With Hunter Brown’s worst outing of the year coming against the Tampa Bay Rays, the Houston Astros (25-24) weren’t able to back him up at the plate after eventful first innings from both teams.

Things got started right away in the top of the first after a hit-by-pitch to the first batter of the game, Jeremy Peña, setup Isaac Paredes for a two-run shot to left center to put Houston up 2-0.

The Rays answered right back on Brown though with two runs of their own in the bottom half to tie it, both coming on RBI-singles. Another run didn’t cross till the fourth inning when Brown, who had only allowed two home runs all season, allowed his first homer of the day to give the Rays a 3-2 lead.

They doubled-down on that in the bottom half of the fifth with two more solo-shots, coming on the first two pitches of the inning, to extend their lead. Brown allowed more home runs in his game than he has all season long so far. Brown increased his ERA by over 0.60, starting the game at 1.43 and ending at 2.04.

Hunter Brown’s final line:

5 IP, 7 H, 5 ER, 2 BB, 4 K, 91-52 (TP-S)

Bennett Sousa was the first man out of the pen for head coach Joe Espada once Brown came out from his shortest outing of the year, and kept up the theme for this year, shutting down the Rays for two innings, allowing just two hits and striking out three.

It wasn’t till the eighth inning when the Astros offense was able to wake up again, starting with Mauricio Dubón, who took the first pitch of the inning and hit it over the right center wall for the Astros first run of the game since the first inning.

After a strikeout to the next hitter, Paredes stepped up for his fourth time this game and hit his second home run, putting the Astros back just 5-4.

After Sousa, the Astros got a rare occurrence on the mound, with Forrest Whitley taking over and pitching for just his second time this season and fifth time professionally. That was when the Rays broke the game open with a three-run bomb to take an 8-4 lead and hand Whitley his first earned runs of his career.

One thing that also didn’t help were the errors. Coming into the game with just 19 errors as a team, the Astros put up three errors in this game, two coming from Dubón in right field.

One of the only good parts about this game was Paredes. On this road trip alone, he has hit four home runs in the last seven games, adding to his team-leading 10 this season. Today was also Paredes’ first multi-homer game as an Astro.

Jake Meyers, who currently leads the team in batting average (.308), also extended his hit streak to six games with a two-out single in the fourth and Christian Walker broke an 0-17 streak with a leadoff single in the top of the ninth.

Houston heads back home tomorrow to play a four-game series against the Mariners, starting at 7:10 in Daikin Park.