
Was that Tony Kemp or Matt?!! _________ Springer trying to break record for most baserunning outs in a single game.
All seasons are going to feature ups and downs... moreso when you have inconsistent players like Rasmus, Valbuena, Gattis, Springer... and at least for this year, Keuchel, Correa, LMJ (health wise), Giles, Gregerson, Harris, McHugh... A lot of you come off like you've never watched a 162 game season before. Major is accurate in that they overcame the sluggish start, were in the WC lead, and still couldn't capitalize for a variety of reasons. After 162, you are who you are... regardless of how you got there.
Did Yuli just hit into his 4th DP this game? That's gotta tie some sort of record. The Plutonium Sombrero?
That's what they are saying on the broadcast, but one of them was Springer being thrown out trying to go to 3rd. So each AB resulted in a DP, but that one shouldn't be on Gurriel as it was Springer trying to be greedy and go 1st to 3rd. Still poor though.
The other thing I liked is that we didn't beat our heads in by making the same mistakes again and again and again, both personnel wise and on the field. For example, we unloaded Gomez, Rasmus sat down, Reed sat down, Bregman was called up, we corrected our sliding issues, we tried different closers, Kemp was called into action, White was sat down. Not everything worked, but we didn't just keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We changed things up. We tried to adapt. Even Pettis calmed down quite a bit. Whereas last year we seemed committed to whatever was going wrong rather than adapting.
While it wasn't Gurriel's fault, it still goes into the record book as a GIDP. He joins Joe Torre, Victor Martinez and the immortal Goose Goslin with 4 in a single game. EDIT - actually, I am not sure if the others grounded into 4 DPs. Yuli only grounded into 3 and popped into another. Essentially, 2 of those were definitely Springer's fault.
