Astros 9, Padres 4
W: Neshek L: Benoit
I can hardly wait for next Monday, the Astros have Monday night off and I will not feel the need to stay awake past the time I should be going to sleep. Yes, I’m getting old unlike the Astros. It seems as though these young boys/men like the night life. They pull out wins towards the end of the games (or so it seems to me). Monday’s win cost the team Jed Lowrie for an unspecified amount of time, since he had a questionable “slide” and injured his hand. I do not believe his status is known more than that.
While the Astros seems to enjoy swinging the bat to a tune of 177 (I’m not going to count Colin McHugh’s strike outs) They lead all major league teams by 11 strike outs. The good news is that atop of the strike out column is not an Astro but a Cub. Jorge Soler has 29 strike outs to George Springer’s 28 strike outs. Surprisingly George Springer has more than Khris Karter but I believe once Springer starts hitting is strikes outs will decrease (obviously).
A nice stat to note is stole bases, the Astros and Reds are tops with 23 stolen bases. If the batter gets on, he’s going to try and take a base. Billy Hamilton of the Reds has 13 stolen bases, the top Astros are George Springer and Jose Altuve with 7 each. So, runners on base made me wonder how many get stranded, for once this is not necessarily bad for the Astros, they are in the middle of the pack – 135 left stranded and the league average is 130. I do wonder if that has improved over the last 10 games, but I have no idea where to find that stat.
It has felt to me that when the relievers come in to relieve they have a tendency to allow the inherited runner to score. Well, this is not necessarily true. Houston is slightly above the league average (30% to 33%), but the culprits allowing the runners to score are Chad Qualls (50%) and Joe Thatcher (71%). No other reliever has allowed an inherited runner to score. I was pleasantly surprised. Now, this says nothing of what the reliever does when he enters with no inherited runners, but out of 21 inherited runners only 7 have scored. I guess the Astros’ bullpen is better than it seems.
Last week I had an online exam in a history course I took this semester (Pirates and Smuggling). The syllabus provided sample questions and I had worked on one of them because I just didn’t feel like doing more, lo and behold that one question was one of the questions I got to chose to answer. Surprisingly I only got a 32 out of 35, this is surprising because I had written most of the answer prior to taking the exam. The mid-term in which I did not draft and answer and received a 35 out of 35. Not sure I need to think I can do better with less preparation. Either way I have a 99.5 for that grade (2.5 was extra credit). One more exam and I am done for the semester and only 6 more classes to pass to be done. Ugh, mistakes we make in our youth are so much more costly to fix when we are older.