It’s been nearly a full month since the last time the Orioles played someone outside of the AL or NL East.
Riding high off of their series victory over the Yankees, which put the finishing touches on a successful three weeks of baseball against AL and NL East teams, the Orioles stay on the road and head to face the Houston Astros this weekend. This is an Astros team that’s underachieving up to this point in the season, bringing a record of just 35-40 into the series. They’re eight games back in their division and six back of even the third wild card.
The Orioles can’t afford to let off the gas just because they’re going up against a weaker opponent. Not that they need to be told this. They have had some disappointing series against teams that aren’t that good this year, losing series against the Pirates and Athletics, plus that distasteful sweep in St. Louis. The Yankees do have a tougher task this weekend, as they will be facing the Braves, whose fortunes have improved since their series with the O’s.
What’s up with the Astros this year? To some extent, they’ve had bad luck. They have a run differential of +7, which gives them an expected record that’s three wins better than their actual record. Among the reasons that they are not achieving that record is that they are an almost unbelievable 5-14 in one-run games. You have to try hard to be that bad! Or you have to sign a $95 million closer (Josh Hader, the Maryland-born former Orioles prospect) and watch him lose four games, so far. The Orioles are 7-10 in one-run games.
Among Houston’s other problems is that they, like the Orioles, have a number of injured starting pitchers. That includes future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, as well as 2022 standout Cristian Javier. Efforts to replace these guys have not worked out as well as the O’s have, up to this point. Part of this means that there will be a guy making his MLB debut for the Astros tonight. More on him shortly.
Although the Astros have the fourth-best team OPS in the AL at .734 (the Orioles are #1 at .768), they are only middle of the pack in their run output with an average of 4.36 runs scored per game. Their best offensive player to date, Kyle Tucker, fouled a ball off of his shin at the beginning of this month and as of a couple of days ago had still not resumed baseball activities.
Without him, there’s only one guy to really fear in Houston’s lineup: Yordan Alvarez, who’s having a disappointing (for him) season with “just” an .889 OPS. Definitely not to be feared is José Abreu, recently released in year two of a three-year contract because Father Time is undefeated. Abreu was OPSing just .361 at the time of his release. His first base replacement, Jon Singleton, sits at a .646 OPS.
This will be the first meeting between these two teams this season. The Astros are 19-19 at home and 10-7 so far in the month of June.
Game 1 – Friday, 8:10 ET
- BAL starter: Grayson Rodriguez – 12 GS, 3.20 ERA, 3.36 FIP, 1.223 WHIP
- HOU starter: Jake Bloss (MLB debut)
This time one year ago, Bloss had only just finished his junior year pitching for Georgetown. This time three months ago, he had never pitched above the Low-A level. The Astros debuted Bloss at High-A and only had him there for four starts before sending him up to Double-A. He’s made the jump from there straight to MLB, two days shy of his 23rd birthday.
Bloss was getting great results for the Astros AA team, rolling to a 1.61 ERA and 0.716 WHIP across eight starts. How thoroughly were the Orioles scouting the Texas League? We’re going to find out tonight. As an Orioles fan, I am permanently scarred by then-Red Sock Clay Buchholz no-hitting the team in one of his first career starts.
For Rodriguez, this will be his first time pitching back in his home state of Texas since he made his MLB debut against the Rangers. He is on an excellent run of starts in the month of June, allowing just five earned runs over 19.1 innings in his previous three starts. That’s a 2.33 ERA and it’s come along with a .596 OPS against. With Kyle Bradish out, Rodriguez continuing to perform well in the rotation is all the more important.
Orioles fans can hope that the three right-handed starters in this series are able to take advantage of a righty-heavy Astros lineup. Their best lefty is Tucker, who is out. Houston’s righty batters are OPSing just .679 against righty pitchers.
Game 2 – Saturday, 4:10 ET
- BAL starter: Corbin Burnes – 15 GS, 2.14 ERA, 3.12 FIP, 1.036 WHIP
- HOU starter: Ronel Blanco – 13 GS, 2.43 ERA, 3.96 FIP, 0.966 WHIP
Blanco threw a no-hitter in his first start of the season. There’s nowhere to go but down from there, and the ERA has nowhere to go but up. Yet even if you take out the 30-year-old’s no-hitter from the season stats, he’s got a 2.75 ERA and .182 batting average allowed in the 12 games that came after that. These are not slouch numbers, though it’s possible that Blanco is benefiting from comically good BABIP luck (.186) and that he is due for some regression in that fortune.
Burnes inherited a share of the AL ERA lead after the Orioles demolished Luis Gil, the previous leader, yesterday. He’s done pretty much everything you could have hoped when the O’s acquired him over the offseason, averaging more than six innings per game started, allowing only about a batter per inning to reach base (1.036 WHIP), and striking out roughly a batter per inning. In June, he’s holding batters to a .553 OPS against, which is probably why his June ERA is 1.35.
Game 3 – Sunday, 2:10 ET
- BAL starter: Albert Suárez – 15 G / 8 GS, 2.05 ERA, 3.06 FIP, 1.200 WHIP
- HOU starter: Framber Valdez – 12 GS, 3.91 ERA, 3.86 FIP, 1.208 WHIP
Valdez is something of a unique pitcher in today’s era of baseball in that he has recorded a complete game in each of the past four seasons. The 30-year-old lefty has been a workhorse for the Astros the last two years, throwing 201.1 and then 198 innings – with excellent results, a combined 3.13 ERA (128 ERA+).
Things aren’t going badly for Valdez so far in 2024, though they have slipped up enough that he’s just an average pitcher in terms of his adjusted ERA rather than a good-to-great one. Probably contributing to Valdez’s ERA being up to 3.91 is that his strikeout rate is way down. A year ago, Valdez had a 9.1 K/9 and right now it’s 6.8 for this season.
Suárez needs to productively find the strike zone again after his most recent start against the Yankees, when he handed out five free passes and hit one batter over the course of a 3.2 inning outing. In the start before that, he walked three Atlanta batters over 5.1 scoreless innings. The zeroes in the run column were good, but the walks were concerning if they continued, and they did.
Good news for Suárez in this department is that the Astros are not a team that walks a lot. Only two AL teams have fewer walks than Houston. Then again, one of these teams is the Orioles, so obviously a team can succeed this year without walking much. The injured Tucker is the team leader in walks with a lead of at least 18 even after missing nearly three weeks of action. Going along with a small number of walks, these Astros also don’t strike out very much. There could be a lot of balls in play in this series in general.
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With a strong series here, the Orioles could find themselves in the AL East lead by the end of the weekend, depending on how things go for the Yankees. It sure feels like the Yankees are on the ropes after the last two games against the O’s, but that doesn’t mean they are, or that they’ll continue to skid. When the O’s beat the Yankees three of four games in May, the O’s went on to sweep the Reds and they gained no games on New York because the Yankees simultaneously swept the Tigers.
What do you think will happen in this series? In the poll before the Yankees series, 51% of voters correctly picked that the Orioles would win two out of three. If you say you were one of them, I’ll never know otherwise.