How Astros pitching update raises both excitement, challenges as season closes in

ARMS RACE

Spring Training games are officially underway and the Houston Astros are getting ready for an exciting season that starts with a matchup against Gerrit Cole and the Yankees on Opening Day.

And while we assumed it would be a classic battle between Cole and Justin Verlander, that all changed when JV announced he was two weeks behind schedule with some shoulder stiffness.

That news terrified Astros fans at the time, but we can all relax for now. Verlander hasn't been shutdown or anything like that. He's still throwing his bullpen sessions and trying to get back on track. Only time will tell if he'll be ready for the start of the season.

JV is taking his time and listening to the trainers, as he doesn't want a repeat of last season, when he wasn't able to pitch until May after straining his teres major (a muscle near the lat).

With Verlander a question mark to start the season, all the attention turns to Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier. Chandler Rome wrote an article recently for The Athletic highlighting Astros pitching coach Bill Murphy. Murphy travels to the Dominican Republic every offseason to work with several of the club's pitchers.

With Valdez, he's trying to help recapture Framber's ability to force batters to hit the ball on the ground at a high level with his sinker. Via: Chandler Rome of The Athletic:

"The pitch generated just a 54.3 percent ground-ball rate last season, down from 68.6 percent in 2022 and 74.9 percent in 2021."

If Framber can get the sinker going again along with his nasty curveball, he should be set for a bounce back season in 2024. Inducing all those extra ground balls should also help keep his pitch count down and allow him to go deeper into games. Hello double play ball!

“El Reptil”

Cristian Javier is a different story, however. His struggles might be fixed just by dropping 15 pounds over the offseason. If Javier's right and his weight gain was throwing off his mechanics, he could put up numbers similar to 2022 when he had a 2.54 ERA.

Pitching through the 2022 World Series and then having to quickly get ready for the World Baseball Classic last spring certainly took a toll. The extra rest this offseason should help.

News from the weekend

Some other important notes from the weekend include GM Dana Brown's update on Ronel Blanco. The plan is to keep him stretched out to add depth to the starting rotation should they need it.

We also heard from owner Jim Crane who believes the Astros have 8 starting pitchers when Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr return around mid-season. The Astros will have the luxury of moving a couple of starters to the bullpen when everyone is healthy. So don't expect any additions to the rotation from outside the organization.

Be sure to check out the video as we discuss the latest on the rotation, and which pitchers we believe have the best shot at cracking the backend of the rotation after Verlander, Valdez, and Javier.

Catch Stone Cold 'Stros (an Astros podcast) with Charlie Pallilo, Brandon Strange and Josh Jordan every Monday on SportsMapHouston's YouTube channel. We'll continue to drop new videos throughout the week.

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Kyle Schwarber won the MVP award for the NL. Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.

Kyle Schwarber was nervous.

He had played in Game 7 of the World Series, homered for the United States in the World Baseball Classic.

But he had never walked up to the plate in an All-Star Game swing-off.

No one had.

“That’s kind of like the baseball version of a shootout,” he said after homering on all three of his swings, going down to his left knee on the final one, to overcome a two-homer deficit. That held up when Jonathan Aranda fell short on the American League’s final three swings, giving the National League a 4-3 swing-off win after a 6-6 tie Tuesday night in which it wasted a six-run, seventh-inning lead.

 

Schwarber earned the MVP award, going 0 for 2 with a walk as the NL won for the second time in its last 12 tries. He became the first non-pitcher MVP without a hit.

“It will be interesting to see where that goes,” said AL manager Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees. “There’s probably a world where you could see that in the future, where maybe it’s in some regular-season mix. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start talking about it like that.”

In baseball’s equivalent of soccer’s penalty-kicks shootout, the game was decided by having three batters from each league take three swings each off coaches.

Boone picked Brent Rooker, Randy Arozarena and Aranda on Monday, and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts picked Eugenio Suárez, Schwarber and Pete Alonso for the NL. Because Suárez was hit on the left hand by a fastball in the eighth inning, the NL turned to its alternate, Kyle Stowers.

Players from both teams stood outside their dugouts, some already in street clothes, jumping and shouting after each long ball from their side. Yankees coach Travis Chapman threw to the AL batters and Dodgers coach Dino Ebel to the NL hitters.

Rooker put the AL ahead by homering on his last two swings, and Stowers hit one. Randy Arozarena boosted the AL lead to 3-1.

Ebel had thrown BP to Schwarber two years ago at the WBC.

“He asked me right before, he was like, where do you want it?” Schwarber recalled “I’m like, just middle. And he’s like, ‘I gotcha.’”

He took two pitches and deposited the third just over the center-field fence. Schwarber took another, then hit a 461-foot drive over the right-center bullpen. After letting two more go by, he dropped to a knee while pulling the third, craned his neck and held his bat in the air as the ball landed in the fourth row of the Chop House seats.

“I didn’t hit it, obviously, my best, but I was thinking I got enough of it,” Schwarber said. “And I was just kind of down there, hoping, saying: go, go, go. And it went. And it was awesome.”

 

Aranda followed with a fly well short of the center-field warning track, drove a pitch about a foot shy of the top of the right-field wall and hit an opposite-field pop that dropped in medium left.

Alonso, a two-time Home Run Derby champion, didn’t have to bat and patted Schwarber on the head as fireworks went off at Truist Field.

“I felt like a closer going into a game,” Alonso said, “and then it’s like, wait, the guy in the field got a double play to end the inning. You’re not going in.”

What was the score?

MLB, after consulting with the Elias Sports Bureau, said in 2022 that All-Star Games ending in a swing-off would be listed as tied, with a notation of the game being decided in a swing-off. MLB’s official postgame notes listed Tuesday’s outcome as a 7-6 NL victory.

In earlier action

Ketel Marte’s two-run double in the first had put the NL ahead, and Alonso’s three-run homer off Kris Bubic and Corbin Carroll’s solo shot against Casey Mize opened a 6-0 lead in the sixth.

The AL comeback began when Rooker hit a three-run pinch homer against Randy Rodríguez in a four-run seventh that included Bobby Witt Jr.’s RBI groundout. Robert Suarez allowed consecutive doubles to Byron Buxton and Witt with one out in ninth, and Steven Kwan’s infield hit on a three-hopper to third off Edwin Díaz drove in the tying run.

Heat on the mound

Paul Skenes, the first pitcher to start the All-Star Game each of his first two seasons, reached 100 mph on four pitches in a perfect first. Jacob Misiorowski, a controversial inclusion after pitching in just five major league games in his rookie season, fired nine pitches of 100 mph or more in a one-hit eighth 34 days after his major league debut. The 23-year-old righty, added to the NL roster by baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, reached 102.3 mph. There were 21 pitches of 100 mph or more, down from a record 23 last year.

Robot umpire debuts

Four of five challenges were successful in the first use of the robot umpire in the All-Star Game.

Styling

Teams were back in their regular-season club jerseys — whites for the NL, mostly grays for the AL — after four years of special All-Star uniforms that were much criticized. The AL leads 48-45 with two ties.

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