McHugh ends season on high note; Altuve retains hits lead
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Collin McHugh ended his season much better than he started it.
The Astros righthander pitched 72⁄ innings of scoreless baseball Saturday night in the team’s penultimate game of the season, a 3-0 victory over the Los Angeles Angels. He was perfect through 42⁄ innings before Andrelton Simmons singled up the middle for one of only three hits McHugh allowed.
McHugh, 29, arbitration-eligible this winter for the first time, capped his career-high 33rd start with a 4.34 ERA, a 0.45 drop-off from last year but the best among Astros to make more than 15 starts this year. He had a 13-10 mark.
April was McHugh’s worst month. He opened his season by allowing six runs, five earned, while recording just one out at Yankee Stadium.
September was McHugh’s best month, as he recorded a 2.45 ERA in 362⁄ innings in six starts. 3
The Astros managed 10 hits Saturday. With two more singles, Jose Altuve maintained his major league lead in hits, 215 to Boston’s Mookie Betts’ 214. Altuve will DH in Sunday’s finale; the game, like the previous two, is meaningless and Altuve, batting .338, has locked up his second batting title in three years.
In stealing two bases, Altuve became the second player in Astros history with five consecutive 30-steal seasons, joining Cesar Cedeno (1972-77). He is one shy of 200 stolen bases for his six-year career.
Three RBI singles, two by Evan Gattis and one by Jake Marisnick, were responsible for the Astros’ runs off Tyler Skaggs and six Angels relievers.
Rodgers earns first start in bigs
Brady Rodgers’ best season as a professional will culminate with the Richmond native making his initial start in the major leagues.
Rodgers, a starter who has pitched only in relief since his September callup, will start for the Astros in their season finale Sunday afternoon against the Los Angeles Angels.
Given he hasn’t logged more than two innings in an appearance since Aug. 23, it’s unlikely the 26-yearold righthander will pitch deeper than five innings.
“It’s really exciting,” he said after manager A.J. Hinch made the announcement Saturday. “I’m definitely looking forward to the opportunity.
“(I’m going to) try to finish on a strong note to finish the season for both myself and the Astros.”
Rodgers posted a 2.86 ERA in 22 starts in Class AAA en route to Pacific Coast League pitcher of the year honors.
He struggled mightily out of the bullpen upon his promotion to the Astros early last month, allowing five runs in each of his first two outings, but logged scoreless appearances in his last two.
“I looked at film from the first two outings and the previous outings and I just wasn’t myself the first two,” he said. “I was trying to be a guy that I wasn’t.
“I was trying to be a guy out of the pen who threw 93, 94 (mph) with good stuff and that’s not who I am. I’m a guy who can just spot up with 89, 90 and work off of that.
“The last few outings that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, so I’m going to try to keep doing that on the start tomorrow.”
Correa focuses on improvement
Astros shortstop Carlos Correa’s expectations for himself are even higher than everyone else’s.
So the tone with which he spoke in assessing his season was not exactly surprising.
“It was an OK year,” he said. “Obviously not what I was hoping for, not the expectations that I had for this year.”
Correa, the reigning American League Rookie of the Year and a preseason MVP candidate, was worth at least five wins for the Astros this season, more than all but 10 to 15 AL players.
The 22-year-old came into Saturday leading AL shortstops in doubles (36), RBIs (96) and on-base plus slugging percentage (.818).
Despite his modest selfassessment, Correa had the best all-around season by an AL shortstop this year according to baseballreference.com’s version of wins above replacement (6.1) and the second-best (5.0) behind Cleveland’s Francisco Lindor (6.3) according to FanGraphs’ version of the metric.
The only better age-21 season in Astros history belonged to Cesar Cedeno, who in 1972 batted .320 with 22 home runs, 39 doubles and a .921 OPS.
Correa and Alex Rodriguez are the only shortstops in major league history with two 20-home run seasons through their age-21 seasons, though Correa’s 20 homers in 152 games before Saturday were two fewer than he hit in 99 regular-season games as a rookie.
His 75 walks are the most by a shortstop since Marco Scutaro’s 90 in 2009.
After playing the season’s final four weeks with a balky left shoulder, Correa will take the remainder of October following Sunday afternoon’s finale to rest.
Spending the bulk of his offseason in Houston, he plans to begin his offseason workouts in November and take them to a field beginning around midDecember.
Correa plans to work on “everything” but especially on offensive aspects of his game.
Odds and ends
The Astros will face Angels righthander Jhoulys Chacin (5-8, 5.06 ERA) in Sunday’s finale. … Coming off his hamstring injury, third baseman Alex Bregman said he plans to resume normal workouts around Halloween. “Start getting after it in the weight room,” he said. He will split his offseason between Houston and his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M. … Yulieski Gurriel will return to Miami, where he worked out in the months between his defection from Cuba in February and his signing with the Astros in July. … Outfielder Teoscar Hernandez wants to play winter ball in his native Dominican Republic from mid-November to midDecember if the Astros let him.