Alex Bregman’s Instagram Trouble Makes Boston Cackle, But Jose Altuve’s Injured Knee is the Real Astros Danger: The Defending Champs Desperately Need a Moment

Alex Bregman knows the question is coming. This is a 24-year-old who’s becoming well versed in Major League narratives. And after Steve Pearce’s home run gives the Boston Red Sox the lead for good, sending the team with the best record in baseball rolling to an emphatic 8-2 statement of a Game 3 win… well, there is no doubt Bregman is going to spend his postgame talking about Instagram.

It turns out it was the topic of choice before the game as well.

“We actually talked about in center field before the game,” Bregman says, surrounded by more TV cameras and reporters than some major political press briefings attract, at his locker. “Things nowadays get blown way out of proportion. It’s incredible how it’s even news nowadays.”

A few questions later, Bregman shrugs. “It is what it is,” he says. “I tell you what, I didn’t lose any sleep over it.”

The Houston Astros didn’t lose this game — and at least temporary control of this heavyweight American League Championship Series — because the Astros’ budding mega star posted an Instagram story highlighting the back-to-back-to-back home runs Houston hit off Red Sox Game 3 starter Nathan Eovaldi in a regular season game. But he sure made the series more lively.

One way or the other, Alex Bregman is the straw that stirs the drink in this ALCS.

And now, he must push the defending world champs, a team that came back from much more dire situations against the New York Yankees in the ALCS and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series last October, to do it again.

Pearce took particular offense at Bregman’s Instagram work — and he takes out a lot of anger on a fastball from Astros reliever Joe Smith in a crucial situation. The Astros’ ever-controversial-closer Roberto Osuna later blows up in the eighth inning, giving up five runs, including the first grand slam he’s ever surrendered in his Major League career.

Welcome to a series. The champs are going to be tested now.

“It’s a dog fight now,” Astros starter Dallas Keuchel says. “It’s a coin flip from here on out. Two teams with 100 wins going at.

“I expect us to be right back in the thick of it tomorrow.”

These battered, bruised and wounded Astros face a particularly telling Game 4 Wednesday night in Minute Maid Park, the house that the Red Sox quieted more effectively and brutally than the harshest librarian in Game 3 on this chilly Tuesday in Houston.

When Osuna gives up five runs in the top of the eighth inning, turning a 3-2 game into a 8-2 Red Sox laughter, he does not just give fuel to all the critics who say the Astros never should have signed a player suspended 75 games by Major League Baseball for a beyond troubling domestic violence incident. He puts Houston’s would be dynasty in serious jeopardy.

Repeating as champions in any sport is a Herculean task. In baseball, it’s grown into a near impossible one with its 162-game grueling seasons and three round playoff sprint. Star players are worn down and chewed up — and the Astros are living that.

Jose Altus’s knee is bothering him, clearly sapping some of his power even on a day when he goes 2-for-3, scores two runs and beats out a bunt single. Carlos Correa’s back kills him on some days — and he almost never knows which days it’s going to strike.

These Astros have come back from tougher situations than this — down 3-2 to the Yankees in last fall’s ALCS after three straight losses in the Bronx jungle, trailing in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the World Series after having already lost Game 1. Compared to those, this 2-1 series deficit is minor.

But that was a different, healthier Houston team.

Now, the Astros’ real leader — the one who really doesn’t know Instagram — is fighting against his own body too.

“He’s playing on one knee,” Bregman says of Altuve. “Competing every at bat. Busting his butt down the line. That’s a leader right there. He’s going to go out there and suit up every day and give it everything he has. No matter if he’s feeling good ….

“He’s somebody that I like up to and everybody else in this clubhouse looks up to. The way he goes about his business, it’s special to be on his team. That’s a star.”

The Astros need more of them on Wednesday night. Despite two more hits, including an RBI double in Game 3, Bregman leaves Minute Maid kicking himself for not coming through with Altuve on and a chance to tie it or take the lead in the bottom of the seventh.

“I have to be better,” Bregman says.

Tony Kemp’s Lost Moment

Little Tony Kemp saves the Astros early. The guy who willed himself into being the defending champs’ semi regular ninth hitter uses every bit of his 5-foot-6 frame to bail out Keuchel in the third inning. When Pearce sends a blast to the left field wall with two on, Kemp leaps up against the giant manual scoreboard, extends his glove and somehow comes down with the inning-ending out.

It’s a huge play — one that becomes a footnote as soon as Boston’s No. 9 hitter Jackie Bradley Jr. rockets that Osuna pitch over the wall for a grand slam.

Suddenly, these Astros have at least as many questions as they do answers.

“Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to roll over either,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch says.

Let the Red Sox throw an Instagram victory party. Bregman knows he’s set himself up for some not-so-veiled Boston fun.

“I’ve never, I guess, really been over the top,” Bradley Jr. says. “I heard this saying from one of my coaches back in the day. He said, ‘No one should ever know whether you’re winning or losing.’ ”

You’ll always know if Alex Bregman is winning or losing. And that’s partly why his Astros teammates love him so.

The Astros are losing for sure now. But Game 4 offers the chance to tell a new story. Ready or not. Healthy or not. Whole or not. Here it comes.