Club swept away in stifling heat
California road trip off to nightmare start with Athletics, Dodgers on tap
In a season of grim statistics, the most worrisome numbers confronted Sunday by the Astros were 106 — the game-time temperature at Angel Stadium — and 7.41, their bullpen’s earned-run average across a four-game sweep in which the Angels won each game in their final at-bats.
The temperature, fortunately, was in the rear-view mirror as the team departed Sunday night for more temperate climes in Oakland.
The state of the Astros’ bullpen, however, will lin
ger as that hard-pressed contingent prepares for the final 20 games of the regular season, starting with a fivegame series beginning Monday against the A’s.
With their 9-5 loss Sunday afternoon, the Astros fell to 5-13 on the road and a worrisome 14-11 against the American League West, their private punching bags during their three-season run as one of baseball’s best teams.
Now, however, they arrive in Oakland 3.5 games in arrears of the A’s, having squandered chances to close the gap while the A’s were losing two of three to the Padres.
And it’s the manner in which they lost that most concerns manager Dusty Baker, who has seen much in his lifetime in baseball and doesn’t particularly like the waking nightmare of the last three days.
“Boy, this is really tough to take,” Baker said. “These guys beat us up really good.
“Mentally, it doesn’t make it easier on your sleep. We had very little sleep. You get in the bed, and you have these games that you play back in your mind.”
And then, upon arising, something else happens, and it’s usually nothing good. Sunday’s news was the move of pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. to the injured list with what the Astros described as neck nerve irritation and Baker described as “irritation that you feel down in your arm.”
Baker said he expected McCullers will return to Houston to be examined and “to see if he can get to the root of the problem.”
McCullers’ inability to get out of the first inning Friday got the series off to a bad start and increased the need for an extended outing Sunday from lefthander Framber Valdez.
Valdez complied, throwing 108 pitches into the eighth inning and allowing eight runs on 11 hits with two strikeouts and two walks. The last two runs charged to him came on the watch of
Chris Devenski, who was able to retire just one of four batters he faced during a four-run Angels rally in the eighth to break a 5-5 tie.
“I wasn’t worried as much about runs as wanting to go as deep as I could,” Valdez said through an interpreter. “I know our bullpen was taxed and needed a little bit of a rest, so I had that on my mind above all else.”
Valdez got stronger as the game progressed, retiring the Angels in order in the fourth and fifth before giving up a run in the sixth and recording another 1-2-3 inning in the seventh.
But in the eighth, with the Astros having battled back to tie the score at 5-5, Jo Adell led off the eighth with an infield hit up the middle, and Max Stassi followed with a base hit to send Adell to third.
Jared Walsh’s chopper bounced over the head of second baseman Aledmys Diaz on the hard-baked infield to bring in the lead run, and Valdez was lifted for Devenski, who walked two and allowed a two-run base hit
by Justin Upton.
The Astros led 3-1 after two innings on a two-run homer by Kyle Tucker in the first inning and a solo shot by Diaz in the second off Angels starter Jaime Barria.
The Angels, however, answered with three in the third on a two-run Anthony Rendon homer and a Taylor Ward sacrifice fly.
In the fifth, Josh Reddick collided with the right field wall in pursuit of Taylor Ward’s drive and could not hold onto the ball. Ward reached third and scored on Franklin Barretto’s base hit, and Reddick subsequently departed with a right elbow contusion.
His status for Monday’s game is unclear.
The Astros tied it in the seventh against reliever Felix Pena on Carlos Correa’s 461-foot homer, a walk to Diaz and Abraham Toro’s double to right, which broke an 0-for-13 streak.
Noe Ramirez replaced Pena and threw out Toro at third on Martin Maldonado’s bunt. Jack Mayfield followed with a double, but
George Springer flied out to end the inning.
“It hurt not getting those runs in from third with less than two out,” Baker said. “It was a weekend where we hardly got any breaks.”
Anaheim, in short, was hardly the happiest place on earth this weekend for the Astros when combining their four-game sweep with injured list stints for McCullers and Jose Altuve.
“It was a bad weekend psychologically and physically on the field,” Baker said. “We’ve got to rise to the occasion. We usually do.”
Improvement, however, will require a better performance from the bullpen, which allowed 16 hits, 14 runs and 14 talks in 171⁄3 innings pitched against the Angels.
“They’re doing all they can to keep us in the games,” Diaz said. “This was a tough series for us, but I have confidence in the guys we have in the clubhouse. We expect to play better baseball.”