Astros stay cold in snowy Colorado, suffer ninth loss in 10 games.
Ninth loss in past 10 games comes on snowy day in Denver
DENVER — Misery and the Astros have become constant companions as a spirited start spirals into something nearing an abject disaster.
Blame falls everywhere, from playing amid a pandemic to pitiful pitching to poor decision-making. Whatever the cause, a team that beats its chest as a championship contender is now last in the American League West.
“Just get to work and get after it. That’s it,” third baseman Alex Bregman said. “Three and a half games back 17 games into a season that’s 162 games long. Just get back to work and get back in a rhythm.”
That will be easier said than done for a lineup doing nothing right and making game-altering mistakes — a missed fly ball in center field, a hanging breaking pitch, or a poor plate appearance with runners in scoring position.
Opponents try to invite them back into games, and
Houston often refuses.
On Wednesday, two baserunners reached to start the ninth inning against Rockies closer Daniel Bard. But three straight groundouts from the fifth, sixth and seventh hitters in the order sent the Astros to an all-too-familiar result.
Their 6-3 loss to the Rockies continued a horrendous run of baseball against lower-tier competition.
Houston now has lost nine of its past 10 games, with five of those defeats coming against the Tigers and Rockies. Both are in last place in their divisions; the Astros joined them Wednesday.
“Talk is cheap. It’s action,” manager Dusty Baker said. “We haven’t had our team to talk about it in a week or so. We know what we have to do. These are big boys. You shouldn’t have to call a team meeting. I think the bad teams call excessive meetings. Good teams try to figure out a way to get out of this.”
Conditions on Wednesday were wretched, but both teams had to play in them.
Snow flurries fell throughout the game. The 34-degree temperature at first pitch made it the coldest regular-season game in Astros history. Scoreboard thermometers showed it dipping below freezing for a portion of the middle innings.
By the end, snow obscured sightlines as it poured from the sky.
The Astros resembled bank robbers and not ballplayers, bundled almost beyond recognition to avoid the elements. They froze and continued to confound, with Yuli Gurriel’s two-run homer in the second inning their only extra-base hit.
The 6-1 start seems forever ago. Several key players were sidelined for six days because of health and safety protocols, and Jose Altuve is still absent, but assigning all of the blame to that is disingenuous.
The Astros have scored eight runs in the past four games while producing only six extra-base hits. Their starting pitchers have been leaving games too early, and their injury-riddled bullpen is a bumbling mess.
“It’s my first game that I’ve thrown with the snow or a little cold,” starter Jose Urquidy said. “It’s not an excuse. I was trying to do my best. It wasn’t a bad day for me, bad outing, but we’ll just keep working for my next outing, and I hope to win.”
Urquidy warmed up with a sleeve on his left arm and nothing covering his right. He ditched the sleeve when his start began, bringing two bare arms and an unbuttoned jersey to tundra-like conditions.
Seven of his first nine pitches missed the strike zone. Urquidy’s fastball command cratered, and the Rockies feasted on some of his subpar secondary pitches. The righthander required at least 20 pitches to finish each of the first three innings, a foreboding — if not fatal — sign for the afternoon.
The velocity on each of Urquidy’s four pitches was two or three miles per hour below his season average.
His hardest fastball clocked at 92.6 mph, and he misfired with seven of
his first eight, forcing him to utilize breaking pitches that rarely elicit swings and misses.
Urquidy walked the first man he faced and allowed a single to two-hole hitter Ryan McMahon. Trevor Story swatted a hanging slider down the third-base line for a double to score them both.
Gurriel’s two-run homer in the second briefly tied the score, and Urquidy returned for the bottom half with what appeared to be better matchups.
Rockies six-hole hitter Yonathan Daza awoke Wednesday with a .542 OPS in 130 career plate appearances. Just four of his 28 major league hits went for extra bases.
Urquidy got ahead of him 0-2. Daza did not chase two putaway
changeups, evening the count. He fouled a fourseam fastball, and when Urquidy came back with another, Daza deposited it over the left-field wall to give the Rockies a lead they never relinquished.
After Urquidy barely finished the fifth inning, Brandon Bielak and Peter Solomon handled the final three. Bielak allowed two runs in the sixth.
The Astros optioned Solomon, who pitched two innings with the big club in two appearances without allowing a run, to the alternate site after the game.
“We stayed away from some of the guys who needed a break,” Baker said. “Certainly, we wanted to win the game. Certainly, we wanted to get closer to .500. But we’ll just have to do that at home.”
In the end, Baker discovered silver linings from the snowy defeat. He seemed proud the Astros “didn’t beat ourselves” and that the Rockies “just beat us.” He praised the fact that his lineup put seven balls in play 97 mph or harder against four Rockies pitchers, though just one fell for a hit.
“Everyone knows where we are,” Baker said. “It is early. You don’t want to be where we are, but where I came from, you make up one game a week and, shoot, the middle of May, we’re in great shape. It didn’t take four or five days to get in this mess. It usually takes twice as long to get out of it. This is how life is.”