The Astros are 6-18 in their last 24 games. 12-21 on the season. Y’all, this is a bad baseball team. And I don’t think it’ll get better any time soon.
Of the season’s first 33 games, Houston has allowed more than three runs in all but nine. When the book on this season is finished, we can obviously point to the pitching staff’s shortcomings as a main reason this team struggled so much, at least to start the 2026 season. However, that wasn’t the case against the Red Sox on Friday. It was instead one of those games when the pitchers were, dare I say, actually decent. Not great, mind you, but it was a reasonably well-pitched game.
Of course, the opponent was Boston and their collective 82 wRC+, so take that with a grain of salt if you need to.
Other than Jarren Duran’s three-run home run in the third inning, Mike Burrows did enough to keep this game close. Yes, that curveball to Duran was pretty bad. I mean, you can’t hang something like that there. You’re only asking for a hitter to crush it.
And crushed it was.
But, again, Burrows threw the ball decent enough across six innings. If someone were to tell me entering today’s game that he would allow just three earned runs in six frames, I would’ve been happy with that result. And only one walk, in this economy, isn’t a deal anyone can pass up right now.
Unfortunately for Burrows, Bennett Sousa, and Bryan King, the Astros’ lineup picked a poor time to not convert when it mattered most. While the overall number of hits (11) wasn’t the issue, the failure to drive anyone in was the real problem. Six at-bats with runners in scoring position and nothing to show for it. Other than Carlos Correa’s solo home run in the third inning, Houston’s bats didn’t have an answer for Jake Bennett. Or Zack Kelly. And Danny Coulombe. How about Garrett Whitlock? Of course, Aroldis Chapman closed it down.
This loss against the Red Sox now drops the Astros to 6-3 in games in which they allow three runs or fewer. When the lineup fails to score more than three runs, Houston is now 2-11 on the season. While this loss wasn’t particularly devastating at the time, it joins a growing list. Simply put, this is a bad baseball team. When will that change? Your guess is as good as mine.
I’ll try, like many others before me. 1) A few pitchers are in the IL to start the season. We must look at that. 2) Burrows, Lambert, Weiss, Imai, Teng, are unproven pitchers. They are in the team because we can afford them and Miller said “maybe.” 3) We are hitting very well, scoring tons of runs, and losing most games. For 1 and 3 I have to look at Espada. Espada has never distinguished himself as a strategist, he can’t fabricate a run to win a tight game. Not even in extra innings. The Astros have been unprepared to start the regular season and plagued by injuries since Espada became a manager. After Espada’s first 3 months as a manager, I didn’t like him. He was a Dusty copy cat. Now, I don’t know what he is, a “game watcher”? Astros FO has a tendency to leave bad coaches/managers for too long, and are too quick to remove the good ones.
To slightly add to your age old theory of preparation. Espada has been ahead of ST prep even under Dusty. Obviously some things were changed this year that led to improvement offensively but might have wrecked our rotation.
I do think the Espada experiment should be over. Offer it to Lopez if he refuses due to Espada being his best friend – give it to Miller or Katz or promote Storey from AAA to interim the rest of the season.
If you have a better hypothesis to explain the number of injuries and the poor performance at the start of the regular season under Espada, I’d be interested to hear it. If you don’t have anything to offer…..
And the changes that impacted us offensively have no necessary connection to the ones that have damaged our pitching effectiveness. On step forwards, two steps back. It seems like there was a lot of complacency and lack of effort when it came to adjusting to ABS, pitcher ramp-up in ST, and so on, whereas a lot of effort was put into to trying to coach the batters into a better teamwide approach, to varying degrees of permanent effectiveness.
“Houston Astros at the start of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons were not just unusual, they were arguably historic in their frequency and impact on the pitching staff.A recurring theme for the team was beginning the season with key starters already on the injured list, particularly in 2024 and 2025.2023 Injuries
Context: The Astros entered the 2023 season as reigning World Series champions, but immediately dealt with significant injury issues.Key Injuries: Lance McCullers Jr. suffered a muscle strain in his right elbow and didn’t start the season. Michael Brantley continued his recovery from shoulder surgery.Impact: Injuries throughout the season resulted in over 26 players spending time on the IL, making it a challenging, though ultimately successful, year in the AL West.2024 Injuries
Context: Injuries became even more acute at the start of the 2024 season, particularly in the starting rotation.Key Injuries: Justin Verlander started the season on the IL with a shoulder issue. They were also without Lance McCullers Jr., Luis Garcia, and Jose Urquidy to start the year.Impact: This resulted in one of the worst starts in franchise history, with a 6-14 beginning, necessitating a heavy reliance on rookies and depth players early on.2025 InjuriesContext: The injury woes in 2025 were arguably the worst, with the team described as having the “most injured rotation in baseball” and being “decimated”.Key Injuries: The 2025 season saw numerous pitchers go down. The team had seven different pitchers on the IL and utilized 15 different starting pitchers.Impact: The team missed the postseason due to a tiebreaker, partially resulting from this unprecedented depletion of starting pitching.Summary of the Trend:The Astros in 2023–2025 moved from a resilient championship team managing moderate early injuries to a heavily-depleted roster suffering from a three-year streak of severe, top-heavy pitching injuries that challenged their depth and playoff chances.”
We all know what is happening in 2026. Needless to mention that Espada started his tenure as the Astros manager in 2023. He is the manager, he is responsible for anything that happens in the field. It’s been getting worse every year since 2023.
Sorry. I cut the word “injuries” at the beginning of the statement
I previously wrote about the impact of the smaller strike zone. Astros’ pitchers have had varied approaches to the smaller strike zone. Most of them have taken a nibbling approach to avoid missing in the zone, and the result has been a massive increase in walks. (Arrighetti admitted that the small strike zone has an effect, and that the pitchers have tried to hit the edges because they want to avoid hittable locations.) Burrows has taken a different approach of throwing in zone more often, which gives him one of the few decent BB/9 rates on the team. But when you miss in the zone, the impact is sometimes a center cut pitch, like the Duran HR. As a result of his approach, he has an inflated HR/flyball rate (over 16%), which is normally viewed as unsustainable–but who knows.
The Duran HR was over a second, consecutive, almost identical, curve ball @ 78 mph way inside the zone. That was a stupid sequence.