Astros closer Roberto Osuna blows save and gets win

Astros starter Gerrit Cole pitches a great game only to watch Roberto Osuna blow the save. Next inning, Josh James saves the game and Osuna gets the win.

Gerrit Cole pitched one heck of a game and hands the ball over to the bullpen after six innings. Hector Rondon and Will Harris do a fine job preserving the Astros slim 2-1 lead in the seventh and eighth innings respectively. In comes Osuna to close it out in the bottom of the ninth.

Instead of securing the win for the Astros and Gerrit Cole, Osuna surrenders a game-tying home run to Christian Yelich for his 6th blown save of the season. The Astros retake the lead in the top of the tenth and Josh James holds the Brewers scoreless for the 3-2 victory. Now here’s the kicker, Osuna is accredited with the win.

That’s one of the strange quirks in the scoring system for pitchers I’ll never understand. Osuna blows it but is still the pitcher on record when the Astros score the winning run, therefore he goes down as the winning pitcher in the record books. Something seems very wrong with that.

Let’s get back to Gerrit Cole’s performance. Save a home run by Yasmani Grandal in the first, Cole had a nice outing. From that point on, Cole allowed just two more hits and walked two. But in those six innings of work, he amassed 14 strikeouts. That’s the 16th time this season Cole has had double-digit strikeouts in a game and brings his total on the year to 276.

It was a game of long balls today accounting for four of the five total runs in the game. The two homers for the Astros were provided by Yordan Alvarez (22) in the sixth for the 2-1 lead and the game-winner in the tenth by George Springer (30).

It may not have been the way you would like to see the game play out. I would have loved to see Cole get the win he deserved. But a win is a win and this time of the year, we’ll take it any way we can.