Ideal spark would be one that comes from clubhouse
Can the Astros turn their own season around?
Do they have the internal leadership to call themselves out?
Those were the questions that rolled around in my head as I crossed the city on my way to Minute Maid Park on Tuesday.
The Rangers had flown away after sweeping the stadium clean. The Orioles had flown in for a pivotal three-game stay. And it was clear as soon as an altered lineup was posted that a much-needed Monday off day had left A.J. Hinch considering a few mission-critical things, too.
Free-swinging George Springer now bats leadoff for the 2016 Astros. Hit-everything Jose Altuve is back in the second hole.
Hinch’s hope: A little change can go a long way for an 18-28 club that’s been struggling for almost two confounding months.
“We’ve got to try something different,” Hinch said before Carlos Correa’s 13th-inning walkoff single handed the Astros a 3-2 win that knocked Baltimore out of the AL East lead.
The next step must come from the team being paid to play.
Leadership was a fluid object in 2015 and often defined by intangibles. The Astros guided themselves by committee, proudly welcomed all kinds, and went old-school only when necessary.
It was the right call for 86-76 and life as baseball’s best surprise.
This season, when the year’s already on the line after just 46 games?
These Astros might appreciate an old-fashioned shouting match behind closed doors. It’s recently been considered, a veteran player said. But with the team playing mostly better baseball in May and many in orange insisting the season will turn around soon, the club finds itself stuck between two opposing worlds: enjoying the same strong clubhouse chemistry as 2015 but lacking a single big-name All-Star who can rise up and scare the team straight.
Cause of questions
“Nobody questions leadership when you’re winning baseball games,” Collin McHugh said. “Nobody talks about who’s going to step up and be the person when somebody’s stepping up every night.”
The starting righthander added: “I want to be honest, and I want to be open. But I can’t point to anything in the clubhouse that is hurting us. … We keep each other real loose. But at the same time … we do police each other.”
The Astros lost a few veteran names — Scott Kazmir, Jed Lowrie, Hank Conger, Chad Qualls — after coming within six outs of the American League Championship Series, but no one was 1988 Kirk Gibson in the flesh. An 18-7 start and the roller coaster that followed obscured missing contender components, just as 2015’s sharp pitching cloaked a lineup filled with all-or-nothing holes.
The searching words of eight-year vet Colby Rasmus captured the crossroads his 2016 team is at.
Like others, Rasmus said the Astros initially felt the pressure of their heightened expectations, then tried too hard after a disappointing start. But in recent weeks, he believes, the club has simply lost the “game within a game,” with a single strike, out or missed opportunity dictating an outcome that can’t be erased.
So does a leader dig in when a club might be finding itself ?
Or do the ones who’ve seen it all stand back and continue to let the Astros govern themselves, since it worked so well a year ago?
Double-edged sword
“Do I start yelling at younger guys for taking a pitch that’s this far off the plate and they’re rung up on it?” Rasmus said. “How am I doing them a service? Because we’re taught not to swing at those pitches. … That’s kind of the double-edged sword we’re at right now in the season.”
Then Rasmus — who was ejected in the sixth inning for arguing a strikeout call — relayed a closed-doors story from his Toronto days.
Just because you scream doesn’t mean it’s going to make a difference.
“I was on the Blue Jays,” Rasmus said. “We had Jose Bautista and Mark Buehrle. And they came in and did it, and it didn’t help nothing. We still ended up 15 (games) out.”
Hinch is calm and cool on the dugout’s top step, but he does more than is known when the camera lens loses the view.
The Astros have made multiple minor moves since April, but we’re still a couple weeks away from general manager Jeff Luhnow’s really needing to use his voice.
There’s a reason, however, that rookies Colin Moran and Tony Kemp started Tuesday and Springer and Altuve shifted spots. As off as the Astros have been, they still have too much talent to be 10 games below average.
Either this team will fix itself soon or the men who make decisions will start shaking things up for real.