Astros pitcher booed in wild-card loss to White Sox rips ‘spoiled’ fans

When the Houston Astros clinched an American League wild-card berth in 2015, it came as a shock.

The Astros tanked their way to 100-loss seasons every year from 2011-13. In 2014, they lost 92 games. Suddenly, a young George Springer, Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve were stealing wins from the eventual World Series champion Kansas City Royals in a five-game Division Series loss. The atmosphere at Minute Maid Park (as it was known at the time) was electric.

Eleven years later, the shoe is on the other foot. The Chicago White Sox visited Houston for their first postseason game in five years, on the heels of three consecutive 100-loss seasons. When the Astros lost the first game of their best-of-three wild-card series on Tuesday, Sept. 29, the boos fell like daggers on a field that’s hosted postseason baseball 10 times in 12 seasons since their initial 2014 run.

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Astros pitcher Bennett Sousa, in an unusually candid moment after the game, called out the change in fans’ expectations.

“The fans here are definitely spoiled with a lot of ALCS and World Series runs, and we have to earn that right to bring this team back to that position,” reliever Bennett Sousa said (via the Athletic’s Chandler Rome). “That being said, when this team was in their first (playoff) series 10 years ago, Minute Maid Park was probably packed. It makes a big difference. If we were in Chicago, it’d probably be loud as s—.”

For his part, Sousa did little to discourage the crowd’s negative response. He allowed two hits and one run in the seventh inning of the Astros’ 6-3 loss.

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“Boos reached a dull roar when Sousa spiked two consecutive seventh-inning sliders, but they began within the first two innings of this bullpen game,” Rome wrote.

Both the Astros and White Sox used bullpen games to patch together nine innings in Game 1. Starters Sean Burke (Chicago) and Hunter Brown (Houston) will take the mound in Game 2 of the best-of-five series Wednesday.

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