Alvarez helps evade disaster
Designated hitter delivers key hit to widen lead; McCullers labors despite striking out seven
OAKLAND, Calif. — The luxuries Yordan Alvarez affords the Astros are almost too many to list. One of his swings can crater an opponent. His spot in the lineup sends another dugout scrambling to strategize.
Alvarez is hitting sixth in manager Dusty Baker’s batting order. The skipper still seems skeptical of Alvarez’s surgically repaired knees. Baker does not want to risk running Alvarez too hard near the top of the order. Let the more spry hitters get on base, Baker surmised, and let Alvarez drive them in.
“If the guys in front of him don’t get him, you feel very comfortable up there with Alvarez,” Baker said after the Astros’ 9-1 win over the Oakland Athletics. “He’s getting better every day. He’s swinging like we’ve seen Alvarez of the past.”
Catastrophe loomed far too many times early Saturday afternoon. Michael Brantley left after one inning with an injured wrist. Without him, the lineup let a young A’s starter off the hook during the five frames he pitched. Houston’s own starter, Lance McCullers Jr., labored to finish four of his own but finished five innings. The bullpen behind him entered beaten up.
Alvarez singled first to center and then to left in the third, beating Oakland’s shift. He came to bat again in the fifth. A’s manager Bob Melvin sensed the danger emerging. Keeping Oakland’s deficit at one seemed paramount. Two Astros reached to start the frame against A’s starter Cole Irvin.
Melvin turned to Lou Trivino, the most menacing leverage reliever in his bullpen. He fires fastballs near 98 mph and cutters just a tick lower. Trivino took care of Carlos Correa on five pitches, pumping a 97.1 mph four-seamer by him in a 2-2 count. Alvarez appeared as the Astros’ last hope. He supplied that and more.
“I was not trying to think about too much, just trying to focus on the pitcher and doing damage in that situation,” Alvarez said through an interpreter. “That’s what happened, and I was able to do that in that spot.”
Trivino tried to sneak a 1-0 cutter past Alvarez. The pitch sat flat, and Alvarez annihilated it. The baseball traveled 409 feet to the opposite field, the first of what Houston hopes is many mammoth home runs from the 2019 American League Rookie of the Year. Alvarez has five hits in his first 13 atbats. Three have garnered extra bases.
“I feel really good,” Alvarez said. “I think the biggest thing for me was to work on being healthy, and I feel really good right now. That’s helping me be in the form I’m in coming into the season.
“I was never too worried about (starting slow). I’ve said that I wasn’t too worried coming into the season. I was just focusing on doing my job the right way, and things were going to turn out the right way. I feel really good, though.”
Alvarez’s home runs widened Houston’s lead to four. He had three hits. Aledmys Diaz, playing to give Alex Bregman a planned off day, supplied three of his own. Houston hammered out 13 total, bringing their three-day tally to 36. In a series they’ve already won, the Astros are out-scoring the A’s 26-7. Domination does not begin to describe the first three affairs against the defending American League West champions.
“The energy is there,” McCullers said. “Something that me and the other guys were stressing coming out of camp was that we needed the energy from day one, and it’s been there.”
For five innings, McCullers vacillated from fantastic to frustrating. Oakland managed two hits and one run against him. They struck out seven times. The line looks spectacular, but the journey there seemed anything but.
McCullers threw only 54 of his 95 pitches for strikes. Three frames featured fewer than 12 pitches and just three batters. The other two teetered on disaster and threatened to derail the team’s entire day.
The Astros awoke on Saturday with an overworked bullpen. Relievers threw 81⁄3 innings during the series’ first two games with no off day until Wednesday. McCullers wants to establish himself as a workhorse. Saturday seemed an apt time to do that and save the relievers.
McCullers harnessed miserable command of his four-pitch arsenal during the first. He fell behind 3-0 to three of the first four hitters he faced. His two-seam fastball missed badly on the right side of the strike zone. The first two A’s to face him worked walks. Mitch Moreland poked a single against the shift to score leadoff man Mark Canha, erasing an early Astros lead.
From the dugout, pitching coach Brent Strom saw a solution. He sauntered to the mound after Moreland’s single and diagnosed McCullers’ flaw.
“It was my back leg, I was collapsing on it,” McCullers said. “I wasn’t staying firm on the back side, which was contributing to a lot of those fastballs I was missing arm side … First game of the year, I was trying to stay calm, cool and collected, and I think that turned into a little bit of laziness, mechanically, early on. But we got it right.”
McCullers allowed one hit after Strom’s visit. He managed to wiggle out of perilous predicaments in the first and third. He threw 33 and 32 pitches in the innings, respectively, workloads that usually prompt a mid-frame pitching change. Baker resisted, given the weary state of his bullpen.
“He battled,” Baker said. “Boy, the game started out, and he was throwing those balls in the dirt. He had been throwing so good in spring training That’s not like Lance to walk many people and not like Lance to be close to the strike zone. That was a big adjustment he made during the ballgame.”
McCullers managed to reward his manager’s faith. He needed seven pitches to finish the fourth and 11 during the fifth. He tallied a strikeout in every inning but the fifth, although the A’s only swung and missed eight times. McCullers mixed in his new slider for 13 called strikes. He threw just 16 curveballs. Rollover ground balls on his twoseamer produced quick outs to save his pitch count. Correa committed a fifthinning throwing error to threaten it, but Jose Altuve turned a 4-6-3 double play that prevented it from making any difference.
McCullers waited for all of his defenders after the fifth, high-fiving them as they left the field. He left the bullpen four frames to finish. Ryne Stanek supplied two of them. Enoli Paredes faced four batters in the eighth and retired one. Canha and Matt Chapman coaxed walks while Matt Olson obliterated a single to right field.
With all three aboard and one out, Baker turned to lefthander Brooks Raley. Melvin countered Jed Lowrie off his bench, a switchhitter who took his plate appearance righthanded. Raley struck him out on five pitches. Chad Pinder flew out on the next pitch he threw, sending the southpaw from the field with a raised fist to a jubilant dugout.