Jose Altuve is still experiencing plenty of growing pains in the outfield (no pun intended).
The Houston Astros star Altuve cost his team during Saturday’s game against the Minnesota Twins with another blunder defensively. Altuve had a ball hit to him in left field by Minnesota’s Ty France during the fourth inning with runners on first and second base and nobody out. He played the ball off the bounce and attempted to fire it back into the infield quickly to hold lead runner Byron Buxton of the Twins at third base.
Unfortunately for Altuve, he bobbled the ball on the transfer from his glove, and it squirted away from him. As a result, Buxton was able to score standing up. Here is the video.
Altuve was charged with an error on the play, which proved very costly as the Twins went on to score five more times in the inning to take a 6-1 lead.
The former AL MVP Altuve, 34, was a career-long second baseman but moved to left field this season in order to accommodate Houston’s new infield additions (including Christian Walker and Isaac Paredes). But he was already pretty terrible at the position in spring, whiffing on balls at the wall and even making mistakes on routine fly balls.
Now that it is the regular season, Altuve continues to bumble his way around in left field. Though Altuve did hit a leadoff homer to start off Saturday’s game against the Twins, he also posted a five-strikeout performance (a.k.a a platinum sombrero) against Minnesota the game before that.
