Astros' title defense being tested early

HOUSTON -- The Astros are 7-9, which in itself shouldn’t be cause for panic. After all, they had this identical record after 16 games last year, and we all know how that ended. A second World Series championship in six seasons made everybody forget April’s woes.

Last year’s club responded from its slow start with a 15-2 run that enabled it to get back into first place in the American League West by mid-May and never look back. That figures to be somewhat more challenging for this year’s Astros, who suffered their first series loss to the Rangers at Minute Maid Park since July 2018 with a 9-1 shellacking on Sunday night.

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“I think obviously we haven't played very good baseball to this point,” third baseman Alex Bregman said. “We've got a lot of things we need to correct. I believe in our guys, and I believe we will correct those things.”

Astros ace Framber Valdez carried a shutout in the seventh inning before giving up five runs, with Marcus Semien hitting a grand slam off reliever Hector Neris -- who misplaced an 0-2 split-fingered fastball -- to make it 6-0. The Astros loaded the bases with no outs in the bottom of the inning, but they managed only one run on a Bregman walk.

“He left a couple of pitches up in the strike zone and was probably trying to overthrow a little bit with his fastball,” catcher Martín Maldonado said of Valdez. “He got back-to-back ground balls through the six-hole [in the seventh]. … He knows the ground ball was what he needed, but they passed through the infield.”

Rangers reliever Will Smith, who received his 2022 World Series championship ring from Astros manager Dusty Baker on Saturday, retired Yordan Alvarez to end the seventh. The Major League’s RBI leader hit a dribbler to third to strand the bases loaded. Houston was 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position (0-for-14 in the series).

“Tonight, we didn’t play very well,” Baker said. “We made some mistakes in the field, made some mistakes on the bases. We had some opportunities. The 0-2 grand slam really hurt. That was the major difference in the game.”

With that, the Astros next face a schedule gauntlet with the Blue Jays (10-6) arriving at Minute Maid Park for a three-game series beginning Monday. The Astros then have a six-game road trip with three at the Braves (12-4) and Rays (14-2). It’s not even May, but it’s gut-check time for the defending champs with 90 percent of their schedule remaining.

Last year, the Astros went 35-20 in the regular season against postseason teams, with only the Blue Jays (2-4) and Braves (1-2) having winning records against them among teams that eventually played in October.

“Our guys like playing against good teams, and I believe we’re a very good team,” Bregman said. “We’ve got to start executing a lot better and just clean some things up.”

It’s clear the Astros miss eight-time All-Star second baseman Jose Altuve, who fractured his right thumb a month ago in the World Baseball Classic and is still a month from returning. Bregman (.640 OPS) and Jeremy Peña (.710 OPS) are off to slow starts at the plate, and the signing of veteran first baseman José Abreu (.550 OPS with no homers) has yet to pay off. The Astros are also striking out at a higher clip than last year.

“It’s on all of us,” Bregman said. “We’ve all got to play better, and I'm confident we will.”

Even Houston’s bullpen, which was the best in baseball a year ago and was nearly unhittable in the postseason, has been iffy. The relief corps has a 5.61 ERA in nine losses. The Astros gave up eight unearned runs to the Rangers on Sunday.

“We’re focused on trying to get better and trying to win games,” Maldonado said. “We’d rather be 9-7 instead of 7-9, so we’ve got to stay focused and keep grinding and put at-bats together. I feel that game went out of hand in the seventh inning with a crooked number. We know what kind of team we have, and we have to keep believing and we’re going to be all right.”