The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Houston Astros 9-4 on a night when they kept scoring in bunches and never let Houston get fully back into the game. Jordan Walker opened the run that mattered most with an RBI single in the first inning, and the Cardinals led 1-0 before the Astros had settled in.
JJ Wetherholt started it with a ground-ball single to third baseman Carlos Correa, then Walker lined a sharp single to center to drive him home. St. Louis pushed the margin to 3-0 in the third when Masyn Winn slipped a seeing-eye single between third and short, scoring Iván Herrera and Alec Burleson.
That was the first turn in a game that moved fast in Houston, where the roof was closed. The Cardinals were efficient early and kept adding pressure with contact all over the field, while Kyle Leahy worked through a third inning that briefly cracked open after he had been effective early this season.
The Astros answered with power. Christian Vazquez and Yordan Alvarez each hit solo homers off Leahy in the third inning, trimming the lead to 3-2 after St. Louis had controlled the first two frames. But the Cardinals responded immediately in the fourth, when Pedro Pages ripped a screaming double toward the left field line and Herrera lined a sharp single to center to bring him home for a 4-2 lead.
Houston kept trying to chip away. Christian Walker reached on a fielding error by Alec Burleson, and Taylor Trammell followed with a single that was batted down by Wetherholt. Leahy then struck out Vazquez and Isaac Paredes to end the inning with runners on base, recording his sixth strikeout of the game and preserving the lead.
The Astros were not done. José Altuve launched a solo home run off Leahy in the fifth to make it 4-3, but the Cardinals had already shown they could answer any swing of momentum with another inning of contact and baserunning. Justin Bruihl relieved Leahy in the sixth and threw a scoreless frame, giving St. Louis a calmer finish before its seventh-inning push carried the game out of reach.
That is the part that made the final line look wider than the fight that came before it. Houston had three solo homers and enough traffic to stay within a run, but St. Louis produced the cleaner offense, the better sequencing and the tougher outs. In a game built on singles, doubles and one costly defensive error, the Cardinals turned early contact into a 9-4 win and left the Astros trying to explain why the scoreboard kept moving against them.
