Cleveland Guardians at Houston Astros: Final Score & Recap

The Cleveland Guardians handed the Houston Astros a decisive 8-1 defeat at Daikin Park on June 20, 2026, handing the home side a result that the DiamondIQ model's estimate saw shift from a 47 percent pre-game Houston win probability all the way to zero. Cleveland scored in five of nine innings and never relinquished control, generating 10 hits without committing an error while holding Houston to just five hits across the contest.

The game's pivotal sequence came against Spencer Arrighetti in the third inning, when Kyle Manzardo connected on a home run that swung win probability 21.3 percent in Cleveland's favor — the single largest play of the game by that measure. That blow effectively broke the contest open after the Guardians had already taken a 1-0 lead in the first. Travis Bazzana then added a home run off Arrighetti in the fifth inning, pushing Cleveland's advantage further with a 13.5 percent win-probability swing. Houston's best moment came in the second, when Yainer Diaz singled off Joey Cantillo to generate a 9.4 percent swing for the home side, but a Jake Meyers strikeout later in the same frame erased much of that ground, and the Astros never mounted a sustained threat.

Among the individual performers, Manzardo finished as the game's top batter by WPA at plus-21.1 percent with a RE24 of plus-2.6, while Bazzana posted a RE24 of plus-3.2 alongside a plus-9.7 percent WPA to lead all hitters in run-environment value. On the mound, Cantillo was Cleveland's standout, logging plus-14.6 percent WPA to anchor a pitching performance that kept Houston's lineup largely quiet after the second-inning scare. The DiamondIQ model leans toward crediting Cleveland's combination of power from the middle of the lineup and Cantillo's efficiency as the defining factors in the margin.