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Astros 2024: A bipolar year for the fans

This last Sunday was a typical day for the Astros’ fans this year. We felt good when the team swamped the red-hot D’Backs in the series’ first two games. But after watching future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander give away game three before the first beer was glugged, this crazy feeling continues to come back. Who are these guys? What can we expect day to day?

  • Are they the team that started the season 14-25 or the team that then went 63-41 since then?
  • Are they the team that swept the good Royals in a four-game series or the team that then turned around and was swept by the below-average Reds in a three-game series?
  • Is Justin Verlander the great pitcher the Astros knew in 2017-2019, 2022, or the guy who is 3-6 with a 5.30 ERA in 2024 and who is 0-4 with a 9.68 ERA since returning from the IL?
  • Is Spencer Arrighetti the strikeout machine who threw 7 innings of no-hit ball against the Phillies before being undone by a bad fielding effort, or the guy who gave up 9 runs in the first 2/3 innings of his next start?
  • Is Chas McCormick the guy who had a .188 BA/ .253 OBP/ .528 OPS slash after 218 ABs, or the guy slashing .438 BA/.458 OBP/ 1.067 OPS in his last 23 ABs?
  • Shades of Chas….Is Alex Bregman the guy who slashed .204 BA/ .270 OBP/ .590 OPS in his first 191 ABs or the player who slashed .291 BA/ .342 OBP/ .863 OPS in the 326 ABs since?
  • Is Hunter Brown the guy who was 0-4 with a 9.78 ERA after one month of the season, or the ace who is 11-3 with a 2.28 ERA since then? (Note – crazy stat – the Astros have been 12-10 in his starts since April, as they are 1-7 when he has a no-decision, often losing games he should have gotten a win in).
  • Is Josh Hader the closer who is 1-1 with a 2.10 ERA with 29 in 31 save opportunities or the pitcher who is 6-6 with a 4.60 ERA in 30 non-save opportunities?
  • Is Yainer Diaz the guy who only put up a .249 BA/ .278 OBP/.636 OPS/ 3 HR / 23 RBIs in his first 193 ABs this season, or the prime-time hitter who has slashed .329/ .354/ .862 13 HR/ 58 RBIs in 319 ABs since May?
  • Is Tayler Scott the 7-3 / 1.36 ERA surprise he was in his first 47 appearances or the faltering 0-0 / 4.73 ERA pitcher he has been his last 12 times out?

OK, you get it. This could go on and on. The Astros have been a pleasure to watch at times and have had us clawing at our eyeballs at other times. What will they give us down the stretch? Probably more of the same. We just hope that the positive outweighs the negative and that they keep the Mariners at arm’s length.

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29 responses to “Astros 2024: A bipolar year for the fans”

  1. That can we expect day to day? No clue. I’m keeping it simple. I hope we get the good version of Arrighetti tonight, maybe not quite the August version, but at least the keep us in the game version. And then enough hitting to score more runs than the other guys. From who? Again, no clue, but Chas does encourage right now.

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      • Thank you for the kind address Dave. I was referring to the extra inning as I stated. I felt, if Espada had followed the A’s manager’s lead, bunting the runner over to begin the extra inning, then the team would have had an even better chance of winning in those extra innings. I do agree with the lack of hitting in the rest of the game and the poor fielding from the pitching position. Peace brother!

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  5. Good teams find a way to win. Bad teams find a way to lose. Average teams find a way to do both. The Astros are one of the better average teams in baseball. They are 144 games into the season and are a little better than average. Fortunately, they play in a division that is not quite as good as average.

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    • The first place Astros lost and are 10 games over .500. The second place Mariners lost and are 1 game over .500. The third place Rangers lost and are 5 games under .500.

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      • So many opportunities, through the past month and a half, to bury the Mariners and Rangers. Alas, it is what it is.

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  7. Good morning again.

    That was a tough one. We hit the ball harder than the other guys, but that does not necessarily win baseball games.

    We played bad defense. Hector looked terrible. Yainer, as much as we need his bat in the order every night, does not have a feel for first base.

    Arrighetti did everything we could have asked from him.

    Abreu suddenly looked like 2022 post season Abreu.

    We got great pitching overall.

    We got bad hitting overall.

    The Athletics will keep bunting on us. They’re a pretty good team at this point and have zero pressure on them.

    Tucker and Bregman have got to hit.

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    • Yeah Dan, my initial post this morning that went into never never land mentioned Chas getting hurt. We are snakebit this season. The guy finally looks like he’s ready to break out and even last night hit one to the 399 sign. But now he’s day to day I would suspect. That could mean a day, or it could the season for Chas.

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  8. Thoughts

    • Threw away a vintage Bryan Abreu performance twice in extra innings
    • Astros fall to 15-25 in one run games and 5-10 in extra innings – yuck
    • This is not second guessing – at the time I was wondering why they moved Tucker up to the third spot and it hurt us a number of times in the game
    • But no one else was hitting when we needed it either – 2 for 17 with RISP
    • I was at choir practice last night following most of the game on GameCast – I was texting with my brother – mad when Dubon pinch hit for Chas – only found out this morning Chas had a bad wrist
    • Putting Singleton in for Dubon was the only move that worked last night. One Ton had an inside the park homer as a rookie, but this was his first career triple
    • The Astros did have some bad luck on hit balls last night – smoked a lot of them but mostly deep to center. I thought Pena had won it with his line drive in extra innings
    • Former Astro prospect Daz Cameron (went to Detroit in the JV trade) hurt us twice last night – once on the diving catch against Pena in the 10th and second on the bunt single in the 12th that helped bust the game open
    • Neris must go to Framber’s fielding camp in the off season
    • The Padres helped us last night, but this team needs to start playing better (again) – oh wait that is the bipolar playing showing through

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  11. This struck me as interesting from a number of angles – including there is an Astro angle involved here – that I will leave to the bottom of this comment so you can guess at it.

    Manny Machado becomes Padres home run leader: Slugger passes Nate Colbert’s franchise record with 164th homer (msn.com)

    First – Machado becomes their career home run leader after less than 5-1/2 seasons when you consider one of them was 2020. That’s crazy.

    I know the Padres don’t have the longer history of the Astros, but it is just a 7 year difference. Still that 164 number is tiny compared to the Astros top guys.

    His 164th homer if he was with the Astros would have moved him from 10th place into 9th place – just passing Cesar Cedeno (163) and with Yordan Alvarez (161) hot on his tail.

    He would be trailing Jeff Bagwell (449), Lance Berkman (326), Craig Biggio (291), Jose Altuve (228), Jimmy Wynn (223), Alex Bregman (187), George Springer (174) and Glenn Davis (166).

    The Padres sure don’t have much history with good position players sticking around.

    And the Astros connection? Machado passes Nate Colbert, who had a couple cups of coffee with the Astros, before the Padres grabbed him in the 1968 expansion draft.

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    • Really interesting post, Dan. As someone who grew up thinking Glenn Davis’ 31 HR in the regular season in 1986 was pretty much peak power output the numbers since then are mind baffling. What stands out about the Padres numbers …

      1. Manny Machado 164
      2. Nate Colbert 163
      3. Adrián González 161
      4. Phil Nevin 156
      5. Dave Winfield 154
      6. Tony Gwynn 135
      7. Wil Myers 134
      8. Ryan Klesko 133
      9. Fernando Tatis Jr. 122
      10. Ken Caminiti 121

      … is that Winfield is 36th on the all time list with 465, but a lot of them came in an uglier uniform.

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    • That was a terrible time TOF. I was working in downtown Houston and driving to Tomball after work every day to spend time with my dad who was dying.

      We did not find out about the disaster until after the second plane hit. I got in an argument with a guy who said it might be an accident. I said one plane hitting might be an accident – two planes hitting was a terrorist incident.

      Paranoia set in a bit – we were there in one of the taller downtown buildings. We had a number of projects going on in the Middle East. You start wondering if you could be a target. Pretty soon they let us go home as nothing was getting done.

      My wife is originally from the NYC/ New Jersey area and still had relatives up there. She was checking to make sure none of her cousins worked there. Her uncle had worked in the Twin Towers before he retired and in fact had to walk down 60 stories when the previous attack occurred – bombing in 1993.

      It all seemed so surreal at the time. The only other day I lived through like it was when President Kennedy was assassinated. Brought the country together for a short while – now we are as spread out as we could ever be.

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      • Those of us who haven’t succumbed to dementia already will always remember where we were and what we were doing that beautiful Tuesday morning.

        I was working as a consulting engineer off site at Xplore Technologies in Austin and by previous arrangement with them was at work a couple hours early to avoid Austin traffic. Was happily designing my little tail off (23 years ago, it was still little!) when folks started trailing in telling me about it.

        They guy in the next cubicle had a radio so we turned it on just as the second plane was hitting. That’s when we all knew what was happening.

        I just hope America can unify again the way we were on September 12th. And not be fooled again by despots into doing something foolish for 20 years.

        I pray for that every day, man.

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  15. Good morning!

    The Astros put up a remarkable stretch of 3 months where they played 49-29 baseball despite all their afflictions. The season started out with an unprecedented amount of injuries. And it continued when we lost perhaps our most valuable player for 3 months. He still can’t play today. Our third baseman is playing injured. Our first baseman is not very good. We’ve got other guys playing out of position. As much as I love Yanier, he’s not a first baseman either. We’ve got an outfield that can’t hit, the latest blow a fractured finger as Chas had finally found his bat again. And the newest, biggest blow. Jose Altuve is hurt now. The organization may not have made all the best decisions in trying to remedy our issues, but they have used 30 plus pitchers. They have continually picked up guys off waivers. They’ve tried to get a spark out of several minor leaguers. And that’s really only compromised our suspect defense even more. The reality is that this Astro team is just not a very good team. It had to happen at some point. We can fire Dana Brown. We can fire Joe Espada. But when I look at the roster I see a flawed team that has battled all year, had some real success and failure too, that is simply gassed at this point. Maybe there is one more spurt left. I hope so. But if they continue t crater down the stretch, I’m not going to hold it against them.

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  16. Thoughts

    • We can’t seem to get to a spot where the lineup is healthy. We keep thinking….Tucker will come back and we will have a complete lineup. But then we have Bregman and his elbow and now a red hot Chas and his broken finger and Altuve and a strained muscle in his side – the kind of soft tissue issue that may or may not take a while to heal. And of course Tucker has looked like he needed at least a short rehab.
    • Altuve hacked me off a bit – if you know you are going to attempt to put down a 2 strike bunt and then head to the clubhouse – let someone else take the last swing of your at bat.
    • Hunter had the 7 strike outs in 5 innings but really struggled to get through the innings. He was off and the A’s were patient.
    • The offense was up and down – fair amount of traffic 9 hits but only one walk. Missed some chances for sure.
    • How many times are we going to lose at home on pop up home runs into the Crawford Boxes while our guys are taking it deep into centerfield for outs?
    • Framber needs to be the ace and the stopper today. The offense needs to put on their big boy pants and bury these guys.
    • It was good to see Tucker get a clutch hit for an RBI – not a rocket shot but better than he has been putting out there.
    • Continue to get excellent outings from Mr. Ort and the other Caleb (Ferguson) has been decent enough to suck up innings when we need to give the back three a rest.

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    • One would think they would try to take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of their home park. That would be smart. For some reason (ahem) they don’t.

      But I do remember saying a couple months ago that these guys just aren’t that good anymore……

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  17. Once again the Astros continue to disappoint. The team is just not doing what it needs to win and they can’t seem to find their mojo. You’d think after playing so well against better teams the lesser ones would be a cakewalk but no, they continue to lose to lesser teams. I have no idea if they will win the division but I am not optimistic based on their past performances. It would be a sad ending to what has been an amazing run over the past seven years. Yes, I know we’ve had more than our share of injuries but we’ve always managed to get back to our winning ways. With only 17 games left I think it’s time to pull out all the stops to get the job done. That may mean doing non typical things like playing small ball or using multiple pitchers to give guys an extra day of rest. I like others will just have to wait and see what the end result will be.

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