Calm imbues Yordan Alvarez’s movements, on a baseball field or about the clubhouse. Contact off his bat trends much louder than typical words from the Houston Astros‘ stoic slugger, though the understanding is both garner respect. Sunday, after a deficient series, with a late slide threatening to torpedo his team’s playoff hopes, Alvarez spoke.
In their final regular-season series at home, the Astros were swept by an Atlanta team that secured both a playoff spot and its division over a weekend at Daikin Park while knocking the Astros from atop theirs.
With six games left, the Astros do not control their postseason fate. A frustrating 4-2 loss on Sunday left them two games below .500 and one behind the first-place Rangers in the American League West. In its wake, and before they departed for Seattle and a road trip that will define their year, Alvarez convened and addressed the clubhouse.
“We had a team meeting about that,” Alvarez said afterward, through an interpreter. “Basically, for us, it was three slaps in the face that they gave us, right in front of our fans especially. Just use tomorrow to take it as a reset day, a rest. And then the only thing left is to go out there and win those six games that we have left.”
Alvarez declined to offer specifics about the brief meeting, including his message or whether any other players spoke. First baseman Christian Walker described it as putting Houston’s position in perspective.
“‘Settle down, we’re still in the fight,'” Walker said. “‘It feels like s—‘s sliding right now, but we have an opportunity to make the postseason and that’s what we’re fighting for.”
The past 10 days have imperiled that opportunity. The Astros awoke last Friday with a three-game lead over Texas in the AL West. They have lost seven of nine games since, with the two wins against a Royals team in the AL Central cellar, and 10 of their last 14 games overall.
Sunday’s left their record at 77-79 and seemed a tipping point for Alvarez, who spoke animatedly as he addressed reporters postgame. Alvarez attributed that “frustration” to “just losing in general.” Walker said Alvarez’s words to the team conveyed “calmness,” but the fact Alvarez delivered them “stresses a sense of urgency.”
“It’s not, like, a secret recipe or secret formula what we’ve got to do,” Walker said. “But I think from time to time, just getting back on the same page, maybe guys who have never been to the postseason or are new to the big leagues, for them to hear some calmness and steadiness out of a vet like Yordan I think is important.
“Everybody’s going to interpret things differently. Everybody’s going to have to find their own headspace to play well here in the next week or so.”
That, spurred by speech from a Triple Crown candidate or not, is the bottom line for the Astros. To reach the playoffs, they will require a better record over the final week of the season than the Rangers, over whom they hold a tiebreaker, or potentially the White Sox, who are three games ahead of them for the final AL wild-card spot and technically within reach.
The Astros will play two games against the Mariners, who lead 9-2 in the season series, before finishing with four games against the lowly A’s. Both clubs, Walker noted, figure to “have nothing to lose” and an objective “to knock us out.” Seattle, at 10 games under .500 and on the cusp of elimination, still owns a better run differential, at minus-56, than Houston’s minus-59 mark.
“We’re a good team and we can still make a big push here,” said ace Hunter Brown. “And we’re right in it. We’re not dead yet. So that’s what we’re going to do, give it our all this last six games and find out where we’re at after that.”
One game out of playoff position in a flawed American League, the Astros are far from dead. Still, recent sweeps by the Rays and Atlanta, the AL East and NL East champions, renewed questions of whether they resemble a contender at all.
Their offense totaled seven runs in three games against Atlanta. They have scored three or fewer runs in 25 of 43 games since the Aug. 3 trade deadline, a span in which only the AL-worst Angels have produced fewer runs. Their bullpen, on fumes, could not protect slim leads in two losses over the weekend.
Sunday, the Astros received five scoreless innings from Brown. Their lineup failed to score in two bases-loaded opportunities, however, resulting in a 1-0 lead the Braves flipped to a 4-1 deficit in a four-batter span in the sixth. The Astros stranded 19 runners in the series and were outscored by a 16-7 margin.
“We’ve got to use tomorrow to really gather our thoughts and get a good game plan together for the next week,” manager Joe Espada said. “This was not a good series. No doubt about it that we need to bounce back and really dig deep and fight, because this series was not what we expected.”
Jeremy Peña, Alvarez, Isaac Paredes and Jose Altuve combined to record 16 of their 23 hits in the series, upholding a lack of lineup depth. Paredes drove in four of their seven runs. The 5-through-9 spots in the order were a combined 7-for-57 with 21 strikeouts. Peña, who went 2-for-13, and Altuve, who was 6-for-12, both declined comment after Sunday’s loss through a team spokesperson.
“It feels like there’s a lot of pressure right now – and there is and that’s a good thing,” said Walker, who has a .562 OPS since the All-Star break. “Because we’ve played ourselves into a spot to be competitive.”
The Astros have displayed resilience at points this season. They started 20-31 before a gradual climb to claim first place in the division on July 31. They sank below .500 again on Aug. 23, during a disastrous homestand that preceded the dismissal of general manager Dana Brown, then won four of the next five series, three against teams in contention.
A subsequent lull leaves them no choice but to respond again if they are to return to the playoffs. Last season, too, they embarked on their final road trip with a chance to salvage fading postseason hopes. Losing three of the first four games dashed them, ending a streak of eight straight playoff appearances. One of those precedents must fall.
“The only option left is to win,” Alvarez said. “There’s nothing we can say. The only option is to win.”
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This article originally published at A sweep by the Braves, a team meeting and six games to go for Astros. ‘Only option is to win.’.
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