Steven Matz made his second spring training start of the year on Saturday against the Houston Astros and got through two innings of work relatively easily.

In the first inning, the southpaw induced three groundouts that came from George Springer, Myles Straw, and Yuli Gurriel, in that order.

Matz’s second inning wasn’t too difficult either as he got Aledmys Diaz and Kyle Tucker to fall victim in the same fashion, before allowing his first, and only hit of the day, to Taylor Jones, which was a hard hit ball to center field that he turned into a triple.

The left-hander didn’t have trouble getting out of the two-out jam, though, as he struck out Jack Mayfield to end the inning.

All in all, Matz needed 32 pitches (19 strikes) to get through two innings of work in which he allowed one hit and no walks. David Peterson replaced Matz in the third inning.

The 28-year-old’s first start wasn’t bad by any means as he allowed a leadoff homer to Harrison Bader, but got through the rest of the one inning he pitched with ease. He was looking to make some adjustments, though.

“Really, me and [Jeremy] Hefner were working on looking at some of these numbers with all this technology,” Matz said of his performance. “We’re trying to get my ball more true instead of, especially when I go in on righties, my four-seam, ironically, runs more than my two-seam. So, we were working on that and it paid off pretty good.”

The looming pressure of fighting for a starting rotation spot is certainly there with Michael Wacha in the fold, but Matz isn’t focusing on that right now and views this as a good thing for the team overall.

“I’m just looking at getting my work in,” Matz said. “Right now, I’m a starter building up as a starter so I’m just trying to get better every day. We have a lot of really good pitchers in camp, and that’s a really great thing for us looking towards our goal of winning the World Series.”

“I’m really not looking at it as a competition,” Matz added.  “I’m just doing whatever I can to help the team the best I can this season.”

Matz started 30 games for the second year in a row last season and tossed a career-high 160 1/3 innings. In that span, he had a 4.21 ERA, 4.60 FIP, and 1.341 WHIP with 8.6 K/9 as compared to 2.9 BB/9.