Blue Jays broadcast was completely confused as Astros shot themselves in the foot

Tuesday night was not a banner night for the Houston Astros' efforts to improve their baserunning. One of the biggest points of emphasis this spring from manager Joe Espada was aggressively running the bases, but the early results have shown that there are going to be some growing pains as guys learn in the moment.

One can live with plays like the one against the Yankees where Mauricio Dubon was thrown out at home by Juan Soto. That was a perfectly reasonable send and Soto just made a great throw on a close play at the plate. When you're aggressive, that's going to happen sometimes, but generally the positives outweigh the negatives.

However, this is only true when you don't make colossal blunders, and the Astros had a doozy on Tuesday evening. After Kyle Tucker sneakily took second base on a pop out, Jose Altuve got caught creeping down the third base line and got picked off. If there was a silver lining, it was that the Blue Jays' broadcast had no freaking idea what was going on through any of it.

Astros' baserunning blunder costs them late, Blue Jays' broadcast clueless

It is genuinely funny when live TV direction goes awry, and this was a doozy. When Tucker advanced to second base on what appeared to be an innocuous play, Toronto's announcer were completely befuddled and needed to see a replay. Not only was the camera angle they used for the replay not particularly helpful, they were showing the replay WHILE the Altuve pickoff in question happened, and had to replay THAT as well to figure out what the heck was going on.

As for the play itself, Altuve should have known better, plain and simple. He's a veteran who has loads of experience running the bases in a lot of situations. Making an out at third base like that in a tight game is brutal and could have easily changed the outcome given how the late innings played out.

There have been a lot of positives so far from the Astros to start the season despite their record, but they definitely have some things that they need to clean up, and soon.

More Astros News from Climbing Tal's Hill