Astros vs. A’s game thread

Payback time

After the Colorado Rockies and A’s series went the most imaginable way possible resulting in Oakland taking a much needed two of three, it gets a little tougher now. This weekend the A’s welcome their divisional rival Houston Astros to town for a three-game stand starting tonight.

Welcome AN and happy Friday! Hope everyone is looking forward to (hopefully) a long weekend ahead.

The last time these two teams met it felt quite long for the A’s themselves. Just over a week ago, they suffered a four-game series sweep to the very same Astros in Texas while scoring a combined four runs. The A’s have got back to their winning ways since thankfully and their offense has began to turn it around after a rough ten-day stretch.

Tonight, the A’s are gonna need that offense to produce in support of Ross Stripling.

Stripling has the most losses in baseball with eight and the sixth-worse ERA amongst qualified starters at 5.19. The numbers don’t tell the full story, but Stripling has been horrid two of his last three outings going a combined 6.2 innings allowing 19 hits and 15 runs. The one silver lining: that one good start sandwiched between was against the Astros where Stripling was pulled too early if anything.

Below is the lineup behind Stripling tonight. Miguel Andujar makes his season and A’s debut batting fourth in left field after being reinstated from the Injured List earlier today. Andujar had a fabulous spring training before getting hurt just days before Opening Day.

Getting the start for the Astros is 41-year-old future hall of famer Justin Verlander. Verlander has aged like fine wine for the most part throughout his career and he’s piecing together another solid start to the 2024 season — especially for someone of his age. One rough start against the New York Yankees skew the numbers a little bit but make no mistake; Verlander’s still got it.

Pitching hasn’t been the Astros specialty this season, but hitting sure has. The offensive core of José Altuve, Alex Bregman, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker and Jeremy Pena have stood the test of time and continued to rake this season. Tucker has really stood out in particular leading the MLB in home runs with 17. Recent speculation has indicated he’ll be line for a nice pay day at some point possibly.

Those same five hitters are ironically the top five in the lineup tonight. Here’s the rest of the always dangerous Astros lineup taking the field as written by manager Joe Espada:

Let’s go A’s, it’s time to finally beat these clowns.