HOUSTON – For five years, they reestablished a standard of excellence in Major League Baseball, making the World Series their near-annual playground yet earning well-earned scorn off the field and heartbreak on it.
Yet with one mighty swing from Yordan Alvarez, the Houston Astros – after scandal, organizational tumult, free-agent defections and a maddening series of near-misses – returned to the baseball summit Saturday night, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 4-1 in Game 6 of the World Series, earning their first championship since a now-sullied 2017 title.
That electronic sign-stealing scandal, revealed two years after the Astros beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games, threatened to frame every movement of the organization, and certainly its protagonists, in a disputed light. For some, that may always be the case.
But rather than chafe at their detractors, or wallow in guilt, the Astros simply went back to the work of building and sustaining excellence.
And in winning just the second championship in franchise history, they left no doubt.
“You can’t say it didn’t bother them,” Astros owner Jim Crane said of the sign-stealing scandal and the aftermath, “but they worked their way through it and played hard and you got a result tonight that’s pretty spectacular.”
The Astros won 11 of 13 games this postseason, joining the 2005 Chicago White Sox and 1999 New York Yankees (each 11-2) and the ’98 Yankees (also 11-2) as the greatest teams in the wild card era, a span in which the greatest teams often got waylaid by playoff randomness, poor decisions or bad luck.
These Astros, and their beloved 73-year-old manager Dusty Baker, who finally captured a World Series title as a skipper on his third try, were simply too good for that.
Left-hander Framber Valdez won his second game of this Series, dominating the Phillies with one of the game’s greatest curveballs and a sinking fastball that left the Phillies flailing for most of the night. Valdez struck out five consecutive batters at one point and nine overall, and his Game 2 and 6 aggregate was nearly flawless: 13 ⅓ innings pitched, six hits, two earned runs and 18 strikeouts.
Even his lone Game 6 blemish – a leadoff solo home run by Kyle Schwarber leading off the sixth – merely set the stage for the greatest singular moment in Astros history.
With Phillies starter Zack Wheeler returning to ace status after a shaky Game 2, the Phillies’ 1-0 lead briefly inspired hope they could force a winner-take-all Game 7 Sunday night. Yet No. 9 hitter Martín Maldonado leaned in a bit and was struck by a Wheeler pitch leading off the start of the sixth. One out later, rookie shortstop Jeremy Peña, quickly becoming the Astros’ most indomitable plate presence, muscled a single into center field.
Alvarez had not homered in 42 at-bats. Wheeler, at just 73 pitches, hadn’t allowed an extra-base hit all night. And dominant lefty reliever Jose Alvarado had crumbled in a similar, bases-loaded spot in Game 4, hitting Alvarez with a pitch to force in the game’s first run and allowing a two-run double to Alex Bregman.
No matter. Rookie Phillies manager Rob Thomson came out and took the ball from Wheeler, emphatically thanking him for his efforts on the way out.
And then Alvarado piped a 2-1 sinker at 98 mph to Alvarez.
“You know, man,” said Alvarado, “sometimes I win it, sometimes I take my hat off for the hitter. That’s the game.”
The Cuban slugger had been just 5 for 42 since hitting a pair of go-ahead home runs in the AL Division Series. But Alvarado’s pitch loomed big as a grapefruit and Alvarez destroyed it – 450 feet on a straight line to dead center field, soaring over the fence, over the faux greenery hitting background, into a gleeful phalanx of partying Astros fans on a standing-room-only deck.
A gaggle of Astros surged onto the apron of the dugout. Center fielder Chas McCormick was in the tunnel, too nervous to watch and with a towel draped over his head, but giddily emerged, in awe of Alvarez’s blast.
“He’s the greatest hitter alive,” McCormick says of Alvarez. “Nobody hits home runs to center field. He hit it over the backstop.”
It was 3-1. Nine outs away. And in this postseason, as good as over.
See, the Astros bullpen has put up the most dominant playoff run in history, and Saturday seemed a mere formality as the same protagonists who helped finish a combined no-hitter in Game 4 – Bryan Abreu, Rafael Montero and Ryan Pressly, along with Hector Neris – covered the final four innings with ease. The unit finished the playoffs with a 0.81 era, capped by another save from closer Ryan Pressly, who retired Nick Castellanos on a fly ball to foul territory in right field for the final out to set off bedlam in H-Town.
“We’re nasty,” says Pressly, who saved Games 5 and 6 and did not allow an earned run in 5 2/3 World Series innings.
It had been just five years since they celebrated like this, after that Game 7 at Dodger Stadium. The interim period was rocky and revelatory, with a new GM and a new manager and years of boos for holdovers like Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman.
Saturday night, a trio of new heroes stepped forward. And now all of them – Astros old and new, implicated and innocent, are undeniably champions.
“Every single person put in so much work. Every single person believed,” says third baseman Alex Bregman, one of five holdovers from the 2017 team.
“I’m just so thankful and proud to be a part of this ballclub.”
