It’s not hard to argue that Boston has indeed been the best offense in the majors to this point: It leads all of baseball in batting average (.295), slugging percentage (.485), OPS+ (125) and net steals (27 for 29 as a team, netting 25 bags), not to mention hits (367), doubles (90), total bases (603) and runs (207).
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Hanigan scored later in the inning on a wild pitch. They had no answer for David Price.
Price then struck out Jose Altuve and George Springer with a pair of 93-mph fastballs to escape the jam. Price has been aided by 8.49 runs of support per nine innings, third best in Major League Baseball. After striking out Carlos Gomez to open up the inning, Luis Valbuena reached on a bunt single, followed up by an Erik Kratz double off the Green Monster to bring Valbuena to third. Dustin Pedroia is also playing very well on 46 hits and 27 runs. The Red Sox need Gray to really push their staff to the next level. Junichi Tazawa recorded the last out of the seventh, and also tossed a scoreless eighth inning. The Sox had Steven Wright on the mound and things were going well for him until the 5th inning when things unraveled and fast.
At this point, not even the defending Cy Young award victor can stop the Red Sox offense. He has knocked in 14 runs in the past four games alone.
The season is young, with less than 25% of the 162-game schedule played, but the Red Sox are showing early on that they are a force to be reckoned with in the American League.
Panik’s homer after a Span single in the fifth inning gave the Giants a 4-1 lead, and Lopez preserved their first victory over Greinke in 12 meetings.
Joe Panik hit a two-run homer to lead the San Francisco Giants to a 4-2 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Bradley is batting.431 with 26 RBIs during the streak. Bogaerts had three RBI.
“It’s pretty cool, but obviously we wanted to win tonight”, said Bradley, who had three hits and extended the longest hitting streak in the majors this season to 19 games. David Ortiz had a sacrifice fly and a double.
Luke Gregerson, the sixth Houston pitcher, worked a flawless ninth with two strikeouts for his eighth save after Will Harris struck out three in a one-hit eighth. It’s just the relentlessness up and down the lineup.
However, Betts would produce for himself in the sixth. The right fielder is 6 for his last 13 after an 0-for-12 stretch.
It marked the first time this season that Wright failed to complete at least six innings and first time since last July 20 that he gave up more than two earned runs in any outing. Over his seven starts and 2-3 record this year, Buccholz has put up a 5.90 ERA and a 1.44 WHIP in 39.2 innings of work. The Astros were positioned for big innings but left five runners on base over the first three innings with only one run.
Towards the end of the game, the blow out would continue even more. While the Astros scored first, plating a run off of Wright in the first, Boston seemed to take control in the second.
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Both are CT natives. It was the third time in the past four games that the Sox scored at least five runs in an inning.
