Thursday was one of those utterly beautiful summer days I used to relish in Illinois--blue skies, a gentle breeze with a hint of coolness to it, and moderately-warm temperatures. One could work or play in weather like that forever. Yet, in order to describe what happened during Houston's 7-1 loss to the Cubs, I find I have to abandon the reality of those conditions and resort instead to the ambiguities of metaphor. Despite the seeming beauty of the weather, soon after the game began the Astros (64-57) found themselves buffeted mercilessly on the sea by an unrelenting storm of extraordinary fury, a storm caused, not just by the Cubs themselves, but by their own ineptitiude, bad judgment, and more than one instance of horrendous baseball luck. All of these factors came together for three hours yesterday, afterwards leaving all of us who care about the Astros--players, coaches, broadcasters, writers, fans--in states of agitation ranging from anger and disgust to sadness, disappointment, and despair.

Had we truly admitted it to ourselves, conditions were already ripe for a blowout of the usual baseball proportions. Matt Clement had been pitching well recently before yesterday's game even got under way, and Jared Fernandez, (1-2) after Thursday's loss, had already shown signs, both in his earlier career and as an Astro, that he is a game, but essentially average big-league pitcher. Add to these conditions, however, the choices Jimy Williams made for Thursday's lineup. Knowing that left-handed battters in previous games had had sucess against Clement, Williams inserted Orlando Merced in RF and Geoff Blum at 3B to get two more left-handed bats in the order to go along with Lance Berkman. He made these choices in spite of the fact that, as of August 13, Blum was hitting .200 (3x25) during the month, with seven strikeouts, and that Merced was replacing (albeit temporarily) a man who had hit a home run the day before. Left on the bench was Morgan Ensberg, possessor of a .317 batting average for the month and nineteen homers for the season. Williams played the percentages in selecting the lineup, as he often does, but in so doing he ignored how each of those players--Blum, Ensberg, Hidalgo, and Merced--had been performing in the recent past, abandoning the short-term perspective which, in my opinion, must always be brought to bear when contemplating a lineup based on long-term baseball percentages.

Another factor, however, was the excellence of Clement himself. His fastball, whether he located it on the outside corner or blew it by Houston's batters upstairs, was an untouchable breath of wind Thursday. If Clement had ten games against the Astros with a fastball like that, Houston would fail just as miserably each time. Against his breaking stuff, though, whether it be the slider or the sinker, a different set of conditions obtained, and here I believe we must lay some of the blame for failure on the Astros' hitters themselves. After the game, Craig Biggio described Clement's stuff as "nasty," and nasty it certainly was; but as a catchall defense of Houston's lack of success against the breaking pitch, I tend to discount Biggio's opinion because of his historical futility against the slider. To a great degree, with the exception of the occasional hanging curve ball, every pitcher's breaking stuff is nasty to Biggio. The break on Clement's stuff as it dove into the dirt Thursday was so sweeping that I marvelled that the Astros could never see--from the batter's box, from the on-deck circle, or from the dugout--what those pitches were doing and lay off at least a few of them. Geoff Blum was nailed twice, in the second and in the fourth, on low-and-inside breaking stuff that he had no chance in the world of reaching. Lance Berkman, too, in a four-strikeout day, fell victim time and time again to a pitch whose break he should have been able to see. By the end of the afternoon, however, Berkman had yielded to that "Aw, the hell with it" feeling we all get when something frustrates us and swung anyway at pitches he knew he couldn't hit.

These two elements alone would have spelled defeat on most days, but there was more for the Astros to battle in the storm than just bad decisions by the captain of the ship or the winds of strikeouts. There were two (at least two) instances of wretched luck. I don't think I've ever seen twice in one week a ball hit the 2B just as Adam Everett was about to field it, but I have now. That fourth-inning misfortune off the bat Paul Bako, led to runs which boosted Chicago's lead to 4-0, and broke the charmed life that Fernandez had been living in the first, when he gave up only two runs, and in the third, when he left the bases loaded. The second instance came in the fifth, when RP Rick White, the newest Astro, hit Moises Alou on an 0-2 pitch, walked Hee-Seop Choi, then hit Aramis Ramirez, loading the bases. All of this was in the effort to pitch inside, but it was badly done (the pitches were much too much inside), and the run the Cubs got out of it later on a walk was nearly inevitable.

There are three mysteries emerging from these four games for me. Two of them are the hitting of Kenny Lofton and Alex Gonzalez. Every pitch to Lofton in the series was right down the middle, and the pitch that Brad Lidge threw to Gonzalez in the eighth on Thursday for a two-run homer was also. Both men did with those pitches what you'd expect, but I stand in wonder and puzzlement over how the Astros could let a man whose speed they know is a threat to them constantly reach base, and how the club could let a .224 hitter do such damage against them as Gonzalez did without trying some kind of radical adjustment in pitch selection and location.

The third mystery, involving the Astros' lineup and its very poor performance in a long series of great importance, I think I'm beginning to understand a little. We've seen Houston's batting order behave as it did Thursday on numerous occasions both this season and last. Yesterday's effort differed only in degree, not in kind, from the club's prior struggles against the hard breaking pitch and the high fastball. What made Thursday's defeat feel worse than the normal defeat was a combination of elements, elements we've seen before in many prior games (including this series)--questionable player substitutions, poor plate judgment, terrible luck--all coming together and wrecking a boat that, despite Houston's place in the standings, was barely afloat as it was.

A journey back along the Ohio this weekend and a long stay upcoming in home port may salvage the ship and the season yet for Houston, but Thursday's loss, in all of the ways I've tried to describe, was such a stunning disaster that for many hours yesterday afternoon and evening I could not find the words to express myself. Even now, a day after the storm has passed, and I can finally compose myself at the keyboard, I'm not sure these words are adequate enough, accurate enough, and truthful enough to account for game four's loss or the loss of the series as a whole.