Tag Archives: Jose Altuve

ACLS Game Five: Drill, brawl, and another drill

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ALCS Game Five

The Rangers and the Astros scrum in the ninth in ALCS Game Five, after Adolis García (bottom-most left) went ballistic when hit by a first pitch from Astros reliever Bryan Abreu.

With one dazzler of an American League Championship Series Game Five play, Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien may have thought he’d saved their season. With one swing an inning later, Adolis García may have thought he’d guaranteed that save.

But that swing provoked a foolhardy act by an Astros reliever costing the team said reliever plus manager Dusty Baker for the rest of the game. And thus provoked, José Altuve sent the Rangers’ season onto life support with one swing in the top of the ninth, leading to a 5-4 Astros win.

The Astros did their level best to continue proving to the Rangers that they were the unmovable force on the road, which they were all season long. The Rangers did their level best to say, “not so fast,” on Friday afternoon. At least, until García inadvertently poked the Houston bear.

There was nothing wrong with García celebrating the moment he unloaded on Astro starter Justin Verlander with Corey Seager (one-out double, then to third on Sean Carter’s single) aboard in the bottom of the sixth, sending a first-pitch fastball over the left center field fence. There was everything wrong with Astro reliever Bryan Abreu drilling García on the first pitch in the eighth.

Abreu was ejected while both benches emptied. Astros manager Dusty Baker argued so vociferously with the umpires that he was ejected post haste. When order was restored, Astros finisher Ryan Pressly had to slither out of the first-and-second jam and did it with a force out and two strikeouts to follow.

Then, Pressly had to slither out of a jam of his own making, surrendering back-to-back singles to Mitch Garver and Josiah Heim, before a line out, a fly out, and a swinging strikeout banked a game the Astros could have lost almost as readily as they won it.

In between those jams, Altuve batted with two on (Yainer Díaz, leadoff single; pinch hitter Jon Singleton, wal), nobody out, and José Leclerc on the mound for the Rangers after relieving Aroldis Chapman to retire the side in the eighth. The delay may or may not have affected Leclerc. Altuve reached down for a down-and-in 0-1 pitch and sent it up and out, over the left field fence.

No one can really prove Abreu’s intent. Watch a replay of the pitch. Astros catcher Martín Maldonado is set for a pitch coming low under the middle of the zone. The pitch shot up and in and off García’s left tricep. García got right into Maldonado’s grille as if thinking Maldonado might have called for a duster but set up to make it look unintentional.

Six umpires called drilling García deliberate. If Abreu really wanted to drill him, he might have disguised it better (say, throwing the duster on the second or third pitch, assuming there would be one) instead of letting him have it on the first pitch. Abreu probably knows well enough to know that you should worry more about getting the man out than sending him messages about previous over-exuberance—especially when you weren’t the one at whose expense he was over-exuberant.

García isn’t exactly a green rookie. It took him long enough to make the Show to stay as it is. Had he just taken his base, he might have kept the Rangers in the game instead of triggering a bench-clearing brawl that ended up possibly harming Leclerc with the extra down-time.

“Everybody on their side is going to say it wasn’t [intentional],” said Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien. “Everybody on this side is going to say it was.”

“I was saying, ‘My bad, it wasn’t on purpose’,” Abreu said postgame. “He was like, ‘bullsh@t’.”

“We know it’s the playoffs,” said umpiring crew chief James Hoye. “We don’t want to make a mistake in a situation like that. So we’re going to make sure that everybody is on the same page, that we all felt the same way. And to a T, all of us felt like that pitch was intentional.”

It’s not impossible, too, that the umpires acted more upon the moment’s emotions when ejecting Abreu for the pitch, García for launching the scrum, and Baker for arguing as wildly as he did over Abreu’s ejection. Abreu did end up hit with a two-game suspension. He could wait until before Game Six to appeal, which would keep him available for Six and Game Seven if it goes that far, though it might keep him out of the World Series’s beginning if the Astros get there.

García probably escaped suspension because he was drilled and furious, but it would not have been out of line for baseball’s government to suspend him, either, for launching the brawl in the first place instead of just taking his base. Especially since his immediate target was Maldonado, not Abreu.

“My plan for [García],” Abreu said postgame, “was just to try to get the ball up and in. That’s my plan with him—up and in, and slider down and away. I just missed the pitch and he just overreacted.”

“I think the optics of the situation are really bad,” said Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe. “It’s the playoffs. You’re allowed to get excited. He got excited. He celebrated because that was a huge swing for us. To have to wear 98 [mph] on the arm after something like that, it’s pretty disappointing.”

Altuve’s ninth-inning nuke made the optics a little bit worse for the Rangers now. The ALCS moves back to Houston. Granted the Astros weren’t a great road team this season, granted the Rangers took it to them in the first two games in Houston this set, but the Astros are not exactly pushovers. Especially not with someone like Mighty Mouse able to hit bombs when the eleventh hour is about to toll.

But it doesn’t keep Baker from a few trepidations over whether the García drill might linger in the minds of both teams if things get testy in Game Six, which is scheduled to pit Framber Valdez starting for the Astros against Nathan Eovaldi for the Rangers.

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said Saturday during a workout in Houston. “I mean, it’s going to be what it’s going to be. You have to wait and see, just like me. We don’t script it; it just happens.” That’s just about the last thing either team needs right now.

ALCS Game Three: Max the Knifed

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Max Scherzer

Max the Knifed watches José Altuve’s leadoff bomb disappear in the top of the Game Three third Wednesday night.

Which would be more treacherous a thought entering American League Championship Series Game Three? The Astros in the 2-0 hole, needing to win twice for any hope of taking the series home where the Rangers proved impossible to intimidate in the first two? Or Max Scherzer starting for the Rangers at all?

My guess going in was that it was even money. The Astros may have manhandled the Rangers on the regular season, including winning five of six in Globe Life Field. But they got out-wrestled by the Rangers in Houston to open this ALCS, neither team hitting with overwhelming force but the Rangers holding an ALCS ERA one full run lower.

That might or might not change in Game Three, I thought. Scherzer’s age began showing this season well before the Rangers made him their marquee trade deadline catch at July’s end, well before his arm (specifically, it turned out, his armpit) tried to resign on 12 September, knocking him out of the Rangers’ high-wire final stretch.

Scherzer was also once considered a non-factor for this postseason. He, of course, had other ideas. “When this injury happened, we were kind of in that four- to six-week window,” he said before Game Three. “I took one day to feel bad about it and the next day I was back to grinding because I knew we have a team that can compete with anybody . . .

“I’ve pressed all the buttons I can,” he continued. “I’m ready to go . . . I feel normal. That’s all I can say.  All I can do is describe what I feel like and if I have an issue, I have to let them know. But my arm feels fresher.”

On the surface, that sounded better than the 2019 World Series, when Scherzer was a National and had to miss his scheduled Game Six start because of a neck issue that called for a cortisone shot and Stephen Strasburg standing in to deliver heroic pitching. When Scherzer started Game Seven and kept things to a 2-0 Astro lead while he had nothing left in his tank but fumes.

The Nats, of course, went on to win that game and that Series. “We were all kind of making fun of him,” then-Nats catcher Kurt Suzuki said, “saying he was going to rise from the dead.”

Scherzer just might have had to do that again Wednesday night. Whether he’d be Max the Knife or Max the Knifed, he did have a history of sheer survival on the mound going in. But he also had over a month’s rest and rust. And these Astros aren’t quite the same Astros he held off four years ago, but they’re just as formidable—and they flayed him for a 6.55 ERA in two starts on the season.

Plus, Globe Life is a hive where big bops thrive, and Scherzer has averaged 25 home runs surrendered per 162 games lifetime. That won’t paralyse his Hall of Fame case, but there was always the chance that one, two, or even three Astro bombs might murder him and the Rangers in Game Three. And these Astros were a far better road (.630 win percentage) than home team (.481) on the regular season.

Well.

Scherzer and Astros starter Cristian Javier matched shutout innings in the first. But the slider that’s done slightly over half his lifelong lifting began disobeying his orders after that. Fatally. Scherzer said postgame that, while his arm feels good (“That’s the number one thing”), he doesn’t know how he’ll be used the rest of the postseason.

The Rangers may not know just yet, either. Not even if manager Bruce Bochy said he had decent stuff and made “some mistakes.” Scherzer did throw eleven first-pitch strikes and nailed fourteen called strikes. But a little over half his strikes were put into play. The wipeout slider deserted him. The Astros weren’t inclined to show mercy.

Scherzer plunked Yordan Alvarez on the back foot to open the second, then caught José Abreu looking at strike three—before he loaded the bases on a followup walk and a base hit with nobody out.

Then he got Jeremy Peña to pop out to short center, but he wild-pitched Alvarez home with Martín Maldonado at the plate. Seeking his first ALCS hit, Maldonado then nailed it with a two-run single past Rangers third baseman Josh Jung. Maldonado was thrown out at second trying to stretch, but Scherzer left the inning in a 3-0 hole. Which became a 4-0 hole when José Altuve sent a 1-2 service into the left center field seats.

Scherzer went back out for the fourth. Abreu said a rude leadoff hello with a double to the back of center field, and a ground out later Mauricio Dubón singled Abreu home for a 5-0 Astro lead. Getting ahead in the count on most of the Astros he faced did Scherzer no good in the end. The Rangers went to their postseason-surprise bullpen after four full innings.

Max the Knifed.

Javier (.119 batting average against him in his postseason life) kept the Rangers in check with location more than speed, until Nathaniel Lowe rapped a two-out single into left and Jung sent one into the right center field bullpen in the bottom of the fifth. With Cody Bradford on the mound for the Rangers, center fielder Leodys Taveras pulled a likely sixth-inning homer back against Alvarez.

In the bottom of that inning, Rangers rookie Evan Carter sent Javier out of the game and the Rangers’ hair with a two-out double. But Michael Brantley ran down a likely extra-base hit into an out with a running catch on the track off Adolis García’s followup drive and might have saved the game for the Astros.

It must have put a further jolt into the Astro lineup. Alvarez smacked a bases-loaded, two-run single off Rangers reliever Will Harris with two out in the seventh. Then Lowe and Jung delivered a rerun of their fifth-inning flogging—Lowe with a two-out single, this time to right, and Jung with another two-run homer, this time over the straightaway center field fence.

The Astros added an eighth in the eighth off Jon Gray with Peña’s bouncing single through the right side sending Tucker home. It might have been more but for Seager going into the hole at short to stop Altuve’s one-out smash and throw Dubón out at third, before Martin Perez relieved Gray and rid himself of Brantley on the ground for the side. It seemed off script when García singled Marcus Semien home in the bottom of the eighth.

After Alvarez got thrown out at home to end the top of the ninth, here came one final chance for the Rangers in the bottom—the numbers two and three scheduled hitters were Lowe and Jung, following Mitch Garver, even with Astros closer Ryan Pressly coming into the game.

Garver did his part, wringing his way to a full-count leadoff walk, before Lowe struck out swinging and Jung grounded into a game-ending double play. There went the Rangers’ postseason winning streak. The Astros still have an uphill climb ahead of them no matter how good a road team they were this year. Even if they’ve won six out of their last eight games in Arlington.

Scherzer’s competitiveness hasn’t abandoned him. But after the roughest regular season of his major league life, as Yahoo! Sports’s Hannah Keyser observes, “the problem is not rising to the moment but, rather, succumbing to his own physical limitations.” Succumbing to the very real prospect that he really isn’t Max the Knife anymore.

And, to the very real prospect that, however much the Rangers respect him, however much his teammates admire his undiminished need to compete, they may not be able to afford another chance to find out if there’s even one final quality start—never mind one more miracle performance—left in him this year.

“It comes down to execution,” said Max the Knifed postgame. “I know what I need to do.” He almost sounded like a chastened child who made a huge mistake trying to pass a mud pie off as a chocolate cake. That’s not the way a 39-year-old future Hall of Famer or his World Series-aspiring team wants him to sound.

ALCS Game One: Bad Astro looks, sharp Ranger pitching

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Evan Carter

Evan Carter’s running-and-leaping catch of an Alex Bregman drive that had extra bases stamped on it otherwise ended with doubling up José Altuve in the Game One eighth—on Altuve’s own baserunning mistake.

This was not a good look for the Astros. When Justin Verlander keeps the arguable best remaining postseason offense to the weakest postseason game it’s had this time around but the Astros still don’t win, it’s not a good look.

When Jordan Montgomery scatters five hits in six and a third innings with no Astro scoring against him, before handing off to a bullpen whose regular season was an indictment for arson but has been a challenge to pry runs out of this postseason, it’s not a good Astro look.

When José Altuve, one of baseball’s smartest players, makes an eighth-inning baserunning mistake more to be expected of a raw rookie than a thirteen-year veteran with a Most Valuable Player Award in his trophy case, it’s not a good Astro look.

Astroworld should only be grateful that the Rangers didn’t even think about trolling Altuve the way a certain Brave trolled Bryce Harper on a similar but different play in the National League division series out of which the Phillies shoved the Braves.

Harper didn’t miss second scrambling back to first when Nick Castellanos’s long ninth-inning drive in Game Two was caught on the run and leap by Braves center fielder Michael Harris II, but he was thrown out at first by a hair and a half to end the game and the only Braves win of the set.

Altuve didn’t end American League Championship Series Game One Sunday night, but he did put the kibosh on the Astros’s final scoring opportunity in the 2-0 loss. He’d drawn a leadoff walk against Rangers reliever Josh Sborz, who yielded at once to Aroldis Chapman—a relief pitcher whose best fastball can still out-fly a speeding bullet, but who once surrendered a pennant-losing homer to Altuve himself and is still prone to hanging his sliders.

Then, somehow, Astros third baseman Alex Bregman sent a 2-1 slider off the middle of the zone to the rear end of Minute Maid Park, toward the chain-link fence beneath a Bank of America sign. The Rangers’ rookie left fielder Evan Carter ran it down and still had to take a flying leap to catch it one-handed just before it might have hit the fence and spoiled the Ranger shutout.

“Everybody,” said Astros catcher Martín Maldonado, who probably meant both the Astros themselves and the Minute Maid crowd, “thought that ball was going to hit the wall.”

Carter threw in to shortstop Corey Seager, who tossed right to second baseman Marcus Semien with third baseman Josh Jung pointing to the base emphatically. Semien stepped on the base just as emphatically. It took a replay review to affirm what Seager, Semien, and Jung spotted at once. Second base umpire Doug Eddings rung Altuve up. Altuve never touched second en route back to first.

Ouch!

“I didn’t think he was going to make the play he made—it was a great play,” said Altuve, a man who excels at just about everything you can ask of a veteran except baserunning, what with leading the entire Show with sixteen outs on the bases during the regular season. “You just try to come back to first base (and) that’s what I did.”

“That’s a play,” Semien said, “where I always watch to see what the runner does. Sometimes the umpires are looking at the ball, and that’s exactly what (Eddings) told me. He said he was looking at the ball. He didn’t see it. I tried to remind him. He still called it safe, but luckily that’s a play we can review. I’ve made that mistake before on the bases, so it’s one that we kinda go over in spring training, and all of a sudden in the ALCS, it showed up.”

Carter had also run down and caught leaping a Bregman drive down the left field line in the first. Then he himself accounted for the first Rangers run in the second inning, when he shot a base hit right past diving Astros first baseman José Abreu and gunned his way to second ahead of a throw that was dropped almost inexplicably at the base. Rangers catcher Jonah Heim then singled back up the pipe and Carter, reading the ball almost as a Biblical scholar parses the Beatitudes, scored.

“They always preach to us, especially the ones that can run a little bit, just, ‘Hey, it’s a double until it’s not’,” said Carter, who didn’t play his first major league game until 8 September. “So that’s kind of my mindset. I’m going to get a double until the outfielder tells me that I need to stop. I didn’t feel like I was told I needed to stop, so I just kept going.”

Three innings later, the Rangers’ number nine lineup batter, center fielder Leody Taveras, caught hold of a hanging Verlander sinker and lined it right over the right field fence. That was the second and final blemish against Verlander, the veteran who walked to the Mets as a free agent last winter but returned to the Astros in a trade deadline deal in August.

Altuve’s eighth-inning misstep was only the final among several opportunities the Astros missed all game long. They wasted Abreu’s second inning-opening single almost at once when Michael Tucker forced him at second on a followup ground out, then stranded Tucker on a pair of fly outs.

They wasted first and second with two outs in the third when Yordan Alvarez struck out for the second of three times on the night.

They pushed the bases loaded against Montgomery in the fourth, the only inning in which the Rangers’ 6’6″ tall, free agent-to-be lefthander truly struggled, and Montgomery ironed up and struck Maldonado out swinging on 1-2.

It was only when Astros utility player Mauricio Dubón, playing center field for them Sunday night, slammed a hard line out to center field opening the Houston seventh, that Rangers manager Bruce Bochy decided to reach for the bullpen. Now, the Astros had a clean shot at a bullpen that might resemble the Third Army this postseason but blew 33 out of 63 so-called save situations on the regular season.

Altuve’s baserunning mistake still left the Astros four outs to work with yet and the vulnerable Chapman hardly off the hook with Alvarez checking in at the plate: Chapman’s lifetime postseason ERA in Minute Maid Park was 7.53 entering Sunday night. He fell behind Alvarez 2-1. Then, he threw Alvarez a slider that hung up just enough to be sent into orbit, just as Altuve had done winning that 2019 ALCS.

The only place Alvarez sent this one, though, was on the ground toward first base for an inning-ending out. Then Bochy reached for Jose Leclerc to work the ninth. Leclerc landed a hard-enough earned three up, three down; he went to full counts on Abreu and Chas McCormick before getting Abreu to line out to center for the first out and McCormick to strike out swinging, sandwiching Tucker’s 2-2 ground out to second.

“We just found a way to get a couple of runs across the board,” said Bochy after the game ended. “That was the difference in the game, obviously. But our guy was really good, Monty, terrific job he did. And he got in a couple of jams there and found a way to get out of it.”

Verlander didn’t sound discouraged after Game One despite his solid effort coming up just short enough. “We’ve lost Game One of some playoff series before,” said the future Hall of Fame righthander. “And that’s the great thing about this team. Obviously nobody is sitting in the locker room right now happy. But it’s very matter of fact, okay. We just got punched, how do you answer?”

The Astros have Game Two to start answering, of course. But they might have to find a few more ways to keep Carter from running down and killing their better drives.

Keep José Altuve off the Astrogate hook

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Jose Altuve

It’s been said before Peter Gammons revived it Friday: José Altuve wanted no part of illegally-stolen signs when he was at the plate. Stop hammering him with the “chea-ter! chea-ter!” chants once and for all.

When the World Series shifted to Philadelphia, after the Phillies and the Astros split the first two games in Houston, the Citizens Bank Park crowd wasn’t shy about letting the Astros have it over You-know-what-gate. The good news was that they saved the chea-ter! chea-ter! chants for the only three position players left on the roster from the forever-tainted 2017-18 team.

The bad news was that one of the three actually spurned taking the illegally stolen signs in the batter’s box. That was second baseman and Astros franchise face José Altuve. It didn’t matter to the chanting Phillies fans. But it should have.

When SNY’s Andy Martino published Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing in June 2021, the chapter called “The Scheme Begins” included a revelation that should have jolted anyone hammering the Astros rightfully enough over their Astro Intelligence Agency plot:

Altuve was the most reluctant of the Astros stars. When the option to have a teammate bang the trash can [to relay the signs stolen by way of an illegal off-field-based real-time camera to an illegal additional clubhouse monitor—JK] first arose, he declined.

When Altuve was batting, and there would be a bang, he would glare into the dugout.

“He doesn’t want it,” teammates would say frantically. On more than one occasion, Altuve returned to the dugout after his at-bat and yelled at the others to knock it off.

It jolted me, too. Especially since I’d actually missed the first such revelation, in February 2020, from then-Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, usually the face of the team when it came to defending the 2017 World Series title before he signed with the Twins last winter. (Correa is now a free agent again.) I missed it, and I shouldn’t have.

Commissioner Rob Manfred handed down his Astrogate verdict in January 2020—suspensions for 2017-18 general manager Jeff Luhnow, manager A.J. Hinch, and bench coach Alex Cora (subsequently a World Series-winning manager for the 2018 Red Sox . . . who had their own Rogue Sox replay room reconnaissance ring operating that season and possibly beyond); heavy fine for owner Jim Crane; key draft picks stripped.

The Astros faced the press when spring training opened the next month. Depending upon how you saw and hear, they seemed either unapologetically apologetic or apologetically unapologetic. “Yes, there’s no better way to show good old-fashioned genuine remorse than by refusing to speak the misdeed you committed,” wrote since-retired Thomas Boswell, the longtime Washington Post baseball eminence.

Crane and his team used their showcase to insist they keep their phony title and that Major League Baseball was correct not to fine or suspend any Astros players. Also, we should just trust that they stopped cheating in 2018. Why? No reason at all. Just felt like stopping, even though they, you know, won the previous World Series doing it.

. . .Maybe, with time, some Astros will be more forthcoming with authentic feelings, not practiced phrases, that will show their human dilemma—most of them not $100 million stars or future Hall of Famers, just normal ballplayers caught on a runaway train with, realistically, no emergency brake available for them to pull.

But even Boswell might have missed that Altuve didn’t want any part of the AIA. Before the original coronavirus pan-damn-ic compelled that spring training’s shutdown, Correa talked to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, one of the two reporters (with Evan Drellich) who first exposed the true depth of scheme. (Former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers had finally agreed to go on the public record in November 2019, following long, futile efforts to get someone/anyone to investigate.)

They talked aboard MLB Network a couple of days after the presser that did the Astros more harm than good. Correa steamed over Dodger outfielder/first baseman Cody Bellinger’s fuming that Altuve cheated Yankee rookie star Aaron Judge out of the 2017 Most Valuable Player award he might have won if not for Altuve’s career year in Houston. “Cody,” Correa began, “you don’t know the facts.”

Nobody wants to talk about this, but I’m going to talk about this. José Altuve was the one guy that didn’t use the trash can.

The few times that the trash can was banged was without his consent, and he would go inside the clubhouse and inside the dugout to whoever was banging the trash can and he would get pissed. He would get mad. He would say, “I don’t want this. I can’t hit like this. Don’t you do that to me.” He played the game clean.

. . . When you look at Altuve’s numbers on the road, he hit .400 on the road (.381, actually, compared to .311 at home). He didn’t cheat nobody of the MVP. He earned that MVP. He’s a six-time All-Star, three-time batting champion, MVP, five-time Silver Slugger. He’s been doing this for a long time.

For [Bellinger] to go out there and defame José Altuve’s name like that, it doesn’t sit right with me. The man plays the game clean. That’s easy to find out. Mike Fiers broke the story. You can go out and ask Mike Fiers: “Did José Altuve use the trash can? Did José Altuve cheat to win the MVP?” Mike Fiers is going to tell you, straight up, he didn’t use it. He was the one player that didn’t use it. (Emphasis added.—JK.)

The foregoing arises again because another Athletic writer, Peter Gammons, the longtime Boston Globe scribe/analyst who’s a Spink Award Hall of Famer, wrote of the Astros’ post-Astrogate manager Dusty Baker and winning team cultures in a piece published Friday—and returned to that 2020 spring training opening. Including the impossible position into which Altuve was pushed.

There he was, sitting at the table, looking as though he’d rather undergo root canal work without an anesthetic. Now we should ask just what the hell Crane was thinking when, seemingly, he insisted Altuve sit at the head table for that 2020 spring presser. The owner with a reputation for rejecting direct accountability forced “the one player that didn’t use” the AIA’s espionage to take it like a man.

Gammons talked to assorted Astros near the end of the opening workout later in the day. “They were subdued, clearly remorseful,” Gammons wrote, “but when I told Altuve that players, coaches and a number of people in the organization had told me that he did not participate in the sign stealing, he politely declined to discuss it, and asked that I didn’t talk about it on television, or write about it. ‘It would be a betrayal of my teammates’.”

Two years later, he still did not want to be singled out. But while he and [third baseman Alex] Bregman were asked by management to speak to the scandal for all the players and he received the most obscene treatment from beered up louts in Boston and New York, he never pointed to 2017 home/road splits that showed a 200-point OPS difference in favor of the road, where there was nary a banging trash can to be heard.

“He is,” Baker said, “the ultimate teammate.” That from a man who played with Henry Aaron and Reggie Smith.

Altuve’s 2017 OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) was 248 points higher on the road—where the AIA couldn’t operate—than it was at Minute Maid Park. He also hit six more home runs out of town than in Houston. With only four more plate appearances on the road than at home in ’17, his Real Batting Average (my metric: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) was .529 at home . . . but .679 on the road.

The Gammons story seems to have jolted for the Altuve “revelation.” In its email newsletter Morning Bark, offering links to stories based on its choice of a day’s top ten sports stories, Yardbarker linked to it with this teaser, which also headlined a brief news item about the piece: “Insider reveals interesting detail regarding José Altuve and Astros’ cheating scandal.”

It’s only a “revelation” if you missed either Rosenthal’s original or Martino’s book. I missed the former upon its original arrival, but I pounced on the latter when it was published. SNY, after all, stands for the Sports New York regional cable network. And the Yankees, whom Martino’s normal coverage includes, had their own skin in the sign-stealing world.

Theirs wasn’t quite as extensive as the 2017-18 Astros, of course. Neither was anything by any other teams who might have done as the Red Sox did, using their MLB-provided replay rooms for such sign-stealing reconnaissance. (MLB has since tightened up on guarding the replay rooms.) The 2017-18 Astros went far above and far beyond just boys-will-be-boys replay room roguery.

But Martino taking Astrogate book depth had no reason to want Altuve whitewashed. Especially considering Altuve—when Yankee manager Aaron Boone elected to let his faltering closer Aroldis Chapman pitch on to him, with two out in the bottom of the ninth, instead of putting him on at 2-1 with a spaghetti bat on deck—hit the monstrous two-run homer on an up-and-away slider that won the 2019 Astros the pennant.

In fact, Cheated‘s footnotes included the original Correa/Rosenthal revelation. Martino had me convinced before the footnotes section. Reading the Correa/Rosenthal revelation both recently and once again after the Gammons piece Friday, I’m convinced even more.

Saying Astrogate won’t disappear until the last member of the 2017-18 team no longer wears an Astro uniform is one thing. So is saying the 2017-18 cheaters stained baseball almost as deeply as the 1919 Black Sox. But it’s something else to keep including José Altuve among the tainted when he doesn’t deserve to be among them.

The further evidence should be even more clear by now. Altuve wanted no part of the original Astrogate scheming and bawled teammates out when they didn’t respect his wishes. He played the game straight, no chaser, then and now. He’s taken it across the chops unfairly since.

Opening Day: Cross it off the bucket list

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani, shown on the Angel Stadium video board during his pre-game warmup as the teams lined up on the foul lines, on Opening Day. He pitched brilliantly but in a lost cause, the Angels losing 3-1.

The owners probably won’t stop by to see what I’m about to write, but their otherwise ill-advised 1 December-10 March lockout did me one solid. But only one.

After the World Series, and as soon as they went on sale, I’d bought tickets for what I thought would be the Angels’ home opener. They were scheduled originally to open the season on the road. But commissioner Rob Manfred’s cancellation of the regular season’s first series, in light of the owners’ further goalpost-moving shenanigans, turned the Angels’ home opener into Opening Day, after all.

It wasn’t enough to turn my thinking toward the owners’ side one iota, but it did enable me to cross something off my bucket list. Despite a lifetime of loving the game and watching countless games in the stands and on television, I’d never actually had the chance to be at the ballpark on Opening Day. Until Thursday evening.

The best part of the evening was that I got to do it with my now 28-year-old son, Bryan. The second-best part was being able to cross another item off the baseball bucket list within half an hour of us getting our pre-game food and drink, after putting replica 1972-1990 Angels hats onto our heads.

The Ball

The foul ball, now crossed off my bucket list, sitting atop my notebook, before I handed it to my son.

While the visiting Astros took batting practise, a line drive sailed into our section down the right field line. Adjacent fans made it impossible for me to see just which Astro hit the ball, but the ball bounced around off seats in front of us, then under them, and riocheted off a fan two seats to our right, before rolling on the floor under us to where I could grab the ball before another fan reaching under the seat in front of me did.

I held the ball up to see for myself that I wasn’t seeing or imagining things, then handed it to my son. He’d only been asking to try to catch a ball at Angel Stadium since, oh, the first time I got to take him there—in 2000, when the Angels beat the visiting Yankees one fine evening by prying the winning run out of The Mariano himself. We’d gone to plenty of games since. Thursday night, it was pay dirt at long enough last.

Of course, there was now a game to play, and the Angels lost, 3-1. These are my ten takeaways:

1) Shoh-time! The good news for the Angels was Shohei Ohtani starting on the mound. I’m convinced that what looked to be a lockout-dejected, ho-hum crowd in advance, shot into a near-sellout once Ohtani was announced as the Opening Day pitcher. Lockout after-effect, I suspected: I’d checked the ticketing for the game just prior to the announcement and there were several thousand seats remaining for the taking.

Well, now. The day before I set out for southern California from my home in Las Vegas, I checked the ticketing again. The tickets seemed to have flown off the board once Angel fans knew it would be Shoh-time. And Ohtani didn’t disappoint, much. He pitched four and two-thirds innings of one-run, nine-strikeout, four-hit, one-walk baseball.

The best the Astros could do against him was the third inning, after he caught Martin Maldonado looking at strike three and blew Jose Altuve away with a swinging third strike: Michael Brantley banged a double off the right center field fence and Alex Bregman sent him home promptly with a base hit to left center.

As a matter of fact, when Ohtani wasn’t becoming the first player in Show history to throw his team’s first pitch of the season and make his team’s first plate appearance of the season (the Angels like to bat him leadoff), he manhandled Altuve for three strikeouts on the night, including the nasty slider that shot over Altuve’s hard swing for the third such strikeout in the top of the fiftyh.

2) The bad news: Astros starter Framber Valdez was just as effective in six and two-thirds innings. (The Angels planned to keep their starting pitchers on an 80-pitch limit for the time being, after the lockout-imposed too-short spring training.) He struck six out, walked one, and surrendered two of the Angels’ four hits on the night.

3) The worse news, for the Angels: They came to within inches of taking a 2-1 lead in the seventh. Mike Trout led off by beating out a throw from shortstop that should have been ruled an infield hit but was ruled an error. Then Anthony Rendon hit a high liner that sailed into the left field seats . . . but missed the foul pole on the wrong side by a hair.

“When I saw the ball flying in the air,” Valdez said post-game of his narrow escape, “I got mad with myself that I didn’t make my best pitch. I just took a deep breath and threw my best pitch.” That would be the hard sinkerball on which Rendon promptely dialed Area Code 4-6-3.

Matt Duffy promptly beat out an infield hit to third, which promptly moved Astros manager Dusty Baker to end Valdez’s night and bring Phil Maton in to strike Jo Adell out swinging for the side.

4) Cruising speed: Maton seemed on a bit of a cruise in relief until he hit Brandon Marsh with a pitch with two out in the bottom of the eighth and David Fletcher shot a 1-2 pitch through to the back of left center and gunned it for an RBI triple. That was the Angels’ first and last run of the game, alas.

5) The worse news, for baseball as a whole: That ridiculous three-batter minimum for relief pitchers. Under normal circumstances, if your reliever comes into the game and gets murdered right away—as Angels reliever Ryan Tepera was in the top of the eighth—you’d know he didn’t have it that night, right?

Father and son

Father (right) crossed Opening Day off his bucket list at last—and had the pleasure of doing it with his 28-year-old son.

Oops. Tepera’s first pitch to Alex Bregman sailed into the left field seats. The next Astros batter, Yordan Alvarez, hit a hanging slider on 1-1 over the center field fence. The Angels were lucky to escape with their lives after two prompt deep fly outs (Yuli Gurriel, Kyle Tucker) followed by a sinking liner up the middle (Jeremy Peña) that Trout caught on the dead run in from somewhat deep center to retire the side. (Trout also drew a loud ovation after he turned around and, from half-shallow center, winged the ball to fans halfway up the right center field bleachers.)

6) But there was good news on the relief front. Neither manager burned his relievers in the bullpens. If either Baker or Joe Maddon warmed a pitcher up, he either came into the game as soon as needed or he was handed what amounted to the rest of the night off. No Angels or Astros reliever was called upon to warm up more than once.

I paid as much attention to the relievers in the pen as I could, considering I was seated far opposite the pens behind the left field fence. The Angels used five relievers and the Astros, three. None of those eight pitchers threw any more than maybe 20-25 pitches before they were brought into the game. None of them could be called gassed going in.

Tepera simply didn’t have it Thursday night; Maton got vulnerable after ending one inning and getting two outs to open the next. The rest of the two teams’ bullpen corps (Hector Neris and Ryan Pressly for the Astros; Aaron Loup, Austin Warren, Jose Quijada, and Archie Bradley for the Angels) pitched clean-as-a-hound’s-tooth relief. Would that all major league managers were that judicious handling their pen men.

7) Memo to: Angel fans. Subject: The Wave. The 1980s called. They want their obnoxious, obstructive Wave back. One fan adjacent to our section kept calling for fans to do the Wave. I kept shaking my head, but I did notice that each of about ten attempts at it starting in our part of the park died before flowing to a fourth section of the field-level seats. Maybe there’s hope in such deaths, after all.

8) You were saying? The back-to-back Astro bombs to one side, this game wasn’t exactly the kind to send the old farts screaming to the whiskey shots. The game’s twelve total hits included three Astros doubles, Fletcher’s triple, and six singles. Altuve even stole second in the ninth, for whatever that was worth, since he ended up stranded.

9) Wasted Out Department: Altuve, the Astros’ pint-sized, gallon-hitting second baseman, also dropped a sacrifice bunt to third with one out in the seventh against righthanded reliever Warren, after Chas McCormick opened the inning with a double. Remember: A man on second with one out, and you have less chance of scoring a run after that bunt than you did before the bunt, even if you do exactly what Altuve did pushing McCormick to third.

Just what a man with a lifetime .512 Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances), and a .297 lifetime hitting average with a man on second and one out, is doing thinking sacrifice escapes. With his team leading a mere 1-0 at the time, the Angels brought Quijada in to pitch to Brantley, and Brantley flied out shy of the track in right center for the side.

That’s what a wasted out did. The righthanded-hitting Altuve might have been futile against Ohtani on the night, but he has a lifetime .301 hitting average against righthanded pitchers. The Astros would have had a better chance scoring McCormick if Altuve hit away.

10) When Bregman checked in at the plate in the top of the eighth, the Angel Stadium video boards flashed a graphic with Bregman’s head shot plus this: [He] donated over 200 iPads  w/protective cases and iTunes gift cards to several Houston-area elementary schools that have autistic classrooms. He does that through his Bregman Cares charity, with a particular focus upon autistic children.

It was almost as admirable for the Angels to show Bregman such respectful acknowledgement as it was for Bregman and his wife, Reagan, to take such an interest in lending hands to autistic children. Even if Bregman’s idea of saying thank you for such respect was to smash a leadoff homer in reply.