Although I'm only noticing such things because I have no life, Saturday night's ballgame in Houston featured a pitching matchup between Fernandez and Hernandez. To try to make anything out of those homonymous names other than their similar sounds or the different repetoires of the men who bear them would be a sure sign that I am, at this late hour, reaching desperately for material.

Maybe I should reach.

Given the thoroughly-effective way that Livan Hernandez shut down the Astros on six hits tonight, he didn't leave anybody with much else to talk about but his name. Jared Fernandez (1-1) pitched against him for 4.1 innings about as well as an average knuckleballer can pitch, but Hernandez had a better variety of pitches and better command of them when he had to have it in Montreal's 3-1 win.

Hernandez is an old-school type of pitcher in one respect: whenever you look at his won-loss record around this time of year, it's always 12-10, 14-11, 13-9--something like that; not great, but not terrible, either. He frequently struggles early in the season, then gathers himself for a second-half streak for whatever team he happens to be pitching for, the Marlins, the Giants, or, in this case, the Expos. Since his record is almost never top-of-the line, you'd figure some teams are getting to him somehow, but the Astros don't seem to have figured out how to do it in all the years they've faced him. There were a few hard-hit balls on the offense Saturday--a Biggio double off the stands in LF in the third, for instance, and Jeff Kent's double to RCF in the sixth--but several of the hardest-hit balls were outs: Geoff Blum's liner back to the box in the second that Hernandez just hapened to be in position to catch; Jeff Bagwell's flyball to deep CF that ended the third; and Morgan Ensberg's twisting foul fly to RF that Vladimir Guerrero caught in the sixth. Only Kent's double of the three hits that the Astros put together for a run in the sixth was well hit; the other two were bloop hits to CF and RF by Lance Berkman and Richard Hidalgo. That run cut the Expos' lead to what appeared to be a reachable 3-1 deficit, but Hernandez was truly in control of the game, and he was never seriously threatened in throwing the complete game. He walked a couple of men in the opening inning, but soon found good locations for his fastball until he smartly shifted his tactics mid-game and started dropping on the Houston hitters the hook they'd been expecting earlier. By the last out of the sixth--a strikeout swinging on Blum with runners at 1B and 3B--the Astros didn't know what to look for. Hernandez had them coming and going. Biggio struck out swinging on a 2-2 fastball in the seventh, and Ensberg followed by getting rung up on a slider, two of Hernandez's nine strikeouts. The Expos' righthander had a fairly-high pitch count, but that's typical of a Hernandez game. He uses a lot of pitches to set up other pitches later in counts and even, as we saw tonight, later in games. He has the physique to withstand a heavy workload, particlarly in his legs, where a good pitcher must have it, thus he's not afraid to extend himself when the game situation calls for it.

Jared Fernandez, not possessing nearly the talent for changing speeds and locations that Hernandez showed, did his best with the fluttering knuckleball, but it wasn't good enough. Montreal got to him for two runs on three hits in the second. Wil Cordero drove in Vladimir Guerrero, who had singled; later, an error on Blum, playing SS Saturday and trying to hurry to turn two, gave the Expos another run. Fernandez did eventually get that double play (in fact, Blum started it, on Jamey Carroll), but after escaping a bases-loaded jam by striking out the side in a gutsy third inning, he gave up a third run in the fifth on a walk to Orlando Cabrera, a steal, and a base hit by Ron Calloway. At this point, Jimy Williams summoned Mike Gallo to pitch. Gallo got a neatly-turned 3-6-1 double play to get out of further trouble, then turned things over to Ricky Stone and Dan Miceli, but the element needed for an Astro uprising--some offense--never materialized.

As you might have guessed from last night's column, I halfway expected this loss, both because of Hernandez's track record against the Astros and because Montreal's just tough this season, period. Currently the Cubs are losing to the Dodgers 5-0, so if that score holds up, Houston won't lose any ground to them, but St. Louis sneaked a game closer with a win over Atlanta Saturday afternoon. The focus, however, should be on what the Astros (62-54) themselves are doing. A 3-3 homestand, which is what the club will be going after Sunday when Ron Villone takes on lefty Scott Downs, is not what anyone expected here at the outset of the busiest and most important stretch of home games during the season. A win Sunday is almost a must. Downs, if I remember correctly (and I do), used to be with the Cubs, but he hasn't been in the big leagues much, if at all since 2000, when he was 4-3 in eighteen games with Chicago before moving on to the Expos. Although Houston typically doesn't fare well against pitchers they've never seen, I believe they've seen Downs before and have a scouting report or two on him. How good he'll be after a call-up and after so long away from a big-league mound is the key question to be answered. Houston, one would think, should be able to score enough runs against him to give Villone some working room as he seeks to regain the sharpness he showed in his first couple of starts in the Astros' rotation.