These thoughts that the Astros were not sufficiently motivated are funny to me and sound like the musings of someone that has not played high-level competitive sports. The Astros flat emotional expression is pretty typical of a team/person that is 1) getting beat and 2) can’t figure out how to not get beat while it is happening.
The Braves flat out beat the Astros. They were the superior team. It was clear that they had an excellent gameplan, especially on the pitching side, and that they were able to execute against it and iterate as new information came available. I would guess that the Astros had a decent gameplan but failed to execute and certainly were very slow to iterate.
I don’t think the neutering of the Astros offense was an accident or because the Astros key players somehow lost their skill. Every indication is that the Braves had researched each players’ tendencies and then excellently executed against the known weaknesses of each batter. Confirmed a bit by the fact that, when the Astros went off script (batting Greinke, Maldanodo standing on top of the plate, etc…) they had more success. Same on the batting side. It was clear the Braves knew the pitchers tendencies and, of equal importance, were excellent at executing a batting gameplan if 1) the Astros pitchers were pitching their repertoire well and 2) especially if they were not and had to rely on their secondary pitches. Alternately, the Astros seemed stuck into their pre-defined gameplan, on both sides of the ball, and when execution was poor, were unable to adjust, leading to the maddening same-result plodding we witnessed. In that regard, the Braves appeared to beat the Astros at their own analytics game by being more nimble and agile at an inter-game scale instead of an inter-series scale. Just some initial thoughts that I am mulling thru.
Another thing that my dad’s scout friend said to us at breakfast the next morning was that the Astros just looked exhausted in Game 6. Having watched some of the replays of the game after, it’s hard not to agree/see it.
The Astros picked a horrible time to go through a team-wide slump at the plate. Perhaps the weather and a lack of BP in games 3 and 4 had an effect, but Bregman, Correa and Alvarez were already slumping by that point and Altuve was very hit or miss (he’d have one good game followed or preceded by a game where he looked horrible at the plate). When Brantley, Tucker and Gurriel didn’t hit those games, the Astros were in deep trouble.
The Astros scored four runs total in their four losses to the Braves. That isn’t going to beat anyone and certainly not good teams. Believe it or not, before game 6, the Astros’ pitchers had only allowed 18 runs in 5 games, or 3.6 per game. That’s with Framber shitting the bed, twice. (He was responsible for 10 of those runs)
As for the Braves, one thing that stood out was their hitters did a really good job of spitting on chase-worthy breaking pitches. There were quite a few times I was surprised Astros’ pitchers failed to get swings on good off speed pitches that dived out of the zone.
One upside of women’s softball consists of the synchronized team chants, dances, handclaps, and wearing of “lucky” amulets and furry stuffed animals. Perhaps we could have employed these tactics last week, considering multimillion dollar salaries, expunging a national reputation for cheating, and sealing a manager’s 50+ year career with his first World Series win were insufficient for the task.
This is total and complete bullshit. What you mentioned was after the fact celebrations in 2017. If you think Siri was the only one who celebrated this year, you must have dozed off or gone back to your books.
They were the best offensive team in baseball in several categories.
They also had several team-wide slumps during the season that had us gnashing our teeth.
Swing at slop, take strikes.
Try to pull pitches you should take the other way.
Jump on pitches but pull them foul.
Foul meaty FBs straight back.
Take meaty FBs.
Unready to hit FBs.
Get a man on, hit into DPs.
Expand the zone for no discernible reason.
We’ve seen all that and unfortunately we saw it in the WS.
The Braves played better. But I would not call them superior. Fine line, semantics, whatever.
I firmly believe the Astros should have won this series. They didn’t. I hope it sticks in their craw and to the points above I hope the organization learned something from the post mortem.
I didn’t necessarily think our manager did a great job of pushing things to try to help create success for the offense. Continuing to bat a clearly injured (both mentally and physically) Bregman 3rd didn’t help. He killed several potential rallies. Not taking advantage of the Braves catcher’s poor arm hurt also. An example of that is when we pinch ran Siri late in the game and waited two outs to have him steal second, which he did easily. I do think our guys looked tired. We can second guess and speculate all day long but the fact is that the more prepared team won the World Series.
I don’t know how the Astros didn’t have runners in motion more often against a catcher that had thrown out only two of about 45 runners all season. I have to think Hinch would’ve been all over that.
I thought about it quite a bit, and came back to this:
In Atlanta, who did you have in the lineup that had the ability and the experience to run on a good pitch?
I’ve got Altuve and Tucker as starters, and that’s it. I’m still not convinced Siri just didn’t know how aggressive he needed to be instead of waiting for a perfect pitch.