The Houston Astros had their best month of the 2016 season in June with a record of 18-8, moving past the .500 mark into second place in the AL West Division.\u00a0 That\u2019s the good news.\u00a0 The bad news is that they lost ground to the first place Texas Rangers, falling 8 \u00bd games behind after being 7 \u00bd games behind at the end of May.\u00a0 The Rangers were 20-8 in June including 3-1 against the Astros.<\/p>\n
Since May 24, the Astros have won 25 games while losing only \u00a09.\u00a0 The team has played much better on the road than they did last year.\u00a0 During this 34 game stretch, they compiled a record of 13-7 in road games.<\/p>\n
The Astros swept two 3-game series against the Los Angeles Angels in June and also swept a 3-game series at home against Oakland and a 2-game series at St. Louis.\u00a0 Both the hitting and pitching were improved in the month.\u00a0 The team on-base percentage was .354 in June, second only to the Baltimore Orioles at .357.\u00a0 The Astros scored an average of 5.19 runs per game while holding opponents to 3.38.\u00a0 The team scored 10 or more runs in a game 5 times in June, highlighted by back-to-back 13 run games in Kansas City against the defending World Champions.<\/p>\n
Individually, several Astros performed well in June, starting with Jose Altuve who hit .420 for the month with an on-base percentage (OBP) of .492 and a slugging average (SLG) of .620. \u00a0\u00a0He was named American League Player of the Month for June.\u00a0 Altuve leads the major leagues in hitting (.357) but has lost his lead in stolen bases to former Astro, Jonathan Villar of Milwaukee.\u00a0 Luis Valbuena (.316), Colby Ramos (.313) and Carlos Correa (.303) also batted over .300 for the month and Valbuena and Correa both had an OBP over .400 and a SLG over .500.\u00a0 Evan Gattis had 7 home runs and Carlos Gomez finally started producing after coming off the disabled list, hitting .286 with 3 home runs in June.\u00a0 Top prospect, A. J. Reed, made his major league debut but started slowly going 0 for 15 with 8 strikeouts.<\/p>\n
On the pitching side, Doug Fister was again the top starter with 4 wins and an ERA of 2.45 in June.\u00a0 Dallas Keuchel won his last 2 starts and is showing signs of regaining his 2015 form.\u00a0 The other three starters, Collin McHugh, Lance McCullers and Mike Fiers were consistent.\u00a0 Will Harris took over as closer and converted all 7 of his save opportunities.<\/p>\n
The minor league teams also improved in June.\u00a0 Corpus Christi in the Class AA Texas League came on strong to win the first half championship and qualify for the playoffs.\u00a0 The other three full-season farm clubs have combined with Corpus Christi for a record of 164-145 at the end of June.\u00a0 The three short-season domestic farm teams began play in June but have started slowly with a combined record of 10-19.<\/p>\n
The Astros have a favorable schedule in the month of July with 16 of their 25 games at home and no games scheduled against the Texas Rangers.\u00a0 They have nine more games against the Rangers in August and September to try to offset their 1-9 record against the Rangers earlier in the season\u00a0 The Rangers have won 51 games at the end of June, the same number as the Chicago Cubs, a team that some baseball analysts are comparing with the great teams of the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Houston Astros had their best month of the 2016 season in June with a record of 18-8, moving past the .500 mark into second place in the AL West Division.\u00a0 That\u2019s the good news.\u00a0 The bad news is that they lost ground to the first place Texas Rangers, falling 8 \u00bd games behind after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}