Houston Astros Baseball

Astros Win Again! Where Do We Stand?

Thursday May 8th

The Astros seem to be making a habit of late inning heroics as we won our fifth straight game coming from behind. Astros announcer J.D. chatted with Cecil Cooper (Manager) mid game yesterday and discussed the recent plethora of late game runs. Cecil mentioned that as long as our pitchers could keep it close he had no doubt we would score some runs. The best part of Wednesday's game was the fact that with recently departed manager Phil Garner in attendance, Coop showed Garner why he is the better manager. Coop was as aggressive on the base paths as any manager I have ever seen, and ever more impressive than that, it worked every single time. The base running of our Astros won the game on Wednesday and Coop deserves some recognition for that. In just over a month, The Astros have are already at the half way mark Garner set last year for stolen bases. This comes with Michael Bourn not having stolen a base in over 10 days.

Take Aways:

Roy Oswalt looked very good despite getting hammered by Ryan Zimmerman twice. Roy had all his pitches working and made just two mistakes. In addition to his progress with his pitches it was really nice to see an Astro starter go into the 7th inning.

Carlos Lee looks bad at the plate. Even though Carlos did deliver the walk-off game winning RBI, these past couple weeks he has looked awful at the plate. I remember writing about his move to the 5th spot last week and it looks like he still hasn't adjusted. Simply put, his problem is pressing. He is trying too hard. In the 5th spot he is seeing fewer fastballs and hardly any pitches over the plate. This is difficult for a perennial RBI machine. He is suppose to swing the bat, however, opposing pitchers are taking the bat out of his hands by throwing so many balls, yet he continues to hack at those bad pitches and becomes even less valuable. Hopefully pitching coach Sean Berry has recognized the problem and can tell Carlos to simply, relaz and make them come to you. There is nothing sad about taking a walk.


Where Do We Stand

After just a month of baseball The Astros have started to climb some stat charts as individuals and as a team. Let's see where we stand.


TEAM STATS

Category - Rank (NL)

Runs - 8th
Hits - 12th
Doubles - 5th
HR's - 4th
RBI - 8th
BA - 11th
OBP - 14th
SB - 3rd

Individual Stats

Player - Category - Rank (NL)

Berkman - Batting Avg - 3rd
Tejada - Batting Avg - 12th

Berkman - On Base Avg - 5th

Berkman - SLG % - 1st !!!
Tejada - SLG % - 17th


Berkman - Home Runs - 2nd
Lee - Home Runs - 11th



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