The Astros and Guardians are starting their weekend series in Cleveland on Friday night.
Colton Gordon is scheduled to pitch for Houston, while Logan Allen will take the mound for Cleveland at home.
Astros at Guardians prediction, preview
Colton Gordon is in his rookie season, with just four career starts under his belt. The young Astro has been consistent through four starts, but certainly vulnerable. Gordon has avoided a blow-up game, never giving up more than four runs or lasting less than four innings in his young career. However, he has also given up at least three runs and never made it longer than 5.1 innings in each of his four starts. In the current state of his game, Gordon is a pitcher who will go about five innings and give up three runs; a suitable guy in the rotation, but not a top-end starter. Notably, this will be just the second career road start for Gordon. The Guardians will look to jump on the inexperienced rookie and give him that blow-up game that could come at any point.
Logan Allen has had a very up-and-down year for the Guardians. Allen has a 4.22 ERA, but that has come from a series of starts where you don’t know whether you are getting Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. Allen has a couple of starts this season where he has gone a decent length of innings and given up one or even no runs. However, he also has three blow-up starts this season, where he gave up four or more runs. Allen’s last appearance actually came out of the bullpen, not as a starter. He was skipped in the rotation and just gave one inning of work out of the bullpen. He is back in the starting spot but could be expected to give a limited number of innings. Cleveland will then turn to their bullpen, which has been mostly solid this season. The Guardians have a bullpen ERA of 3.87, right around the league average.
Astros at Guardians pick, best bet
These teams are pretty evenly matched. They have nearly identical records this season, very similar offensive metrics and neither team has an ace on the mound tonight. The Astros are short favorites in this game for a couple of reasons. One, Houston does have a slight edge in the bullpen. While their bullpen isn’t quite elite, they have more consistent arms than Cleveland does. Also, despite Gordon’s inexperience and lack of elite stuff at this point in his career, he has been consistent. If Gordon can go five innings and give up three runs, like he has generally done this season, the Houston bullpen should be able to keep things in check. On the other side, Allen has been wildly inconsistent. Some of the great hitters in this Astros lineup, like Jose Altuve and Jeremy Pena, have great career numbers against Allen. The Astros should have just enough to win the first game of this series in Cleveland.
