By Yours Truly
Entering American League Championship Series Game Five, the odds were excellent that an Astros loss would prompt every Astro fan in creation to blame controversial enough umpire Joe West. Calling fan interference on Jose Altuve’s bid for a first-inning Game Four two-run homer made West Public Enemy Number One in Houston.
Never mind available evidence being inconclusive enough to overturn the out call, or the security guard who actually obstructed the best possible angle at which to get a once-and-for-all look at whether Altuve had the homer or Red Sox right fielder Mookie Betts got his glove bumped by a fan as he got
thatclose to making the catch.
Never mind the Astros having opportunity after opportunity to take Game Four over the following eight innings, right down to the moment Andrew Benitendi made his flying-trapeze catch to end the game with the bases loaded and the Red Sox winning 8-6.
The Astros still had reason to feel confident for Game Five. Hadn’t Red Sox starter David Price been a career-long postseason bust, the arguable worst pitcher in postseason history? Didn’t the Astros have Justin Verlander, whose acquisition probably did the most to mean the World Series title they were still defending Thursday night, starting against Price and just bound for further glory?
After the Red Sox finished the 4-1 win and, while they were at it, four straight wins after the Astros behind Verlander and company won Game One, every Astro and their fans must have been thinking, “Now Price finds his game!â€
“Unbelievable,†said J.D. Martinez, half out of breath, after the game and in the middle of the Red Sox celebration. “Un-freaking-believable.â€
Price was actually up in the bullpen late in Game Four on a standby basis in case things got more than dicey for the Red Sox, which seemed to be a postseason given with their closer Craig Kimbrel on the mound. Everyone who saw Price saw him wired up and itching to go, whether coming into Game Four or, barring that, starting Game Five.
He couldn’t have picked a more appropriate night to win for the first time ever in his postseason career, on three days’ rest while he was at it, and just a day after Clayton Kershaw shook off his own postseason blues to pitch maybe the greatest game of his postseason life to push the Dodgers to within a win of the World Series themselves.
“I found something in the bullpen last night and it carried into tonight,†said Price, who pitched the Rays to the World Series while winning a Cy Young Award a decade earlier. “I was hitting a lot of spots . . . [The changeup] felt pretty good in the bullpen, and it’s helped me out for quite a few years . . . To have that opportunity to punch our ticket to the World Series, that’s very cool.â€
Price’s unusual energy level helped him to surreal lengths Thursday night. He threw his changeup over thirty percent of the time and the Astros couldn’t do anything profitable with it if you’d handed them trees for bats. He surrendered only three hits, struck out nine, and walked nobody in six innings’ work, and his changeup got eleven swings and misses including four of his strikeouts.
Verlander struck out four and walked two in six innings and got bashed deep twice, something that was nearly impossible against Verlander in last year’s postseason conquest. Verlander pitched gamely but not close to the form that showed him with a 1.21 ERA and a 4-1 won-lost record when pitching postseason elimination games prior to Thursday.
Price’s rewards included Martinez—whom the Astros released in 2014 when they had an outfield logjam—squaring up Verlander on 1-2 and driving one into the Crawford Box seats in left. The only thing amiss otherwise was Martinez doing it with one out; the Red Sox spent the series hitting with two outs as though the pitches swelled up the closer they got to the plate.
“In a sense, they did me a favour by allowing me to leave and going on to play with another team,†Martinez said after the game. “And if it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. Who knows where I would have been?â€
It was even more off the script in the sixth, when Mitch Moreland led off with a double that hit the left field wall and bounded right away off Astros left fielder Tony Kemp’s glove, Ian Kinsler grounded a base hit into right, and Rafael Devers hit the first pitch the opposite way, into those same Crawford Box seats. All with nobody out, all on Verlander’s dollar.
And none of it had anything to do with Joe West, who manned the left field line for Game Five.
This isn’t even close to the way the Red Sox looked after Game One, which they all but punted and kicked away like the Keystone Kops, or at least the 1962 Mets, when their pitching walked ten and plunked three and their only two runs of the game came on a bases-loaded walk and a wild pitch. After that 7-2 loss, all the predictions that the Astros would win the set began looking even more prescient.
But then came Price pitching just barely well enough to keep the Red Sox alive in Game Two and Jackie Bradley, Jr.—named the ALCS’s most valuable player—starting his slump busting with that go-ahead three-run double off the Green Monster.
And then came Bradley to put Game Three out of reach with a monstrous eighth-inning grand slam off Astros reliever Roberto Osuna, following one bases-loading plunk and one almost immediate run-scoring plunk by Osuna.
And then came Game Four’s insanity—including Bradley hitting a two-run homer, to make it all nine of his series RBIs coming with two outs—that ended when Benintendi hit the jets and caught Alex Bregman’s certain three-run game-winning hit on the dive as he hit the grass sliding an extra five feet or so to save the 8-6 Red Sox win.
“We’ve been battle tested, played against a lot of great ball teams,†said Bradley after accepting his series MVP.
Somehow it seemed only too cruelly appropriate for the Minute Maid Park audience to watch in absolute sorrow when Benintendi ran down Tony Kemp’s two-out, one-on drive to left and caught the ball and the pennant with a reaching catch near the wall.
Never mind the fans who fumed that if the Red Sox ended up winning the pennant West should have been named the series MVP. If they should be fuming at anyone, it’s the security guard who obstructed a perfect chance to capture the best possible camera angle and assure that Altuve had the homer and Betts didn’t have the fan interference.
Other things hurt the Astros, who brought the game’s best regular season run differential against the Red Sox whose road record on the year was better than the Astros’ home record. Their health may have been the most important thing against them.
Altuve’s balky knee—which disabled him for the first time in his career in July--looked so ugly at one point that a broadcaster who’d talked to him before the game thought it looked like a grapefruit was packed inside of it. It reduced him to designated hitting for the final three games, and even if he’s too classy to lean on it as an excuse, something was clearly missing from his usual swing.
Carlos Correa spent most of the season’s second half with back trouble and, despite three hits and two runs batted in in Game Four, his .316 ALCS batting average was only too quiet, with only three RBIs all set long.
Charlie Morton, the almost inexplicable Game Four starter who was money in the 2017 postseason and a first-time All-Star this season, was bothered by shoulder trouble in the season’s second half. Before Game Four he hadn’t pitched since 30 September. He showed more rust than a ’39 Ford left outdoors over eight decades worth of hard winters. Lance McCullers, Jr. missed most of August with a forearm muscle strain and was sent back to the bullpen for the postseason, and he wasn’t close to his 2017 postseason form, either.
Remove Collin McHugh, Hector Rondon, and Tony Sipp from the bullpen equation and the Astro pen entered Game Five with a ghastly 18.09 ALCS ERA. And most of that was Osuna’s fault, thanks to that gruesome eighth in Game Four.
Bregman, the Astros’s smooth third baseman and arguable best clutch hitter this year, wasn’t as big a plate presence as normal this time around even without the near-miss that almost ended Game Four in the Astros’ favour.
He also hit into another spell of hard luck in Game Five, when Betts, who’s probably Public Enemy Number Two in Houston right now, ran down his opposite field drive and took another flying leap, this time catching it on the fly just before the ball might have hit the yellow line atop the fence.
George Springer, last year’s World Series MVP, was just about the only Astro to hit like one in this LCS. He went 1-for-4 in Game Five to finish with a .381/.458/.667 slash line for the series; the Astros could be forgiven if they wished even for a split second that they could have a full lineup of Springers this set.
Don’t count the Astros out for 2019. But give them a hug for the 2018 just ended. Few things sting more than getting pushed out of the postseason by their former bench coach who just became the first major league manager ever to win the pennant on his birthday.
But they’ll be back. Their core is still intact: Bregman, Springer, Altuve (especially as his knee recovers fully), Correa (with his back recovering likewise), Verlander, Cole, and just about their entire bullpen. They can also afford to lose their pending free agents if Morton, Marwin Gonzalez, and Dallas Keuchel sign elsewhere, thanks to such prospects as Kyle Tucker (outfield) and Forrest Whitley (pitcher) about to come forth.
As for their former bench coach turned Red Sox pennant-winning manager, Alex Cora once again made the adroit moves Thursday night. He sent Matt Barnes in for the seventh and, after Gonzalez yanked a home run to the Crawford Box seats and Tony Kemp worked out a walk, the birthday boy reached for Nathan Eovaldi, his Game Three starter now on his normal between-starts throwing day.
Eovaldi finished the seventh and worked a reasonably spotless eighth, including a swinging strikeout on Bregman—who’d tried to troll him earlier in the series by posting online video of him surrendering long balls to Bregman. Price could be seen in the Red Sox dugout hollering, “Post that!†when Bregman swung and missed on Eovaldi’s rising outer fastball.
It’s not nice to troll these Red Sox in the middle of a postseason series. Shows you what the Astros learned from Aaron Judge’s troll attempt leaving Boston after Game Two of the division series. The Red Sox made the Yankees pay for that in their house, too. Dodgers and/or Brewers, take very serious note.
Then Kimbrel—who bends over and spreads his crooked elbows in a remarkable impersonation of the classic TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport when he’s leaning in to take a sign from his catcher, a position that inspires no few fan impressions on both sides—shook off his previous ninth-inning high-wire penchants and a four-pitch, one-out walk to Yuli Gurriel to strike out Gonzalez looking and get Kemp’s game-ending fly.
“I’m sorry that I gave quite a few of you heart attacks the last few days,†Kimbrel said after the game. “Let’s hope in the World Series I can make them nice and clean.â€
The ninth innings? Or the heart attacks? Better not ask. The Red Sox may be winners of three World Series since the turn of the century (take
that, Empire
Emeritus!), but why take chances?
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