I hate losing. This year has been worse than normal even though the Astros are winning a lot. I hate losing more when a good pitcher starts. We just wasted a Morton start. He wasn't great, but team had a chance to pick him up. I hate losing.
Baseball teaches humility to the good student. Baseball pisses the not-so-good students off though at times.
I knew after winning the WS and adding Cole, expectations would be unrealistic and a slow start would lead to some poor reactions. That wouldn't have surprised me. When the team is on pace to win 104 games (and a run differential that says we are even better than that), and people still think we aren't playing well, that manages to surprise me.
What gets me is that we do well against not great teams lately. Mariners, White Sox are both a joke. We sucked against the Twins. Then we lose against a contender (not necessarily for anything beyond a Wild Card) in the Angels, which is a downer. They are starting slow for sure.
The Mariners are 12-10. We don't know if the Twins are any good, we don't know if the Mariners are any good. The Angels are the only team we've played so far that I'm confident will be pretty good by years end, and we've played them twice. You can't take anything from a 2 game sample other than it sucks to have lost them. This group has nothing to prove when it comes to handling pressure or beating quality teams.
On this (bolded), we completely agree. Sometimes its the case that a pitcher gets beat up despite pitching well. But on this night, Morton was not only "not great", but statistically speaking he was pretty bad (era 9 for the game). It was Joe Smith who rightfully took the loss and allowed the game to get just out of reach, despite having chances to win the game despite him. This year is worse, for me at least, because last year showed what this team can do when hitting on all (most) cylinders. And by comparison, this year has seemed off from the get go. While our record is still pretty good, we haven't seen much of the team of yesteryear where every game and series seemed winnable.
There is plenty of evidence to indicate that the Twins and Mariners as they are now assembled are likely around a 0.500 team. Maybe compete for WC if things go well. May sell off at deadline if they don't. Granted, I agree too much is made of schedule as usually schedule only matters by about 2-3 games over a year for most teams.
I was at the game so I didn't hear the commentary, but did they comment on the number of mound visits the Angels had? I swear it was way more than 6 visits by the 9th inning.
Based on what though? Every series has been winnable. We lost 2 series prior (losing twice in extra innings to Texas, and losing the deciding game in the 9th against Minnesota). We are 16-9 this season, wanna take a wild guess what our record was at this point last season? Offense has underachieved, should be awesome by years end. Pitching has overachieved, should regress and still be awesome.
You're right. 16-9 is an awful start. What are we ever going to do? In all seriousness though, I do think they've yet to figure out hitting at home this season. Last night was a good sign of the bats having success at home but in general they've had a rough go of it at MMP so far this season (at least compared to their recent success on the road).
Their last non-pitching change move, was their last move of the night they could make. First time I have seen a team use them all.
This is largely the same team that beat the Red Sox, Yankees and Dodgers consecutively in the playoffs. There's no reason to believe that all of a sudden now they can't beat quality teams. The "strength of schedule" argument in baseball doesn't really work until the second half of the season. Basically, there's no reason to think that the Astros can't beat good teams purely because they beat up on the Mariners and White Sox and followed that up with a couple disappointing losses to the Angels.
That entire post is based on my own personal eye test only. Wasn't trying to make some factually based conclusion. Yea, we were 16-9 at this point last year. Its also true we had a 22-7 May last year. We were 50-26 vs our division last year. While the sample is small, we are 7-6 this year.
Yes, and one of the visits included the trainer and was to check on the health of Ohtani, the TV announcers said they don't count that one.
