Game 69: Indians 2, Astros 0

It turned out that the Indians would get all the scoring they needed after Choo and Cabrera hit to lead off the game.

After one-half inning, the score was 1-0 on a Shin-Soo Choo leadoff triple and an Asdrubal Cabrera sacrifice fly. 1-0 would also be the score after the second inning, the third inning, the fourth inning....

Ubaldo Jimenez would get off to a rocky start, but was bailed out of the bottom of the first thanks to a strange double play. With runners at first and second, Carlos Lee hit a grounder at Jason Kipnis. The runner coming from first (Lowrie) stopped in his tracks, but rather than go for Lowrie, Kipnis threw to first first to get the force there. Casey Kotchman then threw to second in order to get Lowrie, who was by now in no-man's land. The Indians started a rundown with Lowrie, but after a couple of throws Jordan Schafer, who had started the play at second, had rounded third and tried to sneak home, but Asdrubal Cabrera saw it and nabbed him at the plate for the uncoventional 1-4-3-6-2 double play.

That seemed to jump start Jimenez, for he would settle down and pitch into the seventh inning, striking out 8 and not allowing a run while pitching his entire start with a 1-0 lead. This was probably his best road start of the year, and like with Masterson's recent good turn, Ubaldo's recent string of decent to good starts makes this rotation look a lot better as we head into the summer half of the schedule.

Vinnie Pestano pitched a 1-2-3 inning, but all of the outs were loud ones. Shin-Soo Choo caught the first out of the eighth while up against the fence; the second out found Choo's glove just in front of the warning track, and the third one was a line drive that Michael Brantley ran down. Pestano got away with at least two pitches in the batter's nitro zone, but today he and the Indians were lucky.

The Tribe score their second run in their last at-bat on an eighth-inning Michael Brantley single. It didn't matter, for Chris Perez completely shut down the Astros in the ninth, striking out the side on swings-and-misses. Perez has now saved 23 straight games.

Source: FanGraphs