Rookie Hunter Brown allowed two hits and one unearned run over seven innings and Chas McCormick homered and drove in four runs to lead the Houston Astros to a 5-1 victory over the Minnesota Twins on Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis.
Mauricio Dubon had a double and also scored twice, Jeremy Pena went 2-for-4 with an RBI double and run and Yainer Diaz also doubled and had two hits for Houston. The Astros salvaged the final game of the three-game series to avoid being swept in a series by the Twins for the first time since August of 2013.
Brown (1-0), ranked the No. 39 prospect by MLB.com and the top-rated prospect in the Astros organization, picked up his third major league win in his ninth career game and fourth start. The fifth-round pick out of Division II Wayne State University in Detroit walked two and struck out seven.
Donovan Solano had an RBI double for Minnesota, which had a two-game winning streak snapped. Tyler Mahle (1-1) took the loss, allowing four runs on eight hits over six innings. He walked one and struck out six.
Houston took a 2-0 lead in the third inning when Dubon reached base on a two-out infield single and then scored on McCormick’s second homer of the season, a 354-foot opposite-field drive into the flower bed in the overhang in right field.
The Twins cut the lead to 2-1 in the fourth when Byron Buxton led off with an infield single, went to second on a throwing error by Alex Bregman and scored two outs later on Solano’s line-drive double down the right field line.
The Astros extended their lead to 4-1 in the fifth when Pena led off with a single and advanced to third on an opposite-field, two-out double by Dubon. McCormick then drove in both runners with a broken-bat single to center.
Pena made it 5-1 in the eighth with an RBI double down the left field line, driving in Yordan Alvarez, who had singled.
–Field Level Media
