The strikeouts were real. Houston's damage was just louder.

Houston's offense took the neatest route available. The Astros hit five home runs, and those swings alone produced nine of their 13 runs. Isaac Paredes started it with a solo shot in the first. Jeremy Pena hit one in the third and another in the eighth. Yordan Alvarez added a three-run homer in the fifth, and Lucas Spence finished with a solo shot in the ninth.

That matters because it explains the shape of this game better than the hit total does. Houston had 16 hits, but the loudest work came in self-contained pieces. A solo homer gets a starter on the board without help. A two-run homer after a walk punishes the one free base. A three-run homer turns a little traffic into separation. By the time Pena and Spence went deep late, Oakland was no longer losing one inning at a time; it was losing the next clean pitch. That is how a game gets to 13 runs without needing one endless rally to do it.

Jack Perkins' line is the part of this game that asks for a second look. Nine strikeouts in five innings usually means the stuff showed up, and on plenty of pitches it did. The trouble is that all six of his earned runs came on three home runs. Houston did not need to solve him inning after inning. It only needed three chances to do real damage.

Those chances were specific. Paredes homered on a 2-1 cutter in the first. Pena hit a 2-2 sweeper out to center in the third after Cam Smith had walked. Alvarez did the same kind of damage in the fifth, taking a 2-2 sweeper for a three-run homer to right. Two of the three came with two strikes, which is the uncomfortable part of the line. Perkins missed enough bats to survive many at-bats, but the Astros did not let the count itself count as a victory. When they got a strike they could drive, they ended the argument.

Hayden Wesneski's sharpest work arrived before the score got large. Oakland put a one-out runner on in the second when Zack Gelof singled. The inning ended on Donovan Walton's line-drive double play. In the third, Tommy White singled with one out, and Jonah Heim grounded into another inning-ending double play. Two baserunners, two immediate erasures.

That sequence is easy to miss because Wesneski's final line looks clean enough on its own: seven innings, two runs, one earned, 82 pitches. But those were Oakland's first two chances to build something against him, first with Houston up 1-0 and then after the lead had grown to 3-0. Instead, both innings stayed scoreless, Wesneski stayed on schedule, and Houston kept getting the game back in the hands it wanted. A starter does not always overpower a lineup into seven innings. Sometimes he just refuses to let the only dangerous innings breathe.

If Perkins lost the game, Oakland's bullpen decided how ugly it would look. There was one brief escape hatch. Scott Blewett struck out Lucas Spence and Cam Smith in the sixth, Drew Rom retired Nelson Velazquez with two runners aboard, and Houston's 6-1 lead stopped growing for a moment. That was the last manageable frame.

Across the four relief innings, Blewett, Rom, and Yunior Tur allowed seven earned runs on 11 hits and one walk. Spence doubled in a run in the seventh. Pena's second homer and Jose Altuve's RBI single added three more in the eighth. Spence homered in the ninth. The final 13-2 score was not just the residue of Perkins' three home-run pitches. It was the product of Oakland never getting back to clean innings once the relievers took over.