Slugging Giants come away with road sweep of Astros

Heliot Ramos and Wilmer Flores continued their slugging ways and the Giants bullpen threw five scoreless innings in a 6-3 win.

Before the season, there were concerns with how the San Francisco Giants would fare against strong left-handed pitching. Against Houston Astros ace Framber Valdez, the Giants responded those questions with dingers.

Wilmer Flores, Luis Matos, and LaMonte Wade, Jr. all went deep in the Giants’ 6-3 win over the Astros, capping off a three-game sweep and a 5-1 season-opening road trip. They also got five innings of stellar bullpen work, with four relievers combining for six strikeouts and only four baserunners. And while the Astros chased starter Landen Roupp with no outs in the fifth inning, the second-year starter did log eight strikeouts in four innings.

The scoring began in the first inning, when Willy Adames drew a walk and Flores followed up with his fourth home run of the season for a 2-0 lead. He’s now hitting .227 (shout-out to Jackee Harry) but he’s slugging .773. We’d also like to give a shoutout to Dr. Steve Yoon, who performed the knee surgery on Flores last August, and restored his power stroke.

In the second inning, center fielder Luis Matos continued his hot hitting from spring training by blasting a 395-foot homer off of Valdez. The blast initially looked like a double off the wall, and Matos stopped at second, but eagle-eyed former Astro Justin Verlander recognized from the dugout that the ball hit above the yellow home-run line.

Thankfully, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow still delivered a delayed home-run call, and added one for Dave Flemming.

Matos went 2-for-3 with a bases on balls Wednesday, meaning he’s already 20% of the way to last year’s walk total!

After Mike Yastrzemski and Tyler Fitzgerald both drew walks, with a Yaz steal in between, baseball’s most powerful leadoff man Heliot Ramos hit a double into the left-center gap. The shot easily scored the speedy Fitzgerald from first and Roupp had a 5-0 cushion.

That’s Ramos’ sixth extra-base hit in six games and his seventh RBI. He has six hits on the season: three home runs, and three doubles. Ramos is slugging .731, hot on Flores’ tail. The only other San Francisco Giants to open the season with extra-base hits in his first six games is former outfield and manager Felipe Alou, who did it in 1963.

Houston got a run back in the bottom of the second when Jeremy Peña walked and stole second, then scored on Zach Dezenzo’s single. Walks hurt Roupp again in the bottom of the fifth, when he sandwiched two walks around a Jose Altuve infield single, loading the bases with no outs and ending his afternoon. His final line was four innings, four hits, four walks and eight strikeouts, with two infield singles. When Yordan Alvarez golfed a single off Randy Rodriguez, that line also had three earned runs.

But Rodriguez limited the damage. He got Christian Walker to pop out, then struck out the next two batters to preserve the 5-3 lead. Erstwhile starter Hayden Birdsong pitched around two singles in the sixth to get out of a first-and-third jam, then stranded Alvarez at first after a walk in the seventh.

In the eighth inning, the Giants got an insurance run and a struggling player got a much-needed big hit. After an 0-for-16 start, Wade got his first hit and first homer of the 2025 season pinch-hitting for Casey Schmitt, blasting a 2-2 pitch over the right field wall.

Tyler Rogers retired the Astros in eight pitches in the eighth, then erstwhile closer Camilo Doval got his second save of the season with a 10-pitch ninth inning. The Giants retired the last nine Astros hitters and they did it on just 23 pitches, not counting an automatic ball charged to Birdsong for a pitch clock violation. As Larry David would say, that’s pretty, pretty good.

The Giants are now the winningest road team in baseball, though they remain 1.5 games behind the 7-0 Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in the NL West. They’ll get a well-earned day off before veteran starter/amateur umpire Verlander takes the mound for the home opener Friday afternoon against the Seattle Mariners and split-finger artist Bryce Miller.

For a team that’s only hitting .206, 5-1 is a pretty nice outcome. Seattle offers strong starting pitcher, but if the Giants can continue their power surge, good things might happen. They could even move into second place!