Henry Owens Actually Struggles in an Eastern League Start
Henry Owens is human after all. After putting together an unreal first half of the season, the Boston Red Sox prospect has actually allowed runs in five consecutive games. Even more than that, he allowed five runs in a single outing, only making it through four innings against New Britain. The loss was just his fourth on the season and drops his record in his past ten games to 9-1. Owens still struck out six in the four innings to push his total to 123, by far the most in the Eastern League.
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Owens is not the only one that can rack up the strikeouts for the Portland Sea Dogs, as Brian Johnson put in seven scoreless innings on Friday and struck out 12. This gives Johnson back-to-back outings where he refused to surrender an earned run and pushed his record to 9-2 in Double-A with a 2.13 ERA in 15 starts.
The Eastern League’s second most prolific strikeout artist, Kyle Crick, also had himself a day on Friday, as he struck out 11 batters in six innings, while allowing just a single run, but that was enough to saddle Crick with the loss. Later in the game, Steven Moya connected on his 26th home run of the season, tops in the league, but only five ahead of Peter O’Brien who slugged 10 in the Florida State League before getting called up to Trenton.
While there have been plenty of crooked strikeout numbers across the league this week, at the plate nobody had a better game than Jordan Smith on Sunday. Smith had a 4-5 night that included a single, double, triple, and a home run. Yes, he hit for the cycle and drove in three runs in Akron’s 6-4 win.
The best players of the week were Jake Fox, who hit four home runs and drove in 14 runs last week, and Tyler Duffey, who won both his starts and struck out 16 while allowing just two runs over 14 innings.