Four Astros homers give Mike Minor major problems. Astros beat Rangers 4-3

If it wasn’t for home run luck, the Astros wouldn’t have had any luck at all tonight. They could only muster seven hits, but the four home runs among them were the margin of victory over the Rangers.

Not that all the home runs were exactly lucky. Especially not this one by Yordan Alvarez.

This home run was 474 feet, the longest home run hit by an Astro in the Statcast era. What is doubly remarkable about it was the launch angle, only 24 degrees, far below optimum for maximum distance. Five hundred feet seems well within the realm of possibility for this 22 year-old phenom.

It was the third of three consecutive home runs that inning, starting with a 408 foot Jose Altuve blast, his 13th of the season, and then an Alex Bregman Crawford Boxes special, 356 feet, followed by the Alvarez piece de resistance.

Here’s the three homers.

The Astros’ fourth homer came earlier, in the second inning off the bat of Yuli Gurriel, his 17th, as he continues on his recent torrid streak.

Meanwhile, on the pitching side, Justin Verlander was cruising to a shutout, but at around 100 pitches in the sixth inning he gave up back-to-back home runs of his own to Roughned Odor and Asdrubal Cabrera. Verlander continues to lead the league in homers allowed, as he simultaneously makes a run for the Cy Young Award. Along with his two runs, Verlander struck out 12 Rangers batters.

The Rangers scored an unearned run in the seventh against Will Harris on an Altuve error. It was his second of the game.

Josh James and Roberto Osuna held the one run lead for the Astros in the eighth and ninth innings respectively. Osuna got his 21st save. The Rangers struck out a total of 15 times.

One of the two two teams tonight was 0-11 with runners in scoring position. That same team left 11 runners on base. That team was not the Astros.

As you may have already seen on our front page, Tyler White was DFA’ed after the game. Jose Urquidy will take his place on the 25 man roster and start tomorrow’s game. His opponent will be Ariel Jurado.

Game time is 6:10 CDT

Box score and videos HERE.