{"id":172246,"date":"2025-09-27T05:07:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T05:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/172246\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T05:07:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T05:07:08","slug":"astros-on-brink-of-playoff-elimination-after-loss-to-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/172246\/","title":{"rendered":"Astros on brink of playoff elimination after loss to Angels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ANAHEIM, Calif. \u2014 Mike Trout hit two home runs, including a tiebreaking shot in the eighth inning, Kenley Jansen got his 29th save, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/baseball\/mlb\/teams\/los-angeles-angels\/\" class=\"sn-team-post-link\" target=\"_self\" data-team=\"los-angeles-angels\" data-league=\"mlb\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Los Angeles Angels<\/a> pushed the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/baseball\/mlb\/teams\/houston-astros\/\" class=\"sn-team-post-link\" target=\"_self\" data-team=\"houston-astros\" data-league=\"mlb\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Houston Astros<\/a> to the brink of playoff elimination with a 4-3 victory on Friday night.<\/p>\n<p>Trout snapped a 3-3 tie with a leadoff homer to right-center field off Astros reliever Bryan King (5-4) in the eighth.<\/p>\n<p>Jansen struck out the side in the ninth, winning a 10-pitch duel with Mauricio Dub\u00f3n to end the game, for the 476th save of his career, moving the 37-year-old right-hander to within two saves of Lee Smith for third on baseball\u2019s career list.<\/p>\n<p>Angels left-hander Brock Burke (7-1) threw a scoreless eighth for the win.<\/p>\n<p>The Astros, who blew a 3-0 lead, are one game behind Cleveland and Detroit for the final AL wild card, though either the Guardians or Tigers will advance to the playoffs as AL Central champion.<\/p>\n<p>Cleveland and Detroit also hold tiebreakers over Houston, so the Astros will have to win their final two games, and the non-division-winning Central team will have to lose twice for the Astros to reach the playoffs for the ninth straight year.<\/p>\n<p>The Astros&#8217; Christian Walker sparked a three-run fourth-inning rally with a solo homer.<\/p>\n<p>Trout led off the bottom of the fourth with his 24th homer. Back-to-back doubles by Christian Moore and Denzer Guzman pulled the Angels to within 3-2 in the fifth, and Chris Taylor\u2019s RBI single in the seventh made it 3-all.<\/p>\n<p>The Angels tied the score in the seventh, but the rally may have been bigger had Astros&#8217; centre fielder Zach Cole not thrown out Christian Moore attempting to go from first to third on Guzman\u2019s single.<\/p>\n<p>Trout\u2019s 30th career multi-homer game gave him 1,017 career RBIs, moving him past Tim Salmon for second on the franchise\u2019s career list behind Garret Anderson (1,292).<\/p>\n<p>Angels RHP Caden Dana (0-3, 6.39 ERA) will start against Astros RHP AJ Blubaugh (3-1, 1.93) on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANAHEIM, Calif. \u2014 Mike Trout hit two home runs, including a tiebreaking shot in the eighth inning, Kenley&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-172246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}