With J.R. Towles gone, the Astros needed a new scapegoat to blame for their rotten season. It kind of appeared that Hunter Pence was turning into the one that Brad Mills was looking at for that role, as it was Pence that Mills has been continuously benching because of his struggles at the plate.
Yet it was Pence who came through for the Astros on Sunday, delivering a walk-off double in the 11th inning yesterday to give the Astros the come from behind 4-3 win over the San Diego Padres.
It’s been a tough season for Pence as he’s struggled with the bat and struggled with keeping playing time. It’s hard to understand the thinking behind the continued “resting” of Pence while others who have failed more often, Carlos Lee, Pedro Feliz, and Lance Berkman, have continued to earn pretty continuous playing time.
But unlike the others, Pence has continued to provide a steady defensive
presence, and yesterday, Pence was three-for-five with the bat, while
getting a single, a double, a homer, and two of the team’s four RBI.
The win was a nice thing for the Astros. Even if it did come in extra
innings, wasting another solid Roy Oswalt effort.
But the win makes the
Astros just 10-21 on the season. They have, far and away, the worst
record in the National League, and they owe a huge thank you to the
Baltimore Orioles for keeping them from having the worst record in the
majors.
The Astros are the worst offensive team in the majors, having scored
just 85 runs in 31 games. The only team that’s scored less runs is the
Seattle Mariners, and the Mariners fired their hitting coach Sunday in
an effort to address their struggles.
But the job of Astros hitting
coach Sean Berry appears to be safe, even though no team in the majors
has a worse on-base percentage.
The Berry defenders, and there suddenly appear to be a lot of them in
the media, claim that he’s not the one responsible for building a club
so lacking in offensive talent.
And there is some validity to putting
the blame on Ed Wade for assembling a grouping of guys who have a
problem with taking a walk, or with making a pitcher have to build a big
pitch count. But at some point, Berry has to work with these guys and
get them to start working at actually getting on base, and making a
pitcher have to earn a win.
And that’s something that’s just not happening.
It’s something that’s never happened under Berry’s watch. The Astros
have been an awful offensive team under Berry, and even when he
supposedly had better talent with which to work. Somebody on the team
has to get the batters to not swing at everything that comes their way,
and the person who should be working with the players on their offensive
approach is the hitting coach.
There’s generally not much a hitting coach can do with established
players like Berkman, Lee, or Feliz. But the coach should have some
ability to mold the youngsters, and to work on their approach at the
plate, but despite Pence being one of my favorite guys on the team, his
plate discipline, in his fourth season in the big leagues, is just as
bad now as it was when he came up.
It’s up to the hitting coach to help
Pence adjust to the pitching, and Pence hasn’t been doing that. J.R.
Towles hasn’t been able to make that adjustment — though since he’s the
team scapegoat, Berry gets to take a pass on his failures with Towles.
Ultimately, the blame has to rest with GM Ed Wade for continuously going
after guys like Pedro Feliz and Kazuo Matsui instead of guys like
Orlando Hudson and Orlando Cabrera, guys who are excellent on defense,
have speed, and have shown a consistent ability to get on base, whether
by hit or walk.
But until Wade starts bringing guys who can do that,
then Berry has to find a way to work with guys who have no plate
discipline. And Berry has yet to display that he’s capable of doing
that.
Roy Oswalt, Felipe Paulino, and the rest of the pitching staff have been
keeping the Astros completive these past several weeks. The offense
hasn’t. Something needs to be done before Pence’s career is forever
defined by untapped potential and a tendency to lunge at outside
breaking pitches in the dirt.
It’s easy to see Pence as the problem. It’s easy, but wrong. Pence can
have many more games like what he had yesterday. But until something
is done to make Pence and his teammates exercise more discipline at the
plate, then the team is doomed to more games like the Friday’s 7-0 loss
to the Padres and Saturday’s 2-1 loss to the Padres — both games where
the Astros were lucky to scrape together three hits
The man responsible for doing that is Sean Berry. And he’s failing.
Badly.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2010.
