The Houston Astros crawled back to .500 with a seven-game winning streak over the past week, sweeping both the Baltimore Orioles and the Colorado Rockies. Payne and Pendergast react to it here.
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00:00I don't know if you've heard the good news, Seth, but the Astros, we have a 500 ball club
00:04here in town, man. They're 40 and 40. Back to even Steven, baby.
00:09We, uh, I, I looked into it and the Astros are not allowed to schedule any more games
00:14against the A's, but, uh, I will count my blessings and not my curses. The Rockies are
00:20the gift that is delivered twice so far this season. A lot of the turnaround can be traced
00:26back to that Mexico city series. And now you ascend to the lofty Heights of being a
00:33500 baseball team in late June, uh, by way of the Colorado Rockies, who looked very much
00:39like a quadruple a baseball team. Actually, that's an insult to even triple a teams, because
00:44I think a lot of triple a teams in the Astros organization, for instance, uh, at various
00:49times have played very professionally. The Rockies were a hapless mess yesterday and
00:54the Astros did what a good team should do in situations like that.
00:59They looked like the more professional baseball team, Spencer Arrigetty got up and said, all
01:03right, these chumps, I'm going to mow these fools down. And just through basically nothing
01:07but strikes the entire day. And it was just a, it was a really impressive, important performance
01:13both by in consecutive days, a hundred Brown and Spencer Arrigetty, both through the fastest
01:19pitches they've thrown all year, a hundred, a hundred Brown tied it. And it was a, I
01:25feel like for those two young guys that that feels emotionally in the gut, like, okay,
01:33these guys are not feeling their way through it anymore.
01:35Arrigetty now I can't, you know, Arrigetty is probably going to have some hiccups here
01:38and there. Uh, I don't know if a hundred Brown's going to break Frambers streak of consecutive
01:43quality starts or not. He's at seven, five, right. He's at seven right now. Seven. Yeah.
01:49What was Frambers like 20, like 24 or 25, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Mid-twenty
01:54somewhere. Um, so yeah, it was good. I it's, you know, it's weird. Like as I was at the
01:59game yesterday and as we're watching this thing unfold, I'm going, man, I, Spencer Arrigetty
02:06has been so up and down this year and more down than up lately.
02:09I, this was such an outlier. Like, I don't know what to make of it. It was such an outlier
02:13for him going against such a bad baseball team. I guess that, I mean the positive takeaway,
02:18obviously the positive takeaway is they won the baseball game and they're back to 500.
02:21The positive takeaway on Spencer Arrigetty is he took care of business. You know, we'll
02:25see his next start will be against Toronto probably, which is not a great baseball team
02:29right now, but they've got some guys, they've at least got some guys on that team that can
02:32hit a, one of whom the Astros might be going after in a trade here at some point down the
02:37road. But, but it was a good day yesterday, seven to one, the final score, Alex Bregman
02:44after the game saying that they've, they figured some things out, the Astros have
02:48the last five games. I think we've played really, really good baseball, but over the
02:56course of the last like month and a half, I think we've started to play a lot better
02:59and I'm proud of the guys in here. Obviously there's been a lot of bumps along the way
03:05this year, but everybody kept fighting and kept going.
03:09Whew. That's inspiring. Inspiring words by Bregman, regular Winston Churchill right there.
03:15Bregman gets lower energy, the better the situation is. I think a lot of times I've
03:20seen, I've seen irresponsible YouTubers at times, like during a being better than everybody
03:27else scandal, they would, they would take Alex Bregman interviews and be like, clearly
03:32Alex Bregman is miserable because look at this, look at his energy and the way he talks.
03:37That's just the way Alex Bregman talks. He's just low energy, like just a calm, cool and
03:42collected 24 seven. That's it. That's it. So yeah, here we are, man. A week ago, callous
03:47put it. I mean, callous put it best. He's like, man, a week ago we were coming in to
03:50prepare for a game coming off of a shutout loss to the white socks 10 games back.
03:55They're still four and a half games back. So the cool in the gang that we played was
03:59at volume like seven, not volume nine. Cause the Mariners did win yesterday. So there's
04:04still four and a half back of the Seattle Mariners, but they've, they've made a lot
04:10of headway in the last week. They have, they have, I ended up nerding out on stats this
04:15morning based on L2 vase L2 vase, stealing two bases in the same game for the second
04:21time this season and L2. They, I did some of his on pace. Let's hear it. He's a on pace
04:30for 26 stolen bases. By the way, this is, this is a time of year where it's pretty easy
04:34to do the on pace. Cause we're like right at halfway almost, you know, not quite though.
04:38I had to divide by 0.494 tomorrow after today. It'll be nice. Cause you can just multiply
04:44by two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, he's on pace for 26 stolen bases. His batting average
04:52is three Oh three, which would be the third straight season. He's over 300, which remember
04:56that's when he started having that goal of being a 300 batting average, 900 OPS guy.
05:00Yeah. He's a right now his OPS is currently eight 12. That's what's him on pace for eight
05:0512. He's batting three Oh three. Yeah. He's on pace for three Oh three. That one was easy.
05:13That one was easy. I'm pace for 71 RBIs. That'd be the best since 2021. That's interesting
05:20because through the first month of the year, when he was the only one that was hitting,
05:24remember that like the first month of the year, it was L2 of a and Pena and that was
05:28it. They were the only two guys hitting and L2, they had a big power surge early in the
05:31season. But every time he'd come up to start the game, his stats would look so funny to
05:36be like, who's the hell to me? Five home runs, six RBIs. It was all these solo home runs.
05:42He was hitting cause no one else is getting on base. Right? So 71 huh? Wow. 71 RBIs. I'll
05:49double check my mouth. You know, I'm not looking up stats during the segments as much as possible.
05:53I've got a horrible track record. I'm on pace for infinity errors when I do that. So 71
05:59it feels like 71 right now. Okay. Now this would be, this is the interest. This is the
06:03interest. Wow. I'm looking at it. Holy crap. He's on pace for 133 strikeouts, GD windmill
06:09man, which, which would surpass his previous high of 91, 2021. Well, you know what to those
06:17Seth, like that's indicative of what we've been talking about the last couple of days
06:20and what the Astros themselves were talking about in that article that Chandler Rome did
06:24in the athletic, which is they've been super undisciplined to chasing pitches and Altuve
06:28is the worst, right? He is like, he's even worse than usual this year, as is Jordan.
06:33Like you're, I mean, worse is subjective with those two guys. Um, I think that's honestly
06:39when like I started getting into the whole, the whole thing of the whole dynamic of they're
06:43chasing a lot of pitches and yet they have the fewest strikeouts in the league, even
06:47with Jose Altuve at his blistering pace of strikeouts. But so, so you'll, you start looking
06:52at, okay, how many app, how many, how many pitches per app bat, because all right, if
06:58they're not striking out, um, they are grounding out a lot.
07:01They're fourth highest in the league and grounding out, but they have the, they have the lowest
07:05number of pitches per app bat. And, but this is the thing that sounds bad, right? Like,
07:10okay, they're not having, they're not being competitive up there and that they're not,
07:13they're not wearing pictures down. They've actually been, they've actually had amongst
07:18the lowest pitches per app bat for the last several years. They've been in the bottom
07:23five. It's just that in previous years they were hitting them. They were hitting harder.
07:26Yeah. Yeah. So they're now they're the, the, the, the, the upside is they're really good
07:31at putting the bat on the ball. It's just that because they're chasing, they're, they're
07:36grounding out way more often than they should. So that's like, it's, it does. It's right
07:41there in that mode where they just got to tweak it a little bit. You know, they just
07:45got to get back to that impeccable plate judgment that they've had in the right.
07:48I think my big, like I would just to like, just to summarize that, that feels fixable.
07:53You know what I mean? Like that feels fixable. They're not striking out. They're just, and
07:57they're getting the bat on the ball, but they're almost too good at getting the bat on the
08:00ball. They got to reel it back in. And if they're going to be, if they're going to get
08:04that few, that, that, that, that few, a number of pitches, it's gotta be because they're
08:08holding off and guys are throwing strikes and then they're taking advantage of anything
08:12good on L2 way to cap this off. Cause I don't want to finish it with 133 strikeouts. Well,
08:16I would say this is a good thing, even though, cause he is aging at his age of 34 years.
08:21This is his 34 year old season. His, his running speed is 26.9, which is the same as last year,
08:30but it's notable that I think he, you know, L2 way, the savvy base runner that he is,
08:35he is, he has taken advantage of these new rules and that even though he's a little bit
08:39slower, he's, he's stealing more bases than he has in a long time. So that's a good thing.
08:44And he is also the last on pace is that he's on pace to be 34 years old at the end. I got
08:48you. I got you. That hasn't changed. Right? I feel like he'll make that. Right. Right.
08:54I think so too. I think so too. Do they, when they calculate that running speed thing, do
08:58they just toss out the times where they jog to first base? Yeah. Yeah. It's all based
09:02on like peak speed and times when you're actually trying to run L2 way does a lot of that. He's
09:08got, he's, he's got some immunity on that though. You know, like he's, he's, he's allowed
09:13to hustle guy. Yeah. He's not a, yeah. He's if, you know, if it looks like it's an easy
09:17play, don't go pulling a quad or anything. Mr. 34 years old. Yeah. Pena. Pena is my opinion.
09:22Is the guy for watching him. Hope it defers. That's some of the more exciting. He jogged
09:26one more exciting plays in baseball is a, is a pain. You're single. He, he jogged one
09:31time down the line yesterday. I'm like, Oh, that's very unpaid. Someone's feeling themselves
09:35jogging down the line in year three of his career. Well, someone pointed this out on
09:40the text page and I saw you point this out in the rundown and I, I couldn't believe this
09:44when I saw it. That was the first time we've had an Astros pitcher get double digit strikeouts
09:47in a game yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, you know, and you can't help
09:52but think, remember, remember back when it was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to call a call
09:56at 11 strikeouts. Yes. Yeah. Verlander struck out 12, six and a third, 12 strikeouts when
10:03I was supposed to get out of bed for that. What the hell? Right. And it was a cool not
10:07throwing Garrett Cole's not throwing nearly that many strikeouts these days. He had zero.
10:12Yeah. A couple of days ago. Yeah. That was shocking to me when I saw that this is the
10:16first time double digit strikeouts in a game for an Astros starter this season. I know
10:20they haven't been great, but I've, you figure somewhere along the way they'd stumble into
10:24a 10 strikeout game. I mean, that is like with Hunter Brown and Arrighetti just showing,
10:29showing that aggression that they did in the last two games versus a bad team. I guess
10:32that's the only, that's the only downside to having this capping off this stretch so
10:38far versus the Rockies. Some of those old tendencies that we just talked about, like
10:42chasing a little too much, you can capitalize. They capitalized on that in this game, these
10:49games versus a bad team. Whereas, you know, like yesterday was a perfect example of man,
10:54the Rockies are just a sloppy ass baseball team and you can get some, you can get some
10:59bloop singles and capitalize on errors when you're chasing against a team like that, but
11:04you're not going to do it against the really good teams.
11:06The inning where they broke it open. It's like fielder's choice, run scored, fielder's
11:10choice, run scored sack fly. You know, it's just all, but it's stuff. Good teams do against
11:15bad teams. You know, guys are on base, find a way to bring them home and then let your,
11:19let your pitchers go eat.
11:20Just.