Astros Captured By Pirates, Lose 5th Straight

Like a diamondback water snake preparing to grab a little minnow, the fish feels confident in himself, swimming, swimming and swimming, blub, blub. Having never seen a snake before, the minnow do not know what's in store. He swims as if there is nothing to fear. Until the snake violently swipes at the minnow, grabbing the fish on its side. The fish, still trying to swim, flops while in the snake's mouth. The snake moves his mouth toward the head of the fish, inching closer and closer until he swallows it whole. The fish, although being eaten by the snake, is still seen flopping around inside of the snake. The snake looks as if it is having muscle spasms until the snake curls its body and moves the dead fish down toward his stomach.

In a similar scenario, the Astros were the minnows in today's game and the Pirates were the snake. With a 1-0 lead that seemed so promising in the 4th inning, the snake struck the Astros with 2 back-to-back homers. 2 runs scored. 2 more runs scored. And the next inning, 4 more runs scored. For all practical purposes, the game was lost in the 4th inning as the Astros could only score 2 runs. In fact, this may inspire me to create the GLI Average. GLI stands for Game Lost Inning. In today's game, the Game lost inning was inning #4.0 because the Pirates scored enough runs to win. This could also lead to GLI excess, which describes how many excess runs than were needed to win games that they won and GLI deficit, how many more runs were needed to win the game. The GLI deficit for the Astros in this game was 10. Whether or not these new stats have any practical use remains to be seen, but I would be interested to see if there's any correlation with anything. I'll fiddle around with it.

Game Tidbits (Not food-grade tidbits though):

So Jordan Lyles pitched badly. 7 ER in 4 IP. Even if Rhiner Cruz did give one of those runs up, Lyles was not a very good pitcher tonight. He needs to work on his location badly. Otherwise, he's not going to have a very bright mlb future.

Both Fernandos pitched in the game. Abad gave up 1 run on 4 hits; Rodriguez gave up 2 runs on 3 hits (1 double). David Carpenter was the only Astros pitcher not to give up a run.

Only 4 Astros got a hit. One Astro got two hits and he was J.D. Martinez. With a bloop single over the 1st baseman that drove in 1 run, he was also the only batter to hit a double. Scott Moore, however, hit his first homer for the Astros to deep RF. He almost hit that ball out of the ballpark, but at least he hit it over the fence. Carlos Lee had a single as well as future hall of famer Jason Castro, who hit a rocket on the ground toward CF. Other than that, the Astros performed pathetically, but hey, Jon Singleton hit his 12 homer and had 2 doubles.