Five-run frame gets Astros right at home, pads AL West lead

HOUSTON -- The only way the Astros are going to quiet the quickly-growing narrative that their home ballpark is working against them is to start winning some games in Houston.

They took an encouraging first step on Saturday night, topping the Padres, 7-5, at Minute Maid Park to halt their home losing streak at six games. Houston also avoided falling below the .500 mark at home, and will instead take a 36-35 record into Sunday’s series finale.

Because no one else in the American League West has taken firm hold of the division lead, the Astros have been on a bit of a hamster wheel through their ups (sweeping the Rangers) and downs (being swept by the Yankees). Saturday’s win gave them some tangible movement in the form of a 1 1/2-game lead over the Mariners, who lost to the Rays earlier in the evening.

• Games remaining: vs. SD (1), vs. OAK (3), at KC (3), vs. BAL (3), vs. KC (3), at SEA (3), at AZ (3).
• Standings update: The Astros (81-62) are in first place in the American League West by 1 1/2 games over the Mariners (79-63), who hold the tiebreaker vs. Houston. The Astros currently are the second-best division winner in the AL, meaning they would bypass the Wild Card Series round.

“It was real big,” manager Dusty Baker said of the win. “We're down to like 1/19 of the season right now. Every game is huge, especially when you're trying to pad the lead and hold off everyone behind you.

“But you’ve just got to look toward the finish line now, not worry about what they're doing behind. You'll take some help from your friends, but it's in your control to control your own destiny.”

Until the fifth inning, offense was scarce, with Yordan Alvarez giving the only glimpse into what regular life is like for the Astros at Minute Maid Park, before times. The moonshot he hit off Seth Lugo in the third inning was very Yordan-like: it left his bat at 109.8 mph, traveled a Statcast-projected 407 feet and landed in the second deck in right field.

The Padres roared back with four runs off Cristian Javier in the fourth, but their lead was short-lived, thanks to a fifth inning that produced five Astros runs and a whole lot of station-to-station (to-station-to-station) baseball, with 10 batters providing eight hits -- six of which were singles.

It wasn’t necessarily the Astros’ typical style of play -- they do dig the long ball -- but with so much going wrong at home lately, they’ll take it.

“We got a lot of hits and kept the line moving, and you don't see a whole bunch of consecutive hits anymore like that,” Baker said. “That shows you what happens when you make contact and you get the momentum going, just like they had momentum going in that four-run inning. They scored all those runs with two outs.”

When that many batters reach base in one inning and no one homers, determining who stands out more than the others is probably a useless exercise. But it gets easier with a broader look at the game.

It’s probably fitting that on a night when the Astros’ struggles at home took a backseat to one of their more exciting wins, the slugger best known for his monster shots at Minute Maid Park was right in the middle of it all.

Alvarez was on base in each of his first three plate appearances. In addition to the homer, he walked in the first inning and doubled in the breakout fifth, driving in Jose Altuve. Alvarez, who has been on base seven times in the first two games against the Padres, is hitting .403 (25-for-62) with nine extra-base hits, 20 RBIs and a 1.252 OPS during his 17-game on-base streak.

“I always say if he hits one ball hard that day, he’s going to hit four balls hard that day,” Alex Bregman said. “He's incredible.”

Alvarez has been back from the injured list for about six weeks, and Baker noted that it took a while for everything to fall back into place after such a long layoff.

“He hit a number of balls to the wall that ordinarily, if your hand strength was there and your timing is there, they’d be over the wall,” Baker said. “So now, they’re going over the wall.”

The Astros have 10 home games remaining, and even if they win all of them, their final home record will be somewhat pedestrian, compared to recent seasons. But they will focus on bigger things through the final stretch of the regular season -- winning wherever they are, and holding off the pesky Mariners and Rangers in the tightest AL West race in years.

“I think it's no secret that this team has been battling all year in terms of health,” Alvarez said. “It's also not a secret of the quality team that we know that we are. We weren't there [for] a time, but now we're back in first place.”