On a day where Justin Verlander takes the mound, Bo Porter decided to give the best hitter on the team a day off. Jose Altuve sat and watched arguably the best pitcher in all of baseball tear through the Astros line-up on his way to being perfect through six innings.
And to think the game started off fairly promising offensively when Robbie Grossman and Fernando Martinez put together very good at-bats by making Verlander throw a lot of pitches.
But, the Astros were able to escape embarrassment history for the second time this season, although in a much less dramatic fashion. With one out in the seventh, Carlos Pena brought his .234 average (at the time) up to the plate and shot a single to right field.
The other story from the game is that Phillip Humber made another bid to be Peacock'd/Bedard'd with another terrible outing. Tim already discussed the replacements for Eric Bedard and feel free to speculate the same scenarios with Humber.
Humber gave up EIGHT runs, with most coming off of THREE home runs allowed. It took him 91 pitches to get through four innings, partly because only 55 of them went for strikes. That lead to three walks, eight hits, and just one strikeout. He was very hittable with almost all of his pitches hanging high in the zone. Several breaking balls came in belt high. For those concerned with ERA, his is now 8.82.
To his credit, the Detroit Tigers are a very good team and pack a big punch offensively. But, Humber served them up some nice pitches to crush.
Hey, but at least Bedard provided some good innings out of the pen.