Swing, miss
Despite several chances, offense flounders in series-opening loss vs. Greinke’s old team
Life appears undetectable from the Astros, a team with sputtering superstars and few answers for this miserable month of baseball. Injuries are no longer an acceptable excuse. Neither is the quality of their opponents. Houston is playing pitiful teams and has a full complement of its most established hitters. The product remains putrid.
For their final 13 games, the Astros were spoiled with the softest remaining schedule of any major league team. They continued to lose the luxury on Friday, falling 6-3 to the woeful Arizona Diamondbacks at Minute Maid Park.
The Diamondbacks are a disaster. They entered Friday with 21 losses in their previous 27 games. Their .678 OPS ranks 28th of
30 major league teams. They are starting pitchers on Saturday and Sunday with ERAs higher than 6.50. Prospects are plentiful in their lineup.
All but one of their starters had a hit against Astros pitching. Kole Calhoun crushed two home runs. His three-run shot during the fourth afforded Arizona its first lead. A solo bomb in the eighth removed any hope for an Astros comeback — if it even existed to begin with.
Houston’s offense remained incompetent in clutch situations. It took 10 at-bats with runners in scoring position. Two ended in hits. Five ended in strikeouts. Houston struck out seven times on Thursday. Six were looking.
“We didn’t check out,” manager Dusty Baker said. “That’s the wrong choice of words. It might have looked like that, but we didn’t check out.”
Of the Astros’ seven hits, three garnered extra bases. Two of the Astros’ three runs were unearned — direct results of two Arizona errors. They’ve scored three or fewer runs in eight of their last 11 games. In the first four games of this homestand, Houston mustered just seven runs.
Life arrived only briefly in the fifth. George Springer launched a long solo home run against Diamondbacks starter Zac Gallen to start the frame. The baseball bounced off the train tracks along the left field line, and the game was tied. Houston’s dugout greeted the development with relative silence and little actual celebration.
“We’re in the big leagues,” third baseman Alex Bregman said. “This is the highest level of baseball in the world. We got to show up ready to play every single day and get after it, try to work hard.”
Gallen is one of the game’s most promising young pitchers. He began his career by allowing three earned runs or fewer during 23 consecutive starts to establish a major league record. It stopped on Sept. 7 after Gallen gave up four earned runs against the Giants.
Gallen surrendered seven against the Mariners on Saturday, sending him to Houston in a tailspin. The Astros are a perfect panacea. Gallen spun six innings of three-run ball. The Astros scattered six hits against him. Two garnered extra bases.
Chances against Gallen were abundant. The Astros discovered different ways to bungle each of them. Houston’s first three hitters of the game reached base. The next three struck out.
“At the end of the day, we all understand we have to capitalize on some of these (situations),” Springer said. “It’s extremely hard to capitalize on all of them. Just a guy at a time, a baserunner at a time and try to pass the baton a little bit.”
Springer, on only because of Nick Ahmed’s error, scored on a wild pitch to provide an early onerun lead for starter Zack Greinke against his former club.
“It wasn’t too much different than a normal start, I guess,” Greinke said.
It was a reunion in name only. Just four of the nine players in Friday’s starting lineup played with Greinke last season in Arizona. The leadoff man, Josh Rojas, was part of the Astros’ four-prospect package to acquire the veteran righthander.
Rojas struck one of six hits against him. Greinke finished just five innings, undone by inefficiency during his second trip through the Arizona order. He required 42 pitches to finish the first three frames, collecting five strikeouts along the way. All ended on his two-seam fastball. Greinke ended his evening with nine punchouts — matching his season high.
The fourth inning set Greinke askew. Josh VanMeter laced a leadoff single into shallow center field. Christian Walker followed with a hard grounder against the shift, sending a career-long nemesis to face Greinke with two aboard.
Calhoun awoke on Friday with 11 hits in 19 prior at-bats against Greinke. A first-inning groundout avoided any more damage. Calhoun came to change the scoreboard in the fourth.
Greinke fell behind the cleanup hitter 2-1. Greinke is unpredictable in any instance — even fastball counts like this — but chose a fourseam fastball to get back into the at-bat. Calhoun seemed prepared. He hammered the baseball off the ribbon scoreboard that runs along the right-field seats, supplying his club a onerun lead that was enough to deflate its lifeless opponent.
“I think the only thing to do is to get back in there and keep grinding out at-bats and keep working hard,” Bregman said.