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Once a season, it seems like a baseball team gets a football score and last night was the night for the Houston Astros as they beat up on the Rockies 15-11. The good news is that our offense woke up and Mike Hampton got a win. The bad new is that Houston gave up 5 runs in the 9th inning which means that the bullpen, who had a huge lead and nothing to stress about, had yet another horrible outting.
The score was 13-5 when Hampton left the game so the bullpen gave up 6 runs in 3 innings. The culprit was Geoff Geary who gave up the five runs in the 9th before mercifully being pulled so Hawkins could come in and get the last out. Geary’s stats this season are listed below.
| W | L | S | ERA | BB | SO |
| 1 | 2 | 0 | 8.10 | 10 | 12 |
These are really bad. Not only is the ERA very high, but look at how many walks he has compared to strikeouts. Clearly something is not right with Geoff who ended last year with an ERA of 2.53. Greg Lucas reported this morning on Twitter: “don’t be surprised if Geary winds up on the DL with biceps tendinitis.”
Who do you replace him with?
Round Rock has a starting pitcher you are probably familiar named Bud Norris who looks like he is having a good season.
| W | L | S | ERA | BB | SO |
| 1 | 2 | 0 | 2.04 | 21 | 36 |
Don’t get too excited just yet. His ERA is definitely better than Geary’s, but his walks to strikeouts ratio is similar albeit a little better. Other than that, who else can you bring up? Fulchino just went down and he wasn’t altogether successful anyway.
The final person to condsider is Brandon Backe. A report in today’s Houston Chronicle talks about Brandon’s most recent outting in Corpus Christi which was attended by Ed Wade.
“Backe gave up eight hits and four runs with three strikeouts over seven innings, throwing 56 of his 77 pitches for strikes for the Class AA Hooks. Backe gave up only four hits and one run through the first six innings before giving up three runs on four hits in the seventh against Frisco.”
It sounds like Backe is close to being ready to come back and bringing him in as a reliever would be a good opportunity to put him in a game situation without the stress of a starting role. That being said, Backe always keeps himself hyped up, so I am not sure if he isn’t always going to have that starting pitcher mentality.
We’ll see what happens. It might definitely be an interesting week of moves.
