THE PALLILOG
Here's what's on the line with a familiar face returning to action for Astros
Sep 3, 2021, 9:53 am
Jose Urquidy returns to the rotation Friday night. Photo by Getty Images.
Urquidy, Astros hold on to early runs to secure series against Rays
Entering the weekend the Astros sit a comfy four and a half games ahead of Oakland in the American League West. Comfy does not mean home free with the Athletics having six head-to-head cracks at the Astros coming over the last week and a half of the regular season. While the A's are in Toronto for three vs. the Blue Jays this weekend the Astros are in San Diego hoping their offense emerges from the mini-coma it entered in Seattle getting shutout the last two games. Jose Urquidy makes his return to the starting rotation Friday night. Urquidy has a month to impress if he is to make a postseason start. The odds are against him. Presently, in some order Lance McCullers, Framber Valdez, Zack Greinke, and Luis Garcia should be Dusty Baker's starters in a best-of-five Division Series.
The Astros get a Padres team that has been staggering. The Pads were one of the darlings of the first third of the season. They roared to a 34-19 start with shortstop Fernando Tatis alongside the Angels' Shohei Ohtani as the most exciting players in the game. Recurrent shoulder problems have Tatis now primarily playing right field. Despite missing 31 games Tatis still leads the National League in home runs with 36. But over the last three weeks the Padres have been in Tom Petty mode. Freefalling. Losing 14 of their last 19 games they've seen a four and a half game lead for the second NL Wild Card spot disappear. The Padres start the weekend a half game behind the Reds for that spot.
I'm not sure if Jose Altuve got a little homer happy when he was smacking them at a tremendous rate for a while this season, but he's been a bad hitter for more than a month now. Since a monster grand slam to key a win at San Francisco July 30, Altuve has hit just .242 with a crummy .300 on base percentage and .617 OPS, with zero homers in 120 at bats.
Michael Brantley carries an AL leading .317 batting average into the weekend. Yuli Gurriel is second at .313. .317 would be the lowest AL batting champ figure since Carl Yastrzemski's .301 in 1968, the year when offense had grown so impotent that the mound was lowered five inches starting the following season.
College football
After last weekend's limited schedule gave us a little taste to open the college football season, now for our devouring pleasure we're served a holiday weekend smorgasbord. The hands down top matchup goes off in Charlotte with third ranked Clemson a field goal favorite over fifth ranked Georgia. In two tilts of more interest to more people around here, the Houston Cougars play the Texas Tech Red Raiders at NRG Stadium, while the Steve Sarkisian head coaching era in Austin begins with a non-cupcake opener vs. Louisiana.
Dana Holgorsen starts his third season coaching UH. The first two have been major disappointments. In 2019 Holgorsen basically pulled the plug on the season midway and wound up 4-8. Last year the Coogs had to deal with multiple COVID disruptions but 3-5 is 3-5. To date that's far from the return on investment of four million dollars per season UH is seeking. Beating Tech would be a nice launch for UH, not that the Red Raiders are anything special. Matt Wells starts his third season in Lubbock. Off one good season at Utah State Wells got the Tech gig succeeding the fired Kliff Kingsbury. Wells has put 4-8 and 4-6 records on the board, in Big 12 play going 5-13. Perhaps future UH-Tech matchups become Big 12 games.
At UT, Sarkisian succeeds the fired Tom Herman hoping to begin more auspiciously than the Herman Error did (giving up 51 points in a home loss vs. Maryland). The Longhorns get Louisiana. Not LSU. Louisiana. The school prefers to not be referred to as Louisiana-Lafayette. Whatever. Last season Louisiana went 10-1 and finished 15th in the AP poll. Yes, the Rajin' Cajuns play in the much lower quality Sun Belt conference. Well, last season Louisiana opened with a 31-14 win at Iowa State. The same Cyclones who beat the Longhorns in Austin and finished number nine in the nation.
Buzzer Beaters:
1. Texas A&M is off a boffo season in Jimbo Fisher's third at the helm and the Aggies seem positioned to be a power program. But giving Fisher a three-year extension meaning he essentially starts a 10-year 90 (NINETY) million dollar contract this year seems unnecessary and premature. Sure hope it works out better than Kevin Sumlin's extension/raises did for A&M. And Herman's at Texas for that matter.
2. Just one weekend to go before the Texans start their 20th NFL season! Let's replace the exclamation point with a period. If not a yawn.
3. Best college football fight songs: Bronze-USC "Fight On" Silver-Notre Dame "Victory March" Gold-Michigan "The Victors"
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Through 20 games, the Houston Astros have managed just six wins and are in last place in the AL West.
Their pitching staff trails only Colorado with a 5.24 ERA and big-money new closer Josh Hader has given up the same number of earned runs in 10 games as he did in 61 last year.
Despite this, these veteran Astros, who have reached the AL Championship Series seven consecutive times, have no doubt they’ll turn things around.
“If there’s a team that can do it, it’s this team,” shortstop Jeremy Peña said.
First-year manager Joe Espada, who was hired in January to replace the retired Dusty Baker, discussed his team’s early struggles.
“It’s not ideal,” he said. “It’s not what we expected, to come out of the shoot playing this type of baseball. But you know what, this is where we’re at and we’ve got to pick it up and play better. That’s just the bottom line.”
Many of Houston’s problems have stemmed from a poor performance by a rotation that has been decimated by injuries. Ace Justin Verlander and fellow starter José Urquidy haven’t pitched this season because of injuries and lefty Framber Valdez made just two starts before landing on the injured list with a sore elbow.
Ronel Blanco, who threw a no-hitter in his season debut April 1, has pitched well and is 2-0 with a 0.86 ERA in three starts this season. Cristian Javier is also off to a good start, going 2-0 with a 1.54 ERA in four starts, but the team has won just two games not started by those two pitchers.
However, Espada wouldn’t blame the rotation for Houston’s current position.
“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster how we've played overall,” he said. “One day we get good starting pitching, some days we don’t. The middle relief has been better and sometimes it hasn’t been. So, we’ve just got to put it all together and then play more as a team. And once we start doing that, we’ll be in good shape.”
The good news for the Astros is that Verlander will make his season debut Friday night when they open a series at Washington and Valdez should return soon after him.
“Framber and Justin have been a great part of our success in the last few years,” second baseman Jose Altuve said. “So, it’s always good to have those two guys back helping the team. We trust them and I think it’s going to be good.”
Hader signed a five-year, $95 million contract this offseason to give the Astros a shutdown 7-8-9 combination at the back end of their bullpen with Bryan Abreu and Ryan Pressly. But the five-time All-Star is off to a bumpy start.
He allowed four runs in the ninth inning of a 6-1 loss to the Braves on Monday night and has yielded eight earned runs this season after giving up the same number in 56 1/3 innings for San Diego last year.
He was much better Wednesday when he struck out the side in the ninth before the Astros fell to Atlanta in 10 innings for their third straight loss.
Houston’s offense, led by Altuve, Yordan Alvarez and Kyle Tucker, ranks third in the majors with a .268 batting average and is tied for third with 24 homers this season. But the Astros have struggled with runners in scoring position and often failed to get a big hit in close games.
While many of Houston’s hitters have thrived this season, one notable exception is first baseman José Abreu. The 37-year-old, who is in the second year of a three-year, $58.5 million contract, is hitting 0.78 with just one extra-base hit in 16 games, raising questions about why he remains in the lineup every day.
To make matters worse, his error on a routine ground ball in the eighth inning Wednesday helped the Braves tie the game before they won in extra innings.
Espada brushed off criticism of Abreu and said he knows the 2020 AL MVP can break out of his early slump.
“Because (of) history,” Espada said. “The back of his baseball card. He can do it.”
Though things haven’t gone well for the Astros so far, everyone insists there’s no panic in this team which won its second World Series in 2022.
Altuve added that he doesn’t have to say anything to his teammates during this tough time.
“I think they’ve played enough baseball to know how to control themselves and how to come back to the plan we have, which is winning games,” he said.
The clubhouse was quiet and somber Wednesday after the Astros suffered their third series sweep of the season and second at home. While not panicking about the slow start, this team, which has won at least 90 games in each of the last three seasons, is certainly not happy with its record.
“We need to do everything better,” third baseman Alex Bregman said. “I feel like we’re in a lot of games, but we just haven’t found a way to win them. And good teams find a way to win games. So we need to find a way to win games.”