St. Louis Cardinals at Houston Astros: Final Score & Recap

The Houston Astros defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 7-4 on June 3, 2024, at Minute Maid Park, erasing what had been a competitive game with a four-run eighth inning that put the outcome beyond reach. The DiamondIQ model entered the night assigning each side a 50 percent chance of winning, but closed with Houston at 100 percent as the Astros' bullpen and lineup combined to overwhelm a Cardinals team that had kept things close into the late innings.

The decisive sequence came in the bottom of the eighth, where Yainer Diaz delivered a home run off JoJo Romero that represented the single largest win-probability swing of the game at plus 33.2 percent, followed immediately by an Alex Bregman home run off the same pitcher worth an additional plus 21.9 percent. That two-homer barrage against Romero effectively ended the contest. Earlier, Yordan Alvarez had set the tone in the third inning with a home run off Kyle Gibson worth plus 18.2 percent in win probability, and a Jake Meyers single in the sixth added another plus 12.4 percent before Andrew Kittredge limited the damage, inducing a Yainer Diaz groundout that swung 12.1 percent back toward St. Louis.

Alvarez finished as the game's top batter by WPA at plus 20.7 percent with a RE24 of plus 2.5, while Bregman posted plus 14.3 percent and Diaz added plus 12.1 percent despite the costly groundout. On the mound, Kittredge led all pitchers with a plus 17.1 percent WPA contribution, with Rafael Montero and Seth Martinez adding plus 7.4 and plus 6.6 percent respectively. The Cardinals committed two errors against one for Houston, a discrepancy that compounded the damage from a Cardinals pitching staff that surrendered all seven runs on nine hits.