Houston Astros at New York Yankees

If blowing a six-run lead en route to losing a home game to the last-place A’s on Sunday to cap a disappointing 3-6 homestand wasn’t the low point of the Astros’ season, it certainly was close. The loss dropped Houston back under .500, a day before the club cut ties with general manager Dana Brown. Astros owner Jim Crane said Tuesday the club was simply in need of a change, while reiterating that manager Joe Espada had done a good job with the roster he’d been given and would be evaluated at the end of the season. Espada addressed the players in a meeting prior to Tuesday’s game and thanked them for supporting him through a difficult family issue, which caused him to miss Sunday’s game. ​ The Astros then took the field at Yankee Stadium and played the kind of baseball they will have to play over the season’s final 30 games if they want to hold off the Rangers and the Mariners in the wacky American League West race, coming from behind to beat the Yankees, 9-7, to climb over Texas and back into first place. “This is the way we need to come here and play today,” Espada said. “Any other way wasn’t going to be acceptable. We needed to come here today and play like a team that is hunting to win a division, and we did.” Yainer Diaz's second homer of the game and Yordan Alvarez’s RBI triple highlighted a three-run eighth inning that gave the Astros an 8-6 lead. After blowing leads Saturday and Sunday against the A’s, the Astros locked this one down with Josh Hader getting a four-out save -- his 19th of the season. “I felt with the way the game was going, it was back and forth, we got punched, we punched them back, and we got punched again and we retaliated," Espada said.  “We needed to win that game. We needed to go out there and make a point that we’re going to win this game, and Josh was very efficient in that third of an inning \[to end the eighth\