SEATTLE — Postmortems shouldn’t begin with positives, but Joe Espada strayed from convention. His high-priced bullpen blew its 10th save and his reshuffled batting order tallied two runs while taking three at-bats with runners in scoring position, but Espada diverted this discussion toward something more optimistic.
“Let’s start with Hunter Brown’s performance,” Espada petitioned after Tuesday’s 4-2 loss.
Brown needed 87 pitches to punch out nine batters in Seattle’s strikeout-prone lineup. The six innings he threw continued a turnaround crucial for Houston’s thinning rotation. Asking him for a seventh seemed logical. Espada opted against it.
Brown authored a brutal beginning to his season. At one point, his ERA ballooned to 9.78. Allowing a young pitcher to leave with a sense of accomplishment seemed logical, even if the flow of the game suggested letting him shove. Brown retired the final 12 Mariners he saw, descended the dugout steps and saw his skipper.
“Joe came up to me, said, ‘Good job,’ and that was that,” Brown said.
Brown has not thrown more than 97 pitches in any start this season. He acknowledged it’s “a little bit above my pay grade” to ponder whether he could’ve matched it. His team nursed a 2-1 lead with all three of its leverage relievers rested.
One of them combusted. Two of his infielders dumped gasoline on the fire. Houston lost its 16th game after holding a lead, falling 5 1/2 games back in the American League West, and offered a compelling case for its most catastrophic setback of this subpar season.
Julio Rodriguez after reaching second base on a two-run throwing error by the Astros during the eighth inning. (Joe Nicholson / USA Today)
“Disappointing we couldn’t get a win,” Espasa said, “but that was really good to see from Hunter.”
Asked if he considered allowing Brown to pitch the seventh, Espada said “No.” He made a defensible decision for a team giving him no margin for error. Houston’s lineup boasts the sport’s highest batting average, the American League’s second-highest OPS and is still being outscored by nine different teams.
Underperformance and, now, confounding roster construction have crippled an offense that still hasn’t actualized its full potential across 55 games.
Espada wrote his 47th different batting order on Tuesday, moving Alex Bregman down to fifth and Jake Meyers up to sixth. Bregman responded with two hits, including a two-run home run that represented the extent of his team’s production. The outburst inflated his OPS to .612. Only 19 qualified players awoke on Tuesday with a lower one.
A two-hit game represents a turnaround, but Bregman’s third at-bat symbolized this enigmatic team. Yordan Alvarez stood 90 feet away as a crucial insurance run. With one out, Bregman did not need a base hit, just a ball to the outfield. He reached into the other batter’s box for Luis Castillo’s two-strike slider, rolled it to second base, and left Alvarez at third base.
Brown did not appear for the next frame. Bryan Abreu struck out two of the three hitters he faced in his place before Ryan Pressly emerged for the eighth. The Astros demoted him this offseason after signing Josh Hader to a $95 million contract.
Pressly responded with a 4.66 ERA across his first 19 1/3 innings. A 2.82 FIP suggested some sour luck inflated the number.
“My stuff is good. It’s still there,” Pressly said. “It’s just bad luck mixed with some not executed pitches on top of that, it doesn’t really make for a good time. Just have to figure it out.”
Before pitching on Tuesday, Pressly yielded just two earned runs across his previous 10 2/3 innings. He hung the third pitch he threw to Mitch Haniger, who hammered it down the left-field line for a double. Walking nine-hole hitter Ryan Bliss, a man playing his second major-league game, only exacerbated the problem.
“Kind of keeps the double play intact right there,” Pressly said. “It’s not ideal, but it happens.”
Nor is anything that followed. Pressly threw what he described as a “perfectly executed” slider to Josh Rojas. He struck it down the first-base line, where an embattled veteran could not field it.
The baseball exited Rojas’ bat at 95.7 mph and carried a .220 expected batting average. It bounced within inches of José Abreu’s outstretched arm. In no reality is this a routine play, but it’s one elite teams find a way to make. Abreu could not. Asked if it is one he expects Abreu to make, Espada replied “No, that’s a really tough play. That’s a ball hit hard, down the line.”
In his second day back from a 28-game sabbatical to the minor leagues, Abreu struck out twice and stranded two baserunners from the eight-hole, illustrating how difficult it will be for the Astros to hide his precipitous decline. The team’s apparent insistence to play him on an almost regular basis will magnify instances like this — where it’s fair to wonder if anyone else would have at least kept the ball on the infield.
Abreu couldn’t and the tying run scored as a result. Assigning him total blame for the loss is silly, but the outcry from fans will only grow louder if they continue to mount. Houston went 15-10 in Abreu’s absence, but that is more a byproduct of a softer schedule and stout pitching than his demotion.
Rojas’ groundball was correctly scored a double. Julio Rodríguez followed with a soft chopper down the third-base line. Bliss ran home from third base on contact. Bregman barehanded the baseball, but seemed unsure of where to throw. Going to the plate is the team’s first preference.
“I definitely should’ve just ate it and not thrown the ball,” Bregman said. “Obviously a good runner at third base and Julio is an incredible runner as well. As soon as I looked home to try and get that guy, I probably should’ve just ate it and not thrown it.”
Bregman threw wide of first base instead. Rojas scored, too, providing a two-run cushion this offense could not counter.
“They’re a really good team,” Bregman said. “I feel like we’re a really good team. We just didn’t get the job done tonight. We want to get all these games, especially against our division opponents. Learn from it, come back tomorrow and get after it.”
(Top photo of Alex Bregman tagging out Julio Rodriguez at third base in the first inning: Joe Nicholson / USA Today)
