Cancel the season. The Astros lost to the soon-to-be worst team in the American League with Dallas Keuchel on the mound at home. Jexas has her first career game recap for Astros County.
*Dallas Keuchel now has a BB/9 rate of 4.38. This is higher than his 2012 monstrosity of a rookie season, when he walked 4.11 batters per nine innings. If there's a silver lining, and if you're looking at the stats to try to find some Hope (note: you should know better than to do that by now), note that Keuchel's BABIP (.348) is 79 points higher than it was in 2015 (.269) and that his FIP (3.26) and xFIP (3.86) say that this is simply a rough patch.
That said, Keuchel has walked 4+ batters in three of his six starts of 2016 - something he did only once in 2015.
*Hinch, on Keuchel:
It looked like he lost feel of his pitches at the wrong time and the innings started to pile up on him. Any time you get a pitcher that throws 40-plus pitches in an inning, some things went wrong.
The strike zone was iffy all night for both sides - The serial-killer-named/Twins catcher John Ryan Murphy got tossed in the game thanks to the strike zone...in a game the Twins had well in hand. Keuchel noticed it, too:
First three innings were a different story and it seemed like it just snowballed from there. Don't feel like I got any help, but I have to do better than that.
*Luhnow thinks that, if the Astros can be at .500 by the All-Star Break, everything will be gravy.
*Hinch:
We've been punched in the mouth the first five weeks. No one is going to feel sorry for us. The thing for me as manager is to find solutions...we're doing things behind the scenes to speed that up.
*Brian Smith goes Full Brian Smith on the Astros - including thoughts on payroll and Spending Money. (Alt Link)
*Notably, Joe Musgrove threw 6IP, 5H/0ER, 5K:1BB at Corpus last night to lower his ERA to 0.39. In 23.1IP this season, he has allowed 17H/1ER, with 26K:3BB.
*Lance McCullers threw 4.2IP in an extended spring training rehab start, sitting 92-97mph, and is expected to join Fresno on Saturday for his first actual outing of the season.
*Chris Devenski will get Thursday's start against Seattle, meaning Feldman remains in the bullpen for the time being.
*Carlos Gomez looks like he's managed to avoid a DL stint. He also made it to #5 on the 2017 Free Agent Power Rankings list from MLBTR.
*The Astros are the first playoff team to go a month without winning consecutive games since the 1982 Phillies.
*Maybe the Astros are one of 20 teams who will watch Tim Lincecum throw on Friday.
*Ken Rosenthal: The Astros' rotation is a "soft-tossing mess." Patrick and I have said this multiple times on the Lima Time Time podcast: the entire rotation is 89-92 location guys, and once teams face the first starter, they can settle in because they don't have anyone like McCullers or, ahem, Velasquez to come up and change speeds on them.
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
