The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Brian Bogusevic on Astros Recent Stretch & Their Position in the AL West

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Brian Bogusevic on Astros Recent Stretch & Their Position in the AL West

Let's spend 10 quality minutes with our friend Brian Bogus Satic. He is of Space City Home Network. The kids call it S-C-H-N. So, Brian, you're settling in last night. You and Kevin Eshenfeld, you're like, I'm going to go get something to eat after doing this great half-hour pregame show, and then boom, it's 8-0. Boy, baseball strains that way from no hitters to 8 in the first.

It's why it's the most unpredictable game. Yeah, it can change day-to-day. It can change within the course of a game. which we saw pretty much the last two days also. It's unfortunate. Those games, they stink. They're tough to watch. They're really tough to play in.

You know, you want to at least feel like you have a chance. And even though they got back into that one about as good as you could hope for, you put up an eight spot in the first thing. The game's pretty much decided. And if you're going to win consistently, if you're going to put together a win streak, if you're going to put together a good month, whatever you want to call it, you've got to give yourself a chance to win because you're not going to go out there and win every game, certainly, but you've got to put yourself in position to do so.

And those ones like yesterday aren't fun. They don't happen too often, but they happen to every player, no matter what level of professional or collegiate baseball, for that matter, high school. When you have been a part of those games where your team has dug a hole that quick, what does a manager do or say or sometimes maybe some things just left set with no conversation? No, everybody knows the deal, right? Because like you said, everybody's been in it. Everybody knows what's going on.

And a couple things specific to yesterday. Number one, you know, it's not like they blew the game open in the seventh inning and you only had nine out to play with it. You have the entire game. So everybody knows that, hey, we, as steep a hill as it is, we still do have a chance if we could throw up some zeros and put up a couple runs. But, you know, the other side of it is, hey, we're professionals. We get paid to go out here.

and do our job in a professional manner and have quality at bat and put a decent product out there. But also there's the idea of, you know, we're in game two of a four game series. We have to try to make it difficult on the other team. We have to try to run up a pitch count on the starter

and maybe get into the bullpen, maybe make them go to the back of the bullpen, which they made the Rangers do yesterday. See if we can do something in this game that maybe if it won't get us to a victory today if it could make our past to victory a little bit easier tomorrow. They did a lot of those things. It doesn't

result in a win yesterday, but it puts you in a more favorable position today. On the positive side, the bats, you said certainly rallied, including, I mean, four absolute bombs coming from the Astro side of things, frankly.

Yeah, it was a pretty loud night, offensively, and it's good to see, it's good to see them scoring in It's good to see the big innings showing up. We haven't seen a lot of those lately. It's good, not yesterday, but the previous two games to see kind of the knockout blow type of innings.

And honestly, as fun as it has been to see all of the power and the power from a lot of different spots yesterday, it's also been enjoyable to see the manufacturer runs and the last couple of games see them play a little bit of small ball. They score to run the other day without getting a hit. in an inning. And if you can do both, if you can have that balance, you know, you're going to have games where you're going to score a lot of runs, but you're also going to have games where you can win a game maybe just because of one swing or maybe just because of one inning where you pieced it together and found a way to push one across. And good, good offenses can score

different ways. Good offenses don't have to rely on the home run. They can, they can do it in different ways. And we've seen more of that recently. Seems like we talk about a lot of hitters with you, but one guy we don't talk about much because he's just so special is Jordon Alvarez. I mean, can you just kind of describe for us? Why is he so good as he is? And he can just, it feels like he can get to everything and the power that he possesses as well. What makes, are some of the things that make Yordawn so great? Balance. He's always on balance, right? It never seems like he's taking a bad swing. You see sometimes guys reaching for balls.

You see their butts flying out and the bat's sailing. Number one, he never does that. It always seems like he's balanced in his lower half and seeing the ball well. He's got great timing because he doesn't have to cheat to fastballs for as well as he can turn around a high-velocity fastball. It doesn't ever seem like he's hunting it and making himself susceptible to off-speed so he can run into the two home runs that he hit yesterday were, you know, off-speed pitches hung in the middle of the zone. You're not going to get away with that and have a guy kind of have him spin off and accidentally roll over a hung breaking ball in the middle of the zone.

He's going to be on all of those. He's just such a pure hitter who also happens to be one of the strongest guys in the league. And nothing kind of demonstrates that more than the home run he hit on Monday, which was, I mean, you could not have located a fastball down in a way better from Kumar Rocker. And as a pitcher, you're thinking, worst case scenario, this guy takes a great swing and hits a line drive to left field and it's a base hit. And he stays in position to where he can get underneath the ball, get behind it. And then he's absurdly strong enough to hit the ball out into right center field.

You shouldn't be able to put that good of a swing on it. And you certainly shouldn't be strong enough to hit it that far to that side of the field, but he can do both. Brian Bogusevick with us here on Sports Talk 790. Well, the furthest home run hit yesterday was 457 feet off the bat of Cam Smith. He also has a 462-foot home run this year. So, I mean, obviously, we can see some flashes of the power. He does have a potent bat. How does he get to put the bat on the ball more consistently?

Well, it's the position that he put himself in to hit that home run yesterday looked very similar to the position that he was in when he hit that first long home run, run, which was, I think, in Colorado earlier this season, which is getting behind the baseball. And to hit behind the baseball, that's where power comes from. That's where elevation comes from. I'm talking about your body position relative to where the bat makes contact with the ball. He has a tendency to kind of be late with his timing, and then he's starting his swing sometimes as his body's still drifting forward, which never really allows the bat to get

out in front of your body. Seeing a little bit more recently, he took a swing like. this in the Cubs series on a double he hit the left field where he's getting his foot down he's starting his swing kind of rotating around that front side and getting the bat head out in front and when he does that and he hits the ball in the air on its full side he can hit it as far as anybody and he is incredibly strong he's explosive he's twitchy it's just about putting himself in position to take that swing more often and I mean he's so young in not just age wise but so young in his development, the amount of that bats, not just in the big leagues, but professionally as a

whole, there's a lot of growth to be had, but you obviously can see that it's in there. Brian Bogus-Sevick, Space City Home Network with us here at 1111 on Sports Talk, 790. All right, so this American League West, it's hot garbage. I mean, let's face it. The Mariners are playing better. I think it's the Mariners Division in terms of eventually taking over the A's. The Astros are three and a half out. What's going through the minds of a front office right now?

What's going through Hunter Brown's mind as he tries to get back? Thinking about this glass half full. Brown comes back. Hayter comes back. Altouva is resuming some baseball activities down in Florida. What has to happen beyond the obvious to get this team to kind of hang around three and a half, four games out? And then the big decision will be coming up around July in terms of is this team a seller or a buyer at the trade deadline because the Astro's. for a better part of a decade have always been buyers.

Yeah, I think, you know, you've certainly had some fortune on your side that nobody's run away with it yet. Because this is, you know, you're getting pretty deep into this season for nobody in the division to have gotten hot. So you're fortunate in that aspect. And now you're getting to a point to where you are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I guess the biggest thing you want to see between now and I don't call it a month, a month from now. is how consistent are we on both sides of the ball? Because we've seen now a stretch of pretty good pitching and the ability to add Hunter into that

and add Josh Hayter into that, and then how does that have everybody kind of shuffle and fall into place. Where are we at? How do we feel about our pitching staff moving forward? And also, what is the offense? Is it the offense that we saw the first two weeks plus maybe this last week, or is it something in the middle with a tough stretch that we've had?

And if we're pretty good on both sides, I think you have to feel comfortable with are we the team that can go on a run? Because, you know, you look at Oakland, I don't think Oakland, Sacramento, the A's, whatever they are. They don't necessarily, I think, have the pitching to go on a hot streak and really separate themselves. Seattle certainly can. The Rangers have the pitching, maybe not the hitting. But if, you know, the Astros feel comfortable with being, you know, able to do it offensively, and on the pitching side, and there's no reason to think that they can't be the team that goes on a run

because one really good month might be the separator for any team in this division. I think that there's the exact same thing right now in Seattle as we speak. Brian, thanks for the visit. Looking forward to catching you tonight as part of the Astros and Rangers on SCHN, and we'll do this again next Wednesday. All right. See you guys.