Biggest struggle in pro sports for young teams with good players. Consistency. The specter of being able to put forth the "A game" every game. Not just having these random outbursts of runs or pitching. Game to game being the same team. This is what McCann, Beltran, Reddick these veterans are supposed to bring... They started out looking like a monster, even with some cold bats they just looked like an overwhelmingly talented team. KC right away came in and dispelled that...same team in Seattle and they look lost. Yes yes yes, early, long season...but this was their big problem last year too. Just be the same team every night.
Baseball is consistently fickle. Guys will always be on hot streaks, while others Will be cold. The best ones basically either go cold less often, or get uber hot over significant stretches. What am I rooting for right now? Health. Especially amongst the pitching staff. If they continue to pitch at this sort of clip, the bats (especially the veteran ones) will come around.
Health is a great wish. A secondary one for me would be more fundamental baseball. They're shooting themselves in the foot with all the extra-base outs. E.g. if there's a hit-n-run on, the batter needs to swing at it even if its a ball to not leave the runner out to dry. It's been really ugly baseball on the offensive side. Flip side is the pitching has definitely been a bright spot.
That's fair enough. I do still think the only player really being who he is, is springer and he's in overdrive at that. Seems like everyone is struggling with themselves more than the game. Maybe a game like last night where you get a little lucky on a fly ball...where a couple of guys get RBI hits...maybe that breaks the invisible wall. I think we all expected this lineup to mash, 7 runs for them seems almost Ho-hum. But you're spot on about health, definitely don't want to see anyone break down in April.
There's always good/bad in any given viable MLB lineup over any given stretch. Right now, Springer is connecting and making consistent contact, Gattis is actually getting on base at a tremendous clip (and surprisingly being very patient at the plate), and overall the lineup isn't being plagued by K's as much as year's past. It also doesn't help that they've basically only faced 1.3 pitching staff's for the whole season... with 1 team (Mariners) having a pretty set scouting report on how they want to go after the Astros hitters. There's enough talent and veteran hitters on this team for things to be more consistent as the season goes on. Health is everything right now.
This is really the only thing they can control. Lots of mental mistakes right now, glad the bats woke up last night (especially Altuve and Gurriel)
You're not going to find a team in baseball that is consistent - that is the nature of the sport. And the variations in teams are subtle, which is why the best teams win 6 out of 10 games while the worst win 4 out of 10. Last year, Boston scored 5.4 runs per game. Cleveland was #2 at 4.8 runs per game. Dead last was Oakland at 4.0. In other words, taking out the Red Sox outlier, the difference between a great offense and a horrible one was less than 1 run per game. If you're expecting the Astros to often score 7 runs in a game, they are going to just as often have to score 2 or 3 as well.
True. Similar to last year's two dominant offenses in the Cubs and Red Sox. Our OPS so far is identical to them right in middle of the pack. It's also meaningless with this small a sample size.
