After the Astros were demoralized Friday night with a 16-8 loss to the Rangers where they had 5 errors, was it any surprise that Cooper had a closed meeting on Saturday with the team about the importance of defense?
In a way, yes, because I think that they should have had this meeting earlier. They have been playing shoddy defense for about two weeks and that’s two weeks too long.
The Astros have allowed 11 unearned runs in 5 games. In a word, unacceptable. And Cooper was stating the obvious.
“We had a little meeting [Saturday] just to kind of reiterate that we had gotten a little lax on routine plays,” Cooper said.
Uh, yeah.
“Just about a little better focus, making plays and routine stuff as opposed to being a superman and trying to make highlight plays.”
The key words here are “making plays and routine stuff”. In other words, play baseball correctly.
“Yesterday was the first day on the road trip we didn’t make an error and made all of the plays.”
This is the saddest quote of all. I don’t ever want to hear Cooper say this again. In fact, it shouldn’t have even been brought to the attention of the media. It’s a pretty shameful statement.
HOPEFULLY, the Astros will play better defense, but I can’t believe that they hadn’t noticed how bad it’s been. Closed meetings are usually held to point out something that the players might need to notice. How could they have missed 5 ERRORS IN 1 GAME?
Ugh. I still haven’t recovered from how bad they played on Friday night. I hope that when the Rangers come to town, they put on a better show and embarrass themselves less.
Today we start a home stretch against the Cubs who continue to to be one step ahead of the Astros. A sweep of the Cubs would go a long way to making the Astros a contender in the Central.
