With the Silver Boot on the line, the Astros did what they have done for the past nine seasons now and showed out, completing the three-game sweep of the Texas Rangers with a 5-2 win on Wednesday.
After today, since Jacob deGrom threw eight innings of shutout baseball against the Astros in May, the Astros have tallied 10 earned runs off him in his last 16.1 innings of work. That accounts for nearly 6% of the runs he has allowed this season.
Each team put a couple runs on the board in the first two
innings, it was in the third that the Astros took over. After a leadoff single to start the inning, Jose Altuve sent a 2-1 fastball over the Crawford Boxes to give Houston a 4-2 lead.
Jeremy Peña added on to this in the fifth with a leadoff home run into the first row of the Crawford Boxes, giving the Astros now a 5-2 lead. This homer went along with some amazing defence by him later that inning, making a great jump-throw from second.
These runs were all to support starter Cristian Javier, who had a little bit of a bounce-back start after allowing four runs in each of his last two outings and leaving with a big lead.
Cristian Javier’s final line:
6 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 4 K, 88-54 TP-S
Craig Kimbrel was the first arm out of the pen for Espada and he had a bounce-back outing of his own after allowing two runs his last time out, going one inning of hitless ball, striking out one batter.
Steven Okert came in to take over after that and, after allowing a leadoff walk and a single, he got himself into a first and third situation with two-outs. That was when Espada took the ball from Okert and gave it to his most reliable arm in this situation, Bryan King, who left both runners stranded.
King has now inherited runners in 22 of his 65 outings this season out of the pen and has not allowed anyone to score.
He came back out for the top of the ninth and, after throwing just two pitches in the top of the eighth, sat the Rangers down in order to finish off the game and give Houston the 5-2 win with help from another fantastic web-gem from Peña to finish off the game. That marks King’s second save of the season.
Houston now leads and will fight for the division in the final nine games of the season, with all nine of them being against AL West teams. This all starts with a three-game series against the Seattle Mariners starting Friday at 7:10 P.M.
