Astros, unstoppable even against the Yankees, roll to another World Series
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NEW YORK — Maybe the Houston Astros are just this much better than everyone else. Maybe the rest of the American League was not as competitive as it appeared at times this season — or last season or two years before that.
Maybe the once-formidable New York Yankees fell apart at their feet. Maybe, given the way the Yankees surrendered one of the few leads they had this AL Championship Series by being unable to catch and throw reliably in the seventh inning of their 6-5 loss in Sunday night’s Game 4 at Yankee Stadium, that point is beyond dispute.
But whatever the ratios of talent to happenstance, good baseball bones to good baseball fortune, the Astros are AL champions again, the third time in four years and the fourth time in six years they have gone at least that far. They are as undeniable as they are inconvenient for the rest of the baseball world, which remains reluctant to forgive them after a sign-stealing scheme helped them to the 2017 title. But they are in the World Series again anyway — and they have yet to lose a postseason game this year.
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The baseball industry’s relationship with the Astros and their success is complicated. They are, and have been, innovators. They have also become a Goliath, the only team in recent history capable of transforming the Steinbrenners’ Yankees into something even remotely resembling a David. Any team they play holds the presumed moral high ground, one those around the Astros argue they should no longer have to cede.
But what they have ceded more willingly is the ability to surprise anyone anymore. A few hours before Nestor Cortes Jr. threw his first pitch to open Game 4, the Philadelphia Phillies had sent their city into revelry with a stunning, pennant-clinching win over the San Diego Padres. That National League frivolity, and the fact that four different teams have represented that league in the World Series in the past four years, demonstrates just how difficult it is to do what the Astros have done.
It also highlights what is missing from this series: Revelry did not exist in this ALCS. There was history, and there were expectations. And Sunday, there were the undefeated Astros barreling into a team that looked utterly incapable of resisting.
The Yankees scored four runs total in the first three games of this series. They looked offensively challenged, defensively unstable and emotionally disconnected. They arrived on a rainy Sunday in the Bronx all but beaten, then were forced to wait through an hour and a half of rain delays before taking the field before a lighter crowd than might have been in attendance under different circumstances. They were alive but barely — in line for the ferry to Hades, just waiting for their ticket to print.
Then Harrison Bader greeted Lance McCullers Jr. with a single in the bottom of the first. One out later, Anthony Rizzo got hit with a pitch. Giancarlo Stanton hit a line drive to right center, and Gleyber Torres blooped one behind the infield. Suddenly, the Yankees had two runs after five batters. And for the first time in 10 games against the Astros between the regular season and postseason — a span of 91 innings — they led an inning that wasn’t the last one.
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An inning later, Isiah Kiner-Falefa sent a groundball double up the first base line and scored when Rizzo sent one of his own up the third base line. The Yankees had done in two innings what they had not done in this series in nine: They scored three runs. Perhaps they could make this competitive.
Cortes didn’t look sharp early, but he worked through the first two innings unscathed. When he started the third, his low-90s fastball dropped into the high 80s. He walked two batters, leading a trainer and his pitching coach to come check on him. Cortes appeared to tell them he was fine. Five pitches later, rookie shortstop Jeremy Peña, who would be named ALCS MVP, hit a high flyball to deep left, a no-doubter. Not a minute later, Cortes was walking off the mound with a trainer, the score tied, his season seemingly over. Yordan Alvarez greeted his replacement, Wandy Peralta, with a double. Kyle Tucker hit a 107-mph line drive off Peralta’s hand. Yuli Guerriel singled to bring home Alvarez and give Houston the lead.
“Chemistry. You can’t match it. We show up,” Peña said.
Blow by blow, relentless at-bat after relentless at-bat, the Astros dismantled the Yankees’ momentum as quickly as it had appeared. But the Yankees scored to tie it an inning later. They even took a 5-4 lead in the sixth on Bader’s fifth homer of the playoffs. The Astros could have yielded the evening, already well past 11 p.m., and started fresh Monday for Game 5. But maybe they couldn’t.
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After José Altuve reached with one out in the seventh, Jonathan Loáisiga got Peña to hit a groundball to second. Torres fielded it and flipped to Kiner-Falefa at shortstop. Somehow, in ways that still remained unclear after multiple looks at replay, the flip flew by Kiner-Falefa and into the outfield. Both runners were safe, and the Yankees’ chance to escape the heart of the order was lost. Alvarez drove home the tying run, and Alex Bregman put the Astros ahead with an RBI single off Clay Holmes.
“The ending, as I’ve said before, it’s cruel,” Yankees Manager Aaron Boone said. “You’re trying to climb to the top of the mountain. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to get there yet. The end is terrible.”
Alvarez, the Astros’ vaunted slugger, entered the game 1 for 10 in the series — the kind of neutralization any Astros opponent would be proud to have achieved. But when he had the chance to deliver the blow that would make the Yankees pay for their mistakes, he did it. So did Bregman. These are the Astros — beneficiaries of circumstances, makers of history, the best team in the American League, again and again and again.