Astros just keep giving and giving in 8 – 3 loss

WP: Smith (2 – 5)
LP: Neshek (3 – 5)
SV: Wilhelmsen ( 8 )

submitted by Sphinx Drummond

BOX

Gamezone

Seattle Sea Cucumbers, a disgusting creature that forages the ocean floor snacking on other animals (and professional baseball teams) excrement had plenty to dine on at Minute Maid Park on Wednesday. The Astros were crapping up a shit tornado pretty much the whole game.

They initially were just trading shits with the water-logged echinoderms from the Northwest but eventually they blew away the competition with a heaping steaming turd pile that would have made Andre The Giant proud.

The only highlight was a 9 to 2 double play featuring a beautiful throw out at the plate by Colby Rasmus.

Thursday is a day off, Friday the Astros host the Minnesota Twins and starter Mike Pelfrey (6-8, 3.85 ERA) who will face off against Collin McHugh (14-7, 3.92 ERA) starting at 7:10 pm CST.

Game Time: 3:40
Attendance: 18,669 (school night)

Mariners: 3
Astros: 8
W: Keuchel, L: Nuno

MLB Recap
GameZome

I’d like to think my brother is happy the Astros won on his birthday but my parents did something weird with him, he doesn’t really watch sports, of any kind. But, it was still nice of Lowrie, Correa, and Conger to hit HRs on his birthday. And Correa’s was a shot that could have gone into one of the windows of the buildings across the street. The marvelous young man can do spectacular things.

Keuchel wasn’t outstanding in his pitching performance, but he got himself out of jams by going 7 innings and giving up one solo HR. Perez pitched the 9th (Harris had a scoreless 8th) and gave up 2 runs, but better to do it when there is a 7 run lead than a 1 run lead.

Great game by Altuve, who seems to have liked hitting in the month of August. September hopefully treats him even better.

Call-ups should be coming soon, so stay tuned!

Minniepaulius 3
Astros 0

submitted by Neil T

You’ll recall that I’m an expert on Minneapolis. There are actually two cities, side by side, St. Paul and Minneapolis, which are really one city, but which is known as The Twins’ Cities because it was founded by the abandoned fraternal twins, Paul and Minnie. I have rubbed the forepaw of the famous statue of Paul and Minnie suckling from a beaver.

Scott Kazmir had one squirrelly inning, giving up 2 runs for 3 runs total, but otherwise Kazmir pitched well. I thought Twins pitching was very good. Astros hitting missed Correa, and early season Lowrie, with no runs on 6 hits, and 11 runners left on base. Ugh. Castro came out with a strained right quad, which sucks. Conger made the best play of the game though, with a bare handed bunt catch and doubling off the runner at first.

Here’s a list of other famous things from Minnesota: Spam, walleye on a stick, Bob Dylan, Prince, Minnetonka toy trucks, post-it notes, Moonlight Graham, and Norway. As usual, for tonight’s game, I wanted to supply an authentic Minnesotan hot-dish recipe. I’ve done taco hot dish and barbecue hot dish before, so tonight I thought I’d do something truly Minnesotan and less Texan:

SPAM HOT DISH
(from the Food.Com—you can look it up: http://www.food.com/recipe/spam-hotdish-277370. It’s worth it, because there’s an unforgettable picture.)

INGREDIENTS
2 cups macaroni
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1(10 1/2 ounce) can cream of chicken soup
10 1⁄2 ounces cream or 10 1⁄2 ounces milk
1(12 ounce) can Spam
1⁄2 tablespoon onion flakes
10 -12 slices American cheese (about 10-12 slices stacked together)
DIRECTIONS
Cook macaroni as directed on package.
While macaroni cooks, cut up cheese slices and spam.
Mix milk or cream, soup, cheese, spam, and onion flakes. Stir toghether and add the noodles. Bake at 325 for 1 1/2 hours.

With 2 fifths of vodka, serves a family of 4. Delicious!

Four run fifth inning is as sweet as candy.

WP: Collin McHugh (14 – 7)
LP: Michael Pineda (9 – 8 )

submitted by Sphinx Drummond

GameZone

BOX

Wednesday Businessperson’s Special in the Bronx was a tight affair for the first four innings with the Astros clinging to a 1 to 0 lead of off a second inning Evan Gattis’ home run, his first of the day and his 21st of the season. Collin McHugh was tremendous keeping the Yankees scoreless through six innings before allowing 2 runs in the seventh inning and giving way to Tony Sipp who finished the frame without any further damage. Pat Neshek was solid in the eight and Will Harris was perfect closing out the ninth.

After scoring 15 runs the previous night, it seems it would have been almost typical to have a poor offensive performance for the next game, That wasn’t to be, after a modest start, the Astros opened up the run scoring machine in the fifth. Carlos Gomez got it going with a lead off single, Luis Valbuena followed with a single to CF, moving Gomez to third. Jake Marisnick came on with a bunt single scoring Gomez and moving Valbuena to second. Jason Castro then drew a base on balls to load ’em up for a sac fly by Jose Altuve, scoring Valbuena and advancing Jake to third base.

Steve Chasen took over pitching for Pineda and Marwin Gonzales made him pay with a single to CF scoring Jake and advancing Castro to second. The next batter, Jed Lowrie walked to load the bases. A wild pitch to Colby Rasmus allowed Castro to score, then Colby was called out on strikes that weren’t. Arguing about the strikes that weren’t got Colby tossed. Gattis popped out to end the inning, (but he did hit his second home run of the game in his next at bat).

The Astros are now 14 games over .500, I think that is their high water mark but I’m not 100% sure, The Astros haven’t won many road series this season, so taking 2 of 3 from the Yanks in their new stadium is very satisfying.

Thursday if an off day, the Astros will travel to Minnesota a some point to face the Twins on Friday with a 7:10 pm CST start that will put Scott Kazmir (7-8 2.39 ERA) against Kyle Gibson (8-9 3.96 ERA).

Time: 3:26
Attendance: 37,259

Astros 0
Yankees 1
W: L: Perez

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights is pretty much how I feel about games like last night. They make me blue after wasting a pitching performance like the one Feldman had Monday night.

They Astros are just bad with runners in scoring position. I’m too lazy to look up the stats but I would not be surprised if they were last or close to last in all of baseball.

Carlos Gomez just needs to relax and move the rose to the front and breathe through his eyelids.

I still think the boys will win on this road trip, mainly because I refuse to believe otherwise.

So, Go Astros!!!!

GameZone
recap

submitted by Neil T

So on the guitar, I divide the year up into quarters and work on stuff for a quarter and then move on. This year’s first quarter I was working on a transcription of Ravel’s Death of a Princess. I spent three months and got to the third of four pages and moved on. I love the song, but it’s not really a good guitar song, and it was too hard to concentrate on the finish.

Second quarter I worked on Villa-Lobos Prelude no. 5. Villa-Lobos is a Romantic parading as a Modernist, and I have an easy time with his music. Some of the first songs I ever learned were the Villa-Lobos Estudio 1 and the Prelude 1, and if you asked me to play them today I could do a credible job. They’re fun to play, have tricks to their playing that make perfect sense, and they’re deeply Romantic, which I find easy. I once followed a young Japanese guitarist from guitar shop to guitar shop in Granada: he was playing Flamenco like only a young obsessed Japanese kid could play flamenco, and I was playing the Prelude 1. Three days later in a shop in Sevilla he held up a guitar and joyously told me he’d found one. It was one of the best moments of my life.

This past quarter I’ve been working on Leo Brouwer’s 20 Estudios. No one but classical guitarists have ever heard of Leo Brouwer. He’s Cuban, a member of Cuba’s Communist Party, and he hasn’t actually played professionally in a while because of a hand injury. Unlike Villa-Lobos, he’s a Modernist without much Romanticism. A friend once took a master class from Brouwer, and he told me that he thought Brouwer thought exactly like his music sounded.

There are four great sets of Estudios for classical guitar. An Estudio is that: it’s a study. It’s supposed to improve your playing by concentrating on one thing that the guitar is supposed to do, or better yet that you’re supposed to do to the guitar. There are the Carcassi Etudes. There are a bunch of Sor Etudes from the early 1800s, which I think were actually grouped into a set of 20 by Segovia. Then you jump to the Villa-Lobos Estudios which were written for Segovia but which Segovia wouldn’t play. You want to know an odd fact? Villa-Lobos wrote one Concerto for guitar and orchestra, which was premiered in 1956 by Segovia, in Houston, with Villa-Lobos conducting. Villa-Lobos wanted it buried with him, but it wasn’t.

And then there are the Brouwer Estudios, which are just weird. And fun. And weird.

This is a nice You Tube playing of the Brouwer Estudios. They’re nice because you can see the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ5XRfKccoo I’ve memorized some, and right now I’m working on numbers 9 and 10. My favorites are numbers 2, 3 (because it is so damned fun to play), 6, and 7 (because it is even more fun to play), and 10.

The Brouwer Estudios make no rational sense. No one who didn’t think that way would put together music like that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be learning, except maybe a lot of right hand and syncopation, but they’re perfect. Just perfect. Damned perfect.

I was listening to no 15 during the last out of tonight’s 8th inning. It’s now my favorite. No 18 is the most beautiful, and I listened to it in the 9th. No matter where it is, beauty is beauty.

Astros 3
Dodgers 0

Fiers W.