Astros 6, Rangers 3
Astros 6, Rangers 3
- Doesn’t seem like we’d had a good old fashioned bullpen meltdown in a while.
- Nathan Eovaldi kept the Astros off the board the whole time he was out there, but needed more pitches than would have been preferred to do so, and thus went just 5.2 innings. That is unfortunate, because if he could have gone, say, seven innings, things may have played out a little differently.
- Well, we know things would have played out differently, if only because Nathan Eovaldi would have been pitching instead of Hoby Milner and Shawn Armstrong. There wouldn’t have been a pitching change mid-inning, less time would have elapsed, maybe the Brownian motion of the molecules in the air would have resulted in a ball in the air not traveling quite as far, maybe someone in the stands would have gone to get a hot dog and a souvenir cup of Coke at a slightly different time, impacting how that nourishment entered their body and was turned into cells, maybe a ball would have had a slightly different smudge mark on it when it was fouled off.
- There’s an infinitude of futures but only one past, so an infinite variety of things had the ability to occur prior to Eovaldi being lifted, and infinite amount of outcomes were available if Eovaldi had pitched through the seventh innings. What was, was, what could be, will be.
- The timeline that we experienced here saw Hoby Milner asked to start the seventh, get two outs and allow a run before being lifted with a runner on second in a 2-1 game, and then Shawn Armstrong retire none of the four batters he faced, going walk, walk, single, homer to make it a 6-2 game before being lifted for Cole Winn.
- Armstrong was pitching for the third time in the last four games, and with Bruce Bochy saying pre-game that Robert Garcia, Chris Martin and Luke Jackson were all expected to be available, one would have expected Garcia or Martin to handle the seventh, not the Milner/Armstrong combo. But it turns out LuJack wasn’t available, and so Garcia and Martin were being held back for the eighth and ninth, and so someone else had to pitch the seventh, with these unfortunate results.
- Compounding the problem was the offense doing not much. Texas did get a pair of runs in the second, on a Jonah Heim single that drove in a pair, but then pretty much shut down again until Josh Jung homered in the ninth. The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth were each handled by a different Astro reliever, and the Rangers went down 1-2-3 against each of them.
- Not a stellar night for the bats.
- Nathan Eovaldi maxed out at 96.5 mph with his fastball, averaging 95.7 mph — 1.8 mph over his season average. Hoby Milner’s fastball topped out at 87.7 mph. Shawn Armstrong’s sinker reached 94.4 mph. Cole Winn touched 96.4 mph with his sinker.
- Wyatt Langford had a pair of fly outs at 104.1 mph and 101.6 mph. Josh Smith had a 103.9 mph fly out. Josh Jung’s home run was 101.2 mph.
- Off to start a new winning streak now.