Offense running on empty
Fourth straight loss on road trip hands punchless club biggest AL West deficit in 4 years
OAKLAND, Calif. — Kyle Tucker is just a temporary replacement for George Springer, a man who can supply so much energy with only one swing.
Tucker has that sort of promise, but it hasn’t manifested at the major league level. Playing leadoff man for this lifeless Astros lineup left Tucker no choice but to try.
As he came up in the sixth inning with one out and the bases empty, the A’s deployed a dramatic shift to the right side. Jose Altuve stood on deck. Ahead in the count 2-0, Tucker dropped the barrel of his bat and bunted up the third-base line, a patch of grass the defensive alignment left vacant.
Tucker took off for first base, a foreign feeling for most Astros hitters Saturday.
Starter Frankie Montas hurried off the mound and collected the ball himself, then made a perfect throw. Tucker was out by two steps.
“You got to put some runners on base to put him in the stretch,” manager Dusty Baker said after the 3-1 loss, “but we didn’t have a whole bunch of hits to put him in the stretch.”
Baker’s explanation has become a refrain. His lineup is loaded, but it continues to crater against competent teams. The Dodgers held the Astros to four runs and 12 hits during a twogame series last month. Now, in a series with American League West implications, the Astros’ offense is absent again.
Saturday’s loss stretched the Astros’ losing streak to four games and dropped them two games below .500. The A’s hold a 4½game lead in the American League West — Houston’s largest deficit in the division since 2016.
Over 13 innings on Friday, Houston had just seven hits and finished 3-for-19 with runners in scoring position. A day later, the lineup mustered five hits.
After Tucker doubled in the ninth against Oakland closer Liam Hendriks, Alex Bregman singled him in to avoid a shutout.
The team did not make a position player available for interviews after either game. After Saturday’s loss, they made just one player — starter Framber Valdez — available to reporters. More than 20 minutes elapsed between Baker’s postgame news conference and Valdez’s brief interview.
“They’ve got the same guys in the lineup,” A’s shortstop Marcus Semien said. “But like I said earlier, it’s a different year. We’re all trying to catch up. We had so much time off this spring and leading up to the beginning of this season that we’re all playing catchup. So you can tell that some of their hitters are struggling a little bit just like everybody else.”
Montas muzzled them for seven innings, none of which appeared stressful. He yielded two hits — both by Yuli Gurriel. Montas required only 86 pitches as he stymied the Astros with a bevy of splitters and sliders to accompany a four-seam fastball that hovered in the mid-90s.
“This guy was dealing,” Baker said. “He was getting ahead of the hitters with low and away fastballs. If you swung at it, it wasn’t a good pitch to hit, and if you took it, it was a strike. He was dealing today. He was relaxed … He was tough. He stayed around 96-97 damn near the whole day.”
In 10 games since July 28 — the day the Dodgers series started — the Astros are scoring 4.7 runs per game. The number is passable for most clubs. The Astros are not among them. With their pitching staff in shambles, the Astros cannot afford an offensive slump. Nor can they waste a standout performance from an unproven pitcher. They’ve done both in the past two days.
“I’ve learned this year that you can’t let the score affect how you’re pitching; you can’t let it affect what you’re doing on the mound,” Valdez said through an interpreter. “It doesn’t matter if we’re winning or losing — the main thing is I have to be focused on my concentration and my focus for every single pitch.
“It didn’t matter to me what was going on in the game, I just had to focus on what I was doing in the moment.”
Valdez awoke Saturday in an unenviable spot for the Astros’ spent pitching staff. Five relievers were unavailable, a consequence of Houston’s 13-inning loss Friday night. If Valdez could not go deep, the revolving door of rookies would enter, an unwelcome thought for a team in desperate need of a win.
Valdez gave the Astros everything they could have envisioned. He threw seven innings of two-run baseball. Nine A’s struck out against him. His 103 pitches were more than any Astro had thrown this season.
Semien, the A’s leadoff man, started Valdez’s outing with a first-inning solo shot on a hanging curveball. The southpaw was dominant thereafter. He walked just one batter and elicited 19 swings and misses.
His poise was apparent — even if veterans around him had none.
With the results of the game riding on each pitch, and with a margin for error so miniscule, Valdez carried the Astros into the sixth, where he saw Semien again.
The shortstop hit a sharp grounder to Jose Altuve’s left, deep into the hole. He bobbled the ball, but it was ruled a single.
When Semien tried to steal second, Altuve did not corral an errant throw from catcher Dustin Garneau. Semien scurried to third as the ball trickled to center field. He scored on Matt Chapman’s infield grounder, a costly second run for a team that could not answer at the plate.
Altuve dropped a pop fly, too, that was ruled an error. Chapman was caught in a rundown afterward, though, preventing a run from scoring.
“The throw that went into center was a tough hop with a baserunner coming in there,” Baker said. “The bobbled ball, I don’t know if he’d have gotten (Semien) anyway — that’s why they gave him a hit.
“Sometimes these things happen. Altuve is one of the best ... You’re not going to catch them all, but Altuve will catch most of them.”
Altuve had a chance for absolution after Tucker’s unsuccessful bunt. He saw one pitch from Montas — a slider that sat up. He sent a line drive into Semien’s glove, ending another inning.
“I don’t think he wants a day off. He’ll be fine,” Baker said of Altuve, whose batting average fell to .177 and OPS withered to .616 after his first 62 at-bats.
“There’s a ton of good hitters that are struggling, and he happens to be one of them. Altuve is going to hit — you just hope you can get him going tomorrow.”