First-place Rangers complete sweep of Astros

Well, that couldn’t have gone any better.

The Texas Rangers played four games against the team that has led the American League West for almost the entire season, and won them all.

The Rangers hit home runs, got key hits and manufactured runs. Their starting pitching was better, their bullpen was excellent and they survived with Mike Napoli patrolling left field.

That wasn’t just the formula Thursday in an 8-2 victory over the Houston Astros that completed a four-game sweep. It was also the formula in the other three games of the critical late-season series that erased the Astros’ 1  1/2 -game lead and vaulted the Rangers to a 2  1/2 -game advantage with 16 games remaining.

“To sweep a four-game series against anybody is challenging, but to do it against a ball club the caliber of the Houston Astros ... it takes great focus and some determination and some things have to go your way, also,” manager Jeff Banister said. “I believe that our ballclub was as focused, as determined, as locked in as we could be for a four-game set.”

Mitch Moreland hit a three-run homer with two outs in the third inning, Shin-Soo Choo went 4 for 5 and Colby Lewis allowed two runs in six innings to win his 16th game of the season. The Rangers added two runs in the seventh and three more in the eighth as they beat the Astros for the seventh straight time and moved to 12 games above .500.

The Rangers outscored the Astros 33-13 in the four games, out-homered the homer-happy Astros 8-2 and got scoreless work in all but one of their 10  1/3 relief innings — and that one inning didn’t matter.

“We came in trying to win the series and we won all four,” Napoli said. “We put the pressure on. We made things happen. We got big hits and we got good pitching. We’re rolling as a team.”

Moreland’s homer, his 21st of the season, broke a scoreless tie and turned out to be all the Rangers would need. Lewis (16-8) gave back two of the runs in the fourth, but he pieced together two more scoreless innings.

Keone Kela pitched around a single and a walk to start a scoreless seventh, and Sam Dyson mowed through the Astros in the eighth after the Rangers had padded their lead to 5-2. Drew Stubbs scored on a wild pitch and Adrian Beltre drove in Choo with a two-out double.

“Kela’s performance in the seventh was exceptional,” Banister said. “The core group of guys late in the game, they’ve been lock-down for us.”

Choo finished off the Astros with a two-run single in the eighth, a batter after Bobby Wilson’s RBI single. Choo matched his career-high with four hits, and his average has climbed to .267 after a .096 April.

Choo is batting .500 (14 for 28) through the first seven games of the homestand, which ends with three games this weekend against Seattle. While the Rangers have had wild success against the Astros this season at 12-4, they are only 6-10 against the Mariners.

The Rangers have 10 home games and six road games remaining. The Rangers visit Houston on Sept. 25-27.

“I think we have more experience than Houston,” Choo said. “We know how to play big games. These guys know how to pitch, how to play, how to handle big games. It’s hard to make it to first place. But I think it’s harder to stay in first place.”

The Rangers would seem vulnerable to a letdown, but they have bought into Banister’s one-game-at-a-time mantra. It’s cliché, sure, but it’s part of every Rangers player’s script.

It’s what they believe they need to do in final two-plus weeks of the season.

“September’s never easy,” Banister said. “Chasing a pennant is never easy. It takes supreme focus. It’s not looking up. You can’t exhale. You can never look back. If you look back, somebody’s coming after you. That club over there isn’t laying down.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 11:29 PM with the headline "First-place Rangers complete sweep of Astros."