Loss emblematic of September struggles
SEATTLE — A messy 6-2 loss to the Mariners was still scoreless Tuesday night when Josh Rojas lifted a fly ball to right field in the third inning. Seattle runners stood on first and second with no outs. Kyle Tucker caught Rojas’ drive at the wall, turned and found his cutoff man, second baseman Jose Altuve.
Altuve corralled Tucker’s throw at the edge of the infield grass. With Mike Ford tagging up from second, Altuve did not hesitate. He landed and fired a throw that third baseman Alex Bregman had no chance of leaping to catch. Ford trotted home with the game’s first run.
Altuve, sitting in his locker at T-mobile Park after the loss, hardly needed the play mentioned before he declared: “Terrible throw.”
“I’ve got to hold the ball there and try to give the pitcher an opportunity to play for a double play,” said Altuve. “I put the team in a tough situation with a terrible throw right there.”
His pitcher, Cristian Javier, made his own mistake on the play. Javier was late backing up third base and could only watch as Altuve’s relay bounced out of play.
“I was just looking at the throw, just following the
ball, and I got there a little bit late,” Javier said later through an interpreter.
Such lapses defined a loss Tuesday that left the Astros facing an urgent scenario with four games to play in the regular season. With a win Wednesday, they will leave Seattle with a 1 ⁄ -game lead over the Mariners for the final AL wild-card spot. With a loss, they will depart a halfgame behind a Seattle team that owns the regular-season tiebreaker over them, essentially adding a game to their deficit.
Reliever Rafael Montero
was also late backing up a play at third base in Seattle’s three-run fifth inning. With runners on first and second for Cal Raleigh’s single to right, Montero may have needed to decide initially whether to back up home or third. But the latter remained his responsibility.
“You go halfway in between to see if they’re going to make a play at the plate,” manager Dusty Baker said. “Then if not, you retreat and back up third base. So like I said, we didn’t play well.”
Baker, in fact, repeated
those words — “We didn’t play well” — five times in the span of three minutes while he addressed reporters after the loss. The Astros made three errors, went 2-for-13 with men in scoring position and stranded 10 runners. They loaded the bases with one out in the first inning and with no outs in the seventh and netted one run out of those situations.
The defensive miscues, in a game of such magnitude, were jarring but not entirely out of character for an Astros team that some metrics say has regressed in the field this season.
According to Sports Info Solutions, Houston rated in the top five of MLB teams in defensive runs saved each of the past two seasons. The Astros entered Tuesday rated 17th in the majors in runs saved per SIS, with negative runs saved at catcher, first base, second base, pitcher and right field.
“I think you’ve got to flush it and move on to tomorrow,” said Bregman, who is having a strong season defensively at third base. “We’re a very good defensive ballclub. So we need to play good defense the next four games.”
Should the Astros somehow miss the postseason, Tuesday’s loss will in some ways be emblematic of a September slide. It left them 4-10 over their past 14 games. In that span, their lineup is hitting .183 with runners in scoring position. They appeared listless at times in losing three series to 100-loss opponents and failing to capitalize on a favorable schedule.
They will send Framber Valdez to the mound Wednesday night in arguably their most pivotal regularseason game in years. No sense of panic permeated their clubhouse Tuesday night at T-mobile Park. Altuve declared that Wednesday would be “probably the biggest game of the year.” Bregman deemed it “a huge game.”
“Every game the last four are all massive,” Bregman said. “So yeah, we’ve got to play well.”