The Launch Angle

For a night, it was 2017 again. Lance McCullers, Jr. was striking out hitters with premium stuff. Altuve couldn’t be gotten out, unless he got it out himself, which he did twice with two jacks. Correa was back at shortstop making dazzling plays.

Game one of the 3 game series in the win column for the Astros. Tonight, Hunter Brown takes the mound for his second start of the season, while Brayan Bello (No relation to Scott Baio. Yes, they’re pronounced the same way.) makes his season debut for the Red Sox.

Brown, a 2025 AL Cy Young Finalist, had a scoreless outing with 9 K on Opening Day, but managed just 4.2 innings, despite throwing over 100 pitches. The stuff was there, but the command was not:

Brown was also helped by some undisciplined Angels bats. We’ll see tonight if Brown’s command is better.

This post will be updated with lineups as they are made available. Bello is a righty, so expect Loperfido back in there. And if this “start Pena every other day” trend continues, tonight will see Pena back at leadoff, and Altuve returned to the middle of the order.

Update:

The game will be broadcast at 7:10 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.

We hope you will join us and the rest of the Launch Angle community for the game! The turnout has been fantastic on the TLA Discord Server for the game threads. More and more people are joining the party:

Here is a sample from yesterday’s in-game discourse:

Join us again for today’s game. Just join the Discord server using this link: https://launch-angle.com/discord .

If you’ve participated in gamethreads on other Astros sites in the past, you will probably see a lot of familiar names. Chat, lurk, do whatever! (But please say “hi”, so we know you’re not a bot.)

Feature photo from @astros on X, Source Link.