There are 110 frames in that .gif file, which is appropriate, since this play by Houston Astros catcher Matt Pagnozzi allowed what turned out to be the winning run to score in the Astros' 110th loss of the year, a 2-1 defeat on Saturday night to the New York Yankees. The Astros then lost 5-1 on Sunday to the Yanks to close out the season at 51-111. They are the first team since the 1965 Mets to lose more than 106 games for the third consecutive season.
Seriously. Watch that gif again and again. The incompetence is absolutely mesmerizing.
I'm not sure I saw a worse play on a baseball field than this all season. The play got lost in the shuffle a bit during the game, as the focus of this game turned out to be on yet another 78-year-old Yankees pitcher making his last appearance of his career. This play isn't quite as terrible as this headscratcher from 2012, but it goes a long way toward summing up the Astros season. You don't lose 111 games by accident. It should come as no surprise that the Astros led the majors in errors. They also struck out more times than any team in major league history.
I'm sort of surprised they even won 51, to be honest. They can thank the Mariners for that, primarily – their 9-10 record against the M's constituting nearly a fifth of their wins. But after sweeping the Mariners in Seattle in mid-September (and seriously, how did everyone in Seattle NOT get fired after that?), the weary Astros faced a brutal stretch against good teams and hungry playoff contenders to close out the season – the Reds, Indians, Rangers and Yankees. The Astros thus closed out the season with a 15-game losing streak.
Speaking of a fifth, I think I would need to drink to watch this team. Fans aren't exactly tuning in or turning out in droves. The front office there has been pleading for patience, but there is only so much that fans are willing to put up with. Quite a few proud franchises have seen their fanbases dwindle through continued ineptitude – Toronto and Baltimore come to mind, the latter having done well to win some fans back with good play the past couple of years. In Seattle, the relationship between the Mariners organization and the fanbase is becoming almost adversarial – their misguided and pointless 71-91 season, combined with manager Eric Wedge resigning and essentially saying the front office were a bunch of passive-aggressive sissies without a clue, have only added to a decline which has turned what was once a 3,000,000 draw into a team drawing 9,000 for a September game in little more than a decade. You can win the fans back, of course, but winning is exactly what it takes to do so.
In the case of the Astros, I'm not sure where the hope is to be found. The thought was that the Astros would be OK with an ownership change and through establishing a Regional Sports Network on TV, as RSN's have proven to be quite a cash cow for other teams. Well, that hasn't worked out so well either (of course, if you're drawing 0.0 ratings for games, it's not exactly a good buy for an advertiser). Their new GM came from the talent-producing machine that is the St. Louis Cardinals, and one would think he's learned a thing or two about developing major league players while in St. Louis. Folks in Houston should hope so, because there weren't too many major leaguers out on the field this season.
Now that the beloved local nine have finished their terrible season at 76-86, are out of the playoffs and are no longer the Defending World Series Champions (even though technically that moniker holds true for another month), I am throwing my support behind the Cleveland Indians. This is purely for literary reasons – the main character in my novel is originally from Cleveland. He wears an Indians hat all the time: the retro red ones with the blue C that the club revived this year and not the ones with the terrible caricature on them.
