Deluge: Astros Lots, Phillies Less

Since the All Star Break, the Phillies went 5-4 against the NL Central Leading Milwaukee Brewers and fellow NL East basement dwellers Miami Marlins. In that time, Nick Williams has been an absolute dreamboat, putting up some excellent major league numbers. Doesn't that all sound nice? Here, look at this:

Now, the AL Leading Houston Astros are in town, and Vince Velasquez was on the mound for game one facing off against Brad Peacock. Not that either of them got very far in the game.

The 1st inning passed with little incident (aside from this beaut), but the scoring started in the 2nd. And for the Astros... it wouldn't stop for several more.

With two outs, Velasquez surrendered two back-to-back home runs to Brian McCann and Alex Bregman. The Phillies got one back in the bottom of the inning when Tommy Joseph doubled to score Odubel Herrera, who had reached base on a walk. Unfortunately, the Astros plated another one in the 3rd on a Marwin Gonzalez single to score Jose Altuve, keeping the Phillies at a deficit of two. The Phillies would answer in the bottom of the inning with a Cesar Hernandez single (yay) but three strikeouts (boo).

Things got a little... messy in the 4th. Brian McCann reached base on a walk, but almost immediately after that, the grounds crew started rolling out the tarp in anticipation for a fierce thunderstorm rolling through the city. The subsequent rain delay lasted almost two hours.

When play finally did resume at 10:15pm, Ricardo Pinto took over for Velasquez, who got two outs after giving up a double to Bregman. All he needed was one more out to get out of the inning, but instead a single, followed by catcher interference on Knapp, followed by another single, followed by a walk.... you get the idea. The bases were loaded for Carlos Beltran, and he didn't hit a grand slam at least? Instead he just hit a two-run single to make the game 8-1. And yes, with Brian McCann coming to the plate, that means that the Astros batted around. Isn't that fun?

The best (worst) games are the ones where an inning consists of five minutes of Phillies batters and twenty minutes of their opponents’ batters. It just happened in the 4th, and it happened again in the 5th. Pinto came back out for more and gave up two more runs before getting replaced by Hoby Milner. He gave up a single and a walk, but escaped the inning by inducing a double play. The score by this point was 10-1. The Phillies' response? Groundout, Strikeout, Groundout.

Good news about the 6th inning, though! The Phillies managed to get out of it without letting the Astros score any more runs. Unfortunately for them, they didn't score any either.

The Astros, of course, resumed their scoring in the 7th. Jose Altuve continued to not make an out, but anyway, instead of dwelling on this garbage, please enjoy a very important Sixto Sanchez gif.

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Because this game had an unfortunate delay due to a monsoon, TGK had to call in an assist: so here’s Phrozen with more late-night shenanigans.

Unfortunately, I didn’t watch the game or anything, so let’s quickly check the box score to see how they did...

oh...

They did really fucking bad, guys. Like, real bad.

As TGK already recapped, the Phils gave up approximately 400 (10) runs by the seventh inning, and proceeded to allow three dozen (2) more in the seventh and a pointless and meaningless insurance run in the ninth.

The Phils, for their part, did score a few in the seventh, when Nick Williams tripled in Andrew Knapp, Cam Perkins and Cesar Hernandez, because Nick Williams is good and cool, and also somewhat dreamy, for that matter.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Good morning, folks. Phroz-out.