ARLINGTON -- Astros starter Hunter Brown escaped a bases-loaded jam in the first inning Friday night by getting Jared Walsh to strike out swinging. Brown could only hope that would set him up to hit his stride from there and continue the Astros’ run of strong starting pitching to begin the season.

A potent Rangers lineup wasn’t going to get Brown off the hook that easily. Texas batted around in the second inning and scored five runs, capped by a three-run homer by Adolis García, and sent the Astros to a 10-2 loss in the first game of a rematch of last year’s American League Championship Series.

“He got ahead of some of their hitters, but just couldn’t put them away,” Astros manager Joe Espada said. “Tough time executing his breaking ball. When you got a lineup like that, once you get ahead you want to be able to execute your pitches, but the execution wasn’t there today.”

The loss snapped the Astros’ eight-game winning streak at Globe Life Field, which included Houston’s three wins in the 2023 ALCS. That was the longest winning streak here by any team other than the Rangers since the ballpark opened in 2020.

The Astros, who entered the game with a Major League-leading 1.29 ERA from their starting pitchers, watched Brown give up five runs, four walks and eight hits in three innings in his second start of the season. His ERA is 6.43 after seven innings.

“I think they hit some good pitches, but I also made a handful of bad ones, too, and they made me pay for both,” Brown said.

The home run to García was particularly frustrating to Brown because he felt like he threw the pitch to the location he wanted. Brown threw a four-seam fastball a few inches above the strike zone, and García muscled it into the right-center-field seats to make it 5-0.

“I didn’t expect him to hit that ball over the fence,” Brown said. “That’s where I wanted to go with it and he put a good swing on it and hit it out of the park.”

Brown threw 80 pitches in his three innings of work and struggled to put away hitters, which led to some longer at-bats that drove his pitch count up. Brown threw first-pitch strikes to 14 of the 21 hitters he faced, but only induced five swings-and-misses.

“Once you get ahead of hitters, you have to be able to execute your next pitch exactly where you want to go because if you miss, some of those hitters foul pitches and you’ve got to be able to [know] where to go next,” Espada said. “Again, if you look at the quality of his pitches they’re all really good pitches. Sometimes at this level it’s some pretty good hitters that make you earn it. He didn’t do that well today.”

The Rangers didn’t stop hitting when Brown was out of the game, either. Relief pitcher Brandon Bielak gave up five runs and seven hits in three innings to send Houston to its most lopsided loss of the young season. Texas starter Cody Bradford threw a career high 7 2/3 innings and gave up two hits and one run. Jake Meyers’ eighth-inning, two-run homer kept Houston from being shut out.

“Credit to Bradford over there,” Espada said. “He really kept us off balance -- fastballs to both sides of the plate, changed speeds. He didn’t give us very much to hit. Outside of Jake and that big swing in the ninth, we didn’t have much.”

García went 2-for-4 with four RBIs and now has 13 homers and 39 RBIs in 48 career games against the Astros, which is the most by any player against Houston since the start of the 2021 season.

“Adolis is a good hitter and like any good hitter, if you don’t execute he can put some good swings and he’s been able to do [it to] us in the past,” Espada said. “But there are some times we also have been successful against him, but the key is we just got to execute against any lineup.”