Pitching Wins in April, Too
There's an old baseball saying that pitching wins in October. That's true. But pitching also wins in late March, when rosters are still sorting themselves out and lineups are still trying to find their timing after a winter of golf swings and fishing trips. On Monday in Houston, the Red Sox proved exactly that.
Boston's staff held the Astros in check across nine innings of stressful, traffic-on-the-bases, clench-your-teeth baseball. Houston had runners in scoring position in five separate innings and came away with damage in only two of them. That's not luck. That's pitching with conviction when it matters most.
The Astros Keep Knocking
Credit where it's due — Houston's hitters did not make this easy. They worked deep counts, they sprayed the ball to all fields, and they put the kind of pressure on Boston's pitching staff that wears down arms and frays nerves. The problem for the Astros wasn't effort or approach. It was execution. Twice they had the go-ahead run at third with less than two outs and couldn't get him home.
Minute Maid Park gets loud when the Astros have something cooking, and the crowd was in it all night. The atmosphere felt more like June than March, which tells you something about how seriously Houston's fanbase takes even the earliest games of the season.
Early Returns
For the Red Sox, this was the kind of road win that builds confidence heading into April. They didn't overpower Houston — nobody's going to confuse this Boston pitching staff with a historically dominant rotation. What they did was out-compete them. They made the pitches they needed to make when they needed to make them, and they got just enough offense to make it hold up. In the early going, that's enough. It won't always be. But tonight, it was.