Yordan Alvarez hit a two-run, walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning Saturday night, capping a 3-for-4, two-homer, six-RBI performance that carried the Houston Astros to a 10-8 win over the Tampa Bay Rays and ended Tampa Bay’s nine-game winning streak.
It was that kind of day for Alvarez, who had been named the American League’s starting designated hitter for the All-Star Game hours earlier. He answered Junior Caminero‘s first-inning homer with a two-run shot in the bottom half, added an RBI single in the fifth and a sacrifice fly in the seventh, then sent a 1-2 fastball from Casey Legumina out to center field — a drive MLB.com measured at 424 feet by Statcast. Per MLB.com, it made Alvarez the only player in major league history with two career walk-off home runs on July 4; his first came in 2022.
The homers were his 28th and 29th of the season, extending his American League lead, and his 67 RBIs moved him past Nick Kurtz for the AL lead there as well. He is hitting .321 with a 1.069 OPS, and over his last four games from June 30 through July 4 he went 10-for-16 with four home runs and 11 RBIs.
Houston needed all of it. Hunter Brown lasted four innings and gave up seven runs, six earned, and the Astros trailed 8-5 entering the bottom of the seventh. That’s where the veterans went to work: Alvarez’s sacrifice fly, an Isaac Paredes RBI single and a Zach Dezenzo single tied it at 8. Jose Altuve spent the night setting the table in front of Alvarez, reaching base four times with a double, a triple, two walks and three runs scored. Four relievers held Tampa Bay to one run — Jonny DeLuca‘s solo homer off Cristian Javier in the seventh — over the final five innings, and Josh Hader worked around a walk in the ninth for the win.
The comeback was Houston’s second win in the last five games and pulled the Astros to 44-47, 2.5 games behind Seattle in the AL West. Against the team with the best record in the American League, that margin felt worth defending — this club has been written off before, and its two most experienced hitters just spent a holiday reminding everyone why that keeps backfiring. The series concludes Sunday.
