HOUSTON _ It's hard to say how many more starts Rich Hill has for the A's _ another group of scouts were on hand to watch him Thursday with the trade deadline 3 { weeks away _ but the lefty seems to want to make the most of all of them.
Hill allowed just three hits and one run over six innings in leading the A's to a 3-1 win over the Astros and the equally masterful Doug Fister. The win was Hill's sixth in a row and his team-high ninth of the season.
It's an open question whether the A's can afford to keep Hill past the trade deadline. The club is 37-49, buried in fourth place in the American League West and has a history of trading veterans like Hill when they are hot and when the club is out of contention.
And Hill is hot. His 2.25 ERA would be the best in the AL if he had enough innings to qualify. He doesn't, not after spending five weeks on the disabled list. His nine wins are good enough to get him into a tie for seventh in the league. And in two starts since coming off the DL, he's been as sharp as ever, giving up three runs in 12 innings.
George Springer got the Astros started by crushing a triple to center field that Coco Crisp wasn't able to run down to start the bottom of the first. When Marwin Gonzalez followed with a grounder to second base, Houston had a run and a 1-0 lead on Hill.
Springer's hit turned out to be the outlier. Over the course of the first six innings, he allowed just two more singles, and the Astros didn't get a runner past first base against Hill again until the sixth, when he issued his first two walks. He also struck out the side to get to 10 strikeouts, matching his season high.
Those strikeouts took their toll, however, in total pitches thrown, and Hill was out of the game after 101 pitches, turning a 2-1 lead over to John Axford and the bullpen.
The A's have had their wins against Fister, the Astros' starter, over the years, but they've always had trouble scoring runs off the 6-foot-8 right-hander. He'd allowed one run or less in five of his last seven starts against Oakland, part of which made the A's two-run second inning such a big deal.
Danny Valencia broke his bat with a single and Khris Davis went to the opposite field for a soft hit to open the inning before Fister walked Stephen Vogt, loading the bases. The A's seemed to be ideally set up with Marcus Semien at the plate.
The shortstop came in with 16 RBIs in his last 16 games, but Fister induced a double play grounder. The A's got a run, but didn't wind up with the explosive inning they'd been hoping for. Even so, Yonder Alonso broke the 1-1 tie with a double to the wall in left-center. It was by far the most solid hit of the inning for the A's, putting the team ahead 2-1.
That turned out to be a huge hit, because Oakland would not get another one off Fister and would get just two more base runners, two-out walks to Jake Smolinski in the fifth and Billy Burns in the eighth, while Fister was in the game.
Burns was only in the game because the A's weren't crazy about home plate umpire D.J. Reyburn's ball-strike calls. Alonso erupted after striking out in the fifth and Crisp dropped his bat in disgust after striking out later in the inning, furious about a low pitch called for the second strike. Reyburn wasn't having any more of it, making Crisp the first member of the A's to be ejected.
Alonso remained in the game, however, and it was his bases-loaded infield hit in the ninth that gave the A's their third run.
