HOUSTON — Of the 149 major-league players who’ve logged at least 100 competitive runs, only five have a slower sprint speed than Pete Alonso. The lumbering slugger can still seize advantage of apathy, so in the third inning of a sleepy Sunday matinee at Daikin Park, he tried to steal second base.Alonso stole two bases across his first 96 games as a Baltimore Oriole. On Saturday, he swiped his third. Perhaps that should’ve heightened someone’s alert on Sunday, be it Houston Astros ace Hunter Brown, his personal catcher Yainer Diaz, the makeshift middle infield playing behind them or anyone else within a team trying to prove it deserves meaningful additions at the upcoming trade deadline.“What they do in the front office is what they do,” closer Josh Hader said. “If they decide they want to get players, bring them in — reinforcements — and make us a better ballclub, that’s a winning attitude.”Seeing that from the existing group should be a prerequisite, perhaps even the impetus needed to improve a team treading water in a woebegone American League.2026 Aces Project update: MLB insiders rank starting pitchersAndy McCulloughInstead, across 29 abysmal innings this weekend, the Astros played with the antithesis of a “winning attitude.” They stranded 28 baserunners, surrendered 23 free passes, struck four extra-base hits, squandered two winnable games, sunk to seven games below .500 and raised serious questions about their status as aggressive buyers.“Obviously it’s not what we envisioned,” said Brown, who failed to finish six innings for the fourth time in six starts since coming off the injured list. “You want to come out of the break and get on a nice little run. We haven’t done that.”On Sunday, Brown paid Alonso no attention while he drifted off first base and headed toward second. Gunnar Henderson stood on third base, but Diaz threw down to second anyway. Henderson, mind you, scored the go-ahead run in Saturday’s game after Diaz vacated home plate on a routine chopper that second baseman Jose Altuve could not convert into an out.Altuve received a rare start at designated hitter on Sunday, so Ray Delgado caught Diaz’s ill-advised throw. Delgado applied the tag on Alonso far too late and argued with second-base umpire Eric Bacchus to the contrary. Henderson scored Baltimore’s second run while Delgado did.