ALCS Blowout? Astros in Grave Danger of Exiting 2020 with a Whimper vs. Rays
SAN DIEGO – The end of the Houston Astros isn't official yet, but you can hear the trash cans banging off in the distance. The rumbling garbage trucks are getting closer.
Tampa Bay is checking expiration dates daily, starting with the New York Yankees, and is now swiftly moving on to Houston. Through two games of this American League Championship Series, the Rays are making every play, seizing every opportunity, suffocating the Astros at every turn and, with a 4-2 Game 2 win Monday, moving ever closer to tightly affixing a, ahem, lid on this thing.
The dazed Astros, now trailing this series two games to none, don't know what's hit them. Trash-pickup day could now be as early as Wednesday, the day of Game 4.
"It's very frustrating because all you hear is exit speed," manager Dusty Baker said via Zoom after the game. "We had some great exit speed today."
They sure did. Take Alex Bregman. In five plate appearances, his exit velocities were 98.4 mph, 99.5 mph, 103.0 mph, 103.1 mph and a scorching 106.8 mph.
He went 0-for-5.
And he wasn't alone.
All afternoon, the Astros scorched the ball as if each of them had walked off the set of The Natural. Remember when Robert Redford's character hit the ball so hard the seams burst? Houston is swinging it like everyone in the clubhouse is lugging his own Wonderboy to the plate.
And it's as if Rays manager Kevin Cash is sitting in the dugout with his own joystick, moving his defenders into perfect position with all the gusto of a mad scientist.
"When you're hitting the ball hard and not getting results ... this is the one game where you can do everything right and not have any success," Astros shortstop Carlos Correa said. "It's a tough game. We know that.
"At the same time, you have to give credit to their defense."
Quite different, huh, than the Correa who looked straight into the video-conference cameras after Houston swept the Minnesota Twins in the American League Division Series and declared, "I know a lot of people are mad. I know a lot of people don't want to see us here. But what are they gonna say now?"
What those people surely are saying now, of course, is, "Let's go Rays!"
The Astros are out-hitting Tampa Bay 19-10. Houston pitchers have allowed only three earned runs in two games. They have collected 26 of a possible 48 outs via strikeouts.
Take a look at some of the numbers on the surface and you'd swear Houston would be winning this series—or at least tied 1-1.
"It's very frustrating because Charlie Morton wasn't that sharp today," Baker said. "I've seen him much sharper."
Dusty is right. Somehow, Morton made it through five shutout innings Monday. Only the fifth went 1-2-3. Houston put seven runners on base in the first four innings and kept applying pressure, and the Rays and Morton responded as coolly as a jumbo ice pack reducing the pressure of a swollen limb.
Overall in these two games, the Astros are a meek 3-for-16 with runners in scoring position. They've left 21 baserunners stranded, including 12 with two outs.
The Astros keep pushing, as they did in the ninth inning Monday, banging three straight singles against ace reliever Nick Anderson and then, after Anderson coaxed a double-play grounder from George Springer, loading the bases by drawing consecutive walks before Bregman put a charge into a fly ball to center field that was caught by Kevin Kiermaier just short of the warning track.
"Whew, that was tense!" manager Kevin Cash said after the Rays escaped, sounding not unlike an enthusiastic schoolboy who just aced a pop quiz. "That was like Game 5 [against the Yankees] all over again.
"Those guys can hit. It came down to us pitching really, really well and [shortstop] Willy Adames and [third baseman] Joey Wendle putting on a defensive clinic today."
That they did.
If Adames wasn't leaping like a high-jumper to stab a line drive, Wendle was moving his feet with the grace of a dancer to gobble up another ground ball. Over at first base, Ji-Man Choi specializes in doing the splits as he stretches to short-hop whatever throws aren't on target.
"It's good when you have a first baseman like that," Adames said. "For us to have Ji-Man, it's fun. We thank him every time he makes a split like that. Obviously, we don't want to make those kind of throws, but it happens in the game. For him to have that flexibility, it's unbelievable."
Unbelievable was what right fielder Manuel Margot did over a span of about 20 minutes near the start of the afternoon. Baseball games aren't all won and lost in the late innings, and Game 2 was a prime example of that.
With two out and one on in the bottom of the first, Houston's All-Star second baseman, Jose Altuve, playing in the shallow right-field grass during a defensive shift, bounced a throw to first base on a Choi grounder. Because Choi, shall we say, runs longer in one place than most people, Houston first baseman Yuli Gurriel had plenty of time to recover when he couldn't handle Altuve's throw and the ball trickled away from him.
Instead, Gurriel was inexplicably slow and lazy to step and reach for the ball as it lay on the infield dirt, and Choi was safe at first.
Two pitches later, Houston paid for failing to close out the inning when Margot drilled an off-speed pitch over the center-field fence to spot the Rays a 3-0 lead.
"I need to pick him up there," Houston starter Lance McCullers Jr. said of Altuve. "He made an error. I turned to him and gave him a look like, 'We're OK, not a problem.' Then the second pitch found its way out of the park."
Then, with two out and two on in the top of the second, Margot made an incredible catch in foul territory in right field, sprinting, reaching, tumbling and, finally, flipping over the fence that runs parallel with the right-field line.
For Margot, the home run and the catch were a sweet homecoming to Petco Park, his home for four seasons before the San Diego Padres traded him to Tampa Bay in February.
Margot's father passed away in August, and he revealed that earlier this summer, his family was in a car that caught fire, and a bystander wound up pulling one of his children out of the vehicle to safety.
Now, he has three homers in eight playoff games after hitting just one homer in 47 games (37 starts) during the short regular season.
"I'll take the home run, but that catch was great, too," Cash said. "He's hit three huge home runs for us this postseason. And that play, to have the ability to know where you're at and say, 'Forget it, I'm going to hit something and run into the wall,' it's really impressive."
As for Altuve, he threw another ball away in the third, and tellingly, when the Astros moved into that shift several times after that, Correa came way over from shortstop to play the shallow position in right field as Altuve moved up the middle behind the second base bag.
"They moved themselves," Baker said. "Carlos and Jose moved themselves. You know how close these guys are. Carlos really looks up to Jose. It's ultimate admiration. They did that themselves."
Altuve didn't make any throwing errors all season but now has made three this postseason—one against Minnesota and two on Monday. As if the Astros don't have enough to worry about, this put them on alert, too.
"Just hope he isn't getting the yips," Baker said. "I told him to flush it and move on because they can come in bunches."
Altuve was not made available for comment afterward. McCullers noted, "He's been the heartbeat of this team, a staple of this organization for so many years. It just kind of sucks. I really wanted to pick him up there.
"I wish we were talking about something different. He's a hell of a player. He'll come back tomorrow like he always has. And we have to find a way to get a win tomorrow."
No question about that. This Rays team is too well-rounded, too good for the Astros to recover if they fall into a hole any deeper than they're in now. And the disheartening thing is that starters Framber Valdez and McCullers both pitched well enough to win.
Yet a Houston team that committed the fewest errors in the majors this season with just 20 now has been charged with five in this ALCS.
So where to from here?
Maybe the baseball gods are fixing to make things right after the game's worst cheating scandal since the 1919 World Series.
And poor ol' Dusty Baker had nothing to do with that; he was simply brought in to help calm things down.
"I'm not one of the gods," Baker said. "If the gods did answer me, then that would mean I'm not here on Earth anymore. Like I said, they come in bunches: hits, runs, errors. Hopefully [regarding the errors], that's the end of that bunch."
