ASTROS FALL TO RED SOX IN TOUGH NIGHT FOR MORTON
Righthander suffers first loss as team falls out of AL West lead
A ground ball bounced to shortstop, another wasted opportunity on an evening rife with them. Xander Bogaerts collected it, sensed Alex Bregman bearing down upon second base and lunged for the bag. His glove and Bregman’s foot reached simultaneously.
Second-base umpire Phil Cuzzi ruled Bregman out and the seventh inning over, stranding the sixth and seventh Astros runners on base during Sunday’s 9-3 loss to the Boston Red Sox.
Bregman pointed to his dugout and commanded a replay review. Brock Holt, the Fort Worth native and Rice product who struck this game’s big blow, wagged his finger toward it — a prescient show of gamesmanship to effectively conclude this four-game series.
The advent of challenges necessitates such visceral reactions. Manager A.J. Hinch obliged Bregman’s pleas. The game was 6-3, though only two innings away from becoming a farce at the hands of Collin McHugh and Ken Giles.
Two minutes and 15 seconds found insufficient evidence to overturn Cuzzi’s call. The inning ended, allowing the Astros to again let a pristine opportunity pass.
Sunday’s loss was their sixth in nine games. They concluded an unrelenting 11-game stretch against the Indians,
Yankees and Red Sox at 5-6. A Mariners win on Sunday nudged Seattle ahead of Houston in the American League West by one game.
“It’s not frustrating,” said Jose Altuve, who had his first threestrikeout game of the season. “We’re going to do this a lot. Sometimes we’re going to come here and have opportunities and we’re going to execute. I don’t think there’s frustration around this clubhouse.”
Bregman’s broken-bat, basesloaded single in the seventh inning was his club’s first hit in 11 at-bats with a man in scoring position. The Red Sox built a 6-1 lead while the 10 others came and went, battering Astros starter Charlie Morton during his worst start of the season.
“It was one of those games where you’re trying to get out by out,” Morton said, “and I didn’t.”
Morton’s domination of lefthanded hitters was halted against a Red Sox lineup that played four games without Mookie Betts or Dustin Pedroia and collected 15 hits Sunday.
Lefthanded hitters produced a .164/.255/.262 slash line against Morton in 137 prior plate appearances. He yielded six home runs to them all last season.
Boston’s lefthanders struck five hits against him. Four were for extra bases. Andrew Benintendi and Mitch Moreland hit home runs. Holt massacred an RBI triple in the sixth inning to afford his team a five-run lead and end Morton’s evening.
“He didn’t generate hardly any swings and misses with the breaking ball. That usually sets the tone for him,” Hinch said. “It wasn’t a great night for him from pretty much the very beginning.”
Morton received 12 swings and misses on 100 pitches. Four came on his curveball. He permitted six earned runs, the most of his Astros career, in 51⁄3 innings. Not since April 7, 2016, had he allowed as many in a regular-season start.
Benintendi led off the game with a double. Moreland annihilated a two-out, 0-1 hanging curveball to the Budweiser bar in right-center field to chase him home. The missile exited Moreland’s bat at 107.1 mph, a foreboding sign of what was to come.
Morton (7-1) recorded one clean inning, striking out the side in the second. A man reached scoring position in every other one.
The loss snapped Morton’s 10game winning streak, which had been tied for the longest active streak in the majors. In the 14 starts during that span, he had permitted opponents a .195 batting average.
Morton’s offense afforded him little leeway.
It placed the leadoff man in scoring position during five of the first six innings and produced one run — George Springer’s leadoff home run against Red Sox starter Rick Porcello that pared a two-run deficit to one.
Porcello (8-2) lived perilously. The home run to Springer was his first against a righthanded hitter all season. His ERA hovered around 4 when the game began. The Astros struck early but failed in all efforts to inflate it.
Bregman, Altuve and Carlos Correa — hitting second, third and fourth in the order — struck out five times in their first six plate appearances against Porcello.
“He got me a couple times where I was looking in, he’d throw me away, I was looking away and he’d throw me in,” Correa said. “He did a good job mixing and matching.”
Yuli Gurriel curled a double inside the left-field line to start the second inning. Two fly outs and a grounder did not move him.
Moreland could not field Tony Kemp’s ground ball, and Springer coaxed a walk to begin the third. Bregman watched a twoseamer paint the outer half, lingering in the batter’s box as a silent protest of umpire Ben May’s inconsistent strike zone. Altuve swung through the two-seamer he saw. Correa exited after swinging at a slider in the dirt.
It was Correa who arrived in the seventh inning with two men aboard, the tying run in a game the 33,431 who gathered sensed could be changed.
His ground ball found Bogaerts, only to prolong the inevitable.