Los Angeles Angels manager Kurt Suzuki was brilliant in the Halos first two wins, but last night was just ugly.
Kurt Suzuki’s first two games as the new manager of the Los Angeles Angels were mostly brilliant, as Suzuki manipulated a cast of questionable relievers into a pair of surprising opening victories against the Houston Astros.
Last night against Houston, though, Suzuki learned just how quickly and badly in-game decisions can go awry when they’re based on questionable logic as the Angels blew a six-run lead and managed to lose, 11-9, to the Astros.
Start with the decision to leave starter Reid Detmers in the game in the fifth inning. Detmers pitched brilliantly in the initial innings, but he was showing serious signs of being gassed in the fifth as his pitch count got over 90. Suzuki succumbed to some old-school thinking and decided to give his pitcher a chance to go for the win after he snuck a third-strike fastball past DH Yordan Alvarez to get the second out.
Bad idea. The next hitter, Isaac Paredes, doubled to left with two runners on, and suddenly that 6-0 lead was shaved by a couple of runs. Suzuki finally did the right thing by bringing in young reliever Walbert Urena, and a Carlos Correa single cut the Angels lead to 6-3.
Bringing back Urena to pitch the sixth wasn’t necessarily a bad decision on the surface, but what happened after that was ugly. A throwing error by Urena opened the floodgates for the Astros, and Suzuki left his young pitcher in for what felt like an eternity until he finally made a pitching change and inserted newly-signed receiver Joey Lucchesi with Houston leading, 7-6.
Urena ended up throwing 48 pitches, with just 28 of them for strikes, and a wild pitch brought in one of the six runs he gave up, although all of them were unearned. Catcher Logan O’Hoppe also chipped in on the chaos with a throwing error, and by the time it was over the line for the inning was a hide-your-eyes bad 8 runs, 5 hits and 2 errors.
“Sometimes you have to give credit to the other team,” said Suzuki after the game in a piece written by Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com. “They put up some good at-bats. They were fouling a lot of pitches off and making adjustments.”
Suzuki is doing some serious fudging here. The fact that Urena blew up isn’t at all unusual--he’s just 22, and he wasn’t even expected to make the roster coming out of spring training. Losses like this happen to every team, and sometimes there’s no way to stop the bleeding when things start to go bad.
The point is that Suzuki hung his young pitcher out to dry by leaving him for far too long. That should never happen with young pitchers, and it’s something for which the Angels have earned a bad reputation. Hopefully this doesn’t happen again, as it wiped out some of the great vibes from the first two wins and reminded us that there are still times when the Angels will be the Angels.