The Astros bashed the Red Sox for 9 runs on Wednesday evening in Boston, but the big story was the run prevention. The Astros finally shut down the Red Sox via a great performance from a starting pitcher. Framber Valdez went 8 innings and allowed only 5 baserunners--one homer, one double, one single, one walk, and one hit by pitch.
It's likely that baseball fans, and especially Astro fans, will refer to this game as the Framber Valdez game. But the story of the Astros victory today is larger than just Valdez. It was a team effort at run prevention on behalf of the entire Astros lineup today. The defense converted batted balls into outs, helped in large part by the ability of Valdez to induce ground balls and soft contact. Let's explore how this happened.
The Astros Defensive Advantage Finally Showed Up
Entering this series, the biggest advantage that the Astros had over the Red Sox was their superior defense. As I wrote in my ALCS preview, "The Astros have one of the best defenses in major league baseball. And the Red Sox...do not." Over the course of the regular season, the Astros were able to convert about 5% more batted balls into outs.
But in the first four games of the series, that defensive advantage did not materialize. In particular, Rafael Devers has made several nice plays at third base, and the Astros had trouble finding holes in the Red Sox defense.
That changed tonight. The Astros, as always, did a superior job of converting batted balls into outs. Red Sox hitters put 21 balls in the field of play in the game today, and Astro fielders converted 19 of those balls into outs. The Red Sox managed only to elude the Astros defense on a Devers single in the fifth inning and a Christian Vasquez double in the sixth.
Meanwhile, it was very different for Astro hitters this evening. They put 27 balls in play today and reached on 11 times. That's a .407 batting average on balls in play. The Astros managed 8 singles, 2 doubles (one by Yuli Gurriel and another by Yordan Alvarez) and Michael Brantley reached on an error.
The balls the Astros hit kept finding holes in the infield, and the balls the Red Sox hit never did. This was not a coincidence.
One play in particular deserves particular attention. In the critical sixth inning, Jose Altuve led off with a walk. On the first pitch to Michael Brantley, Dusty Baker put a play on, sending Altuve (it looked more run and hit to me than hit and run, YMMV). You don't see run and hits much anymore in the majors, as the stolen base has declined and team prefer straight steals. But you do see plays like this more often in college baseball, where coaches try to exploit the weaknesses of amateur fielders by putting more pressure on them. Usually, the superior defensive abilities on major league fielders eliiminate the benefits of these strategies. But not when you are facing one of MLB's worst fielding teams.
The pressure of Altuve cracked the Red Sox defense. Brantley hit a soft grounder that Rafael Devers had to come in on to play. With no one at third, Altuve rounded second and took off for third for an empty third base while Devers threw to first. The gambit distracted Red Sox first baseman Kyle Schwarber--a converted catcher turned converted left fielder--who dropped Devers throw, allowing Brantley to reach first and Altuve to reach third. Two batters later, Yordan Alvarez doubled in both Altuve and Brantley, and the rout was on.
Framber Valdez Was Excellent on the Mound
One reason that the defense converted so many of the balls hit by Red Sox batters into outs is that Framber Valdez made it easier on them.
 |
| Framber Valdez was dealing today. |
Valdez induced 13 grounders by the Red Sox and it produced 15 outs (two of the grounders were turned into double plays). The 20 Red Sox hitters who put a ball in play against Valdez had an average launch angle of -3.55. It's hard to do a great deal of damage when you hit the ball toward the ground, and that proved to be the case against Valdez today.
The benefits of inducing contact where shown in the fifth inning today. Valdez got into his only jam of the game, giving up his first hit to Rafael Devers and then hitting J.D. Martinez. That brought Hunter Renfroe to the plate, and he crushed a ball, registering an exit velocity of 109.1 MPH. But he hit it right into the ground (a launch angle of -20), hitting the dirt in front of the plate before going to Carlos Correa on two hops. Correa to Altuve to Gurriel and it was a double play. One batter later, Valdez retired Alex Verdugo (on another grounder) and Valdez retained the lead, setting up the big 5 run top of the sixth for the Astros.
Key to Valdez's performance today was his ability to throw strikes. During the regular season, Valdez walked 10.1% of all batters that he faced. That's 10th highest in baseball among starters who pitched 100 innings of more this season. Tonight, Valdez walked only 1 of the 27 men he faced. Valdez's excellent control today helped keep his pitch count down; he threw only 93 pitches in his 8 innings of work.
Walking into today's game, I thought the biggest worry for the Astros is that they did not have a reliever who could give them length in the middle innings if needed. The best way to deal with that would be for Framber Valdez to make that weakness irrelevant. He did. There was no need for any middle reliever to give length today. Heck, there was almost no need for a middle reliever at all.
Instead, Framber Valdez, as this tweet from the MLB Network said, shoved.
SHOVED.
— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 21, 2021
The start the @astros needed. pic.twitter.com/fjh3zRav0O
When I was in college, Soul Asylum sang the lyric "I want somebody to shove." Today, we wanted Framber Valdez to shove. And boy, did he.
Comments