The Launch Angle

Houston Flight is go.

The past few days have been days of great success for Houston. The Houston Astros have kicked off their season, and just finished a dominant sweep of the Boston Red Sox. Artemis II had successful liftoff, and just finished a textbook TLI burn.

The Astros sit at the top of their division, on hopefully on a trajectory to a division title. Artemis II is high above the Earth, on its own ambitious lunar trajectory.

Okay, well NASA is probably doing a little bit better than the Astros. Their launch didn’t begin with two losses to the Angels, or an a opening weekend of underwhelming starting pitching performance.

Nor did it have a temporary closer who hasn’t looked sharp in his first 3 outings of the season, one of which he was pulled from early because of velocity issues that manager Joe Espada assures is “due to issues with the right-hander’s mechanics and not any physical cause.” (Thankfully. Mechanical issues on Artemis II woud lead to more than a blown save.)

But they’re both still on the up and up. Life is good in Houston.

(Interesting note: One of the proposed names for this website during brainstorming sessions was something like “Moonshot”. But this is the internet, and there was concern it might be confused for a website featuring butts. We’d probably get more hits that way.)

The Astros look to keep the successes of a five game win streak going on their first road trip of the season. A 10 game road trip over 11 days, it begins with a 3 game set against the locationless Athletics in Sacramento (Just call them the Sacramento A’s already), before a 3 game series against Colorado and a 4 game series against the Mariners.

The Astros and A’s both feature younger catchers, each in their 5th seasons but heading in very different directions.

Yainer Diaz, 27, burst onto the scene, seemingly a future star, collecting AL Rookie of the Year votes in 2023, hittgin 23 home runs in just 104 games. Since then, his workload has gone up but his offense has gone down, as opposing teams have exposed his poor plate discipline.

For the A’s, Shea Langeliers, 28, has been on upward trajectory, a bigger and bigger offensive force each of the past 3 years.

This trend has continued into 2026. Where Langeliers so far has a wRC+ of 297. Diaz has a wRC+ of… 2. Yes, 2, batting 3 for 19 with no extra base hits and just 1 walk. In contrast, Langeliers has 5 home runs already on a season that’s just one week old.

Sure it’s a small sample size, but not altogether unexpected when you consider the trend over the last 3 years.

With both teams coming off an off day, Diaz and Langeliers each project to be in the lineup today. Cristian Javier makes his second start of the season opposite the A’s Jeffrey Springs, another lefty. This makes for the Astros’ 5th start against a left handed pitcher in their first 9 games. Sorry, Lopeheads, but Joey probably won’t start today.

Ordinarily, I would expect Jose Altuve to have the day off now that it’s the Astros first game away from home, and he doesn’t deserve those boos, but they can’t sit him against a southpaw. Get ready for Altuve to have a banner day against the 33 year old journeyman.

This piece will be updated with starting lineups as they become available.

Update:

The game will be broadcast at 8:40 p.m. CT on SCHN 2 (There’s a Rockets game on SCHN 1) 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.

Here is a sample from Wednesday’s in-game discourse. I’ll let you guess at what point in the game this was:

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 credit: NASA