Monthly Archives: October 2023

ALCS Game Three: Max the Knifed

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Max Scherzer

Max the Knifed watches José Altuve’s leadoff bomb disappear in the top of the Game Three third Wednesday night.

Which would be more treacherous a thought entering American League Championship Series Game Three? The Astros in the 2-0 hole, needing to win twice for any hope of taking the series home where the Rangers proved impossible to intimidate in the first two? Or Max Scherzer starting for the Rangers at all?

My guess going in was that it was even money. The Astros may have manhandled the Rangers on the regular season, including winning five of six in Globe Life Field. But they got out-wrestled by the Rangers in Houston to open this ALCS, neither team hitting with overwhelming force but the Rangers holding an ALCS ERA one full run lower.

That might or might not change in Game Three, I thought. Scherzer’s age began showing this season well before the Rangers made him their marquee trade deadline catch at July’s end, well before his arm (specifically, it turned out, his armpit) tried to resign on 12 September, knocking him out of the Rangers’ high-wire final stretch.

Scherzer was also once considered a non-factor for this postseason. He, of course, had other ideas. “When this injury happened, we were kind of in that four- to six-week window,” he said before Game Three. “I took one day to feel bad about it and the next day I was back to grinding because I knew we have a team that can compete with anybody . . .

“I’ve pressed all the buttons I can,” he continued. “I’m ready to go . . . I feel normal. That’s all I can say.  All I can do is describe what I feel like and if I have an issue, I have to let them know. But my arm feels fresher.”

On the surface, that sounded better than the 2019 World Series, when Scherzer was a National and had to miss his scheduled Game Six start because of a neck issue that called for a cortisone shot and Stephen Strasburg standing in to deliver heroic pitching. When Scherzer started Game Seven and kept things to a 2-0 Astro lead while he had nothing left in his tank but fumes.

The Nats, of course, went on to win that game and that Series. “We were all kind of making fun of him,” then-Nats catcher Kurt Suzuki said, “saying he was going to rise from the dead.”

Scherzer just might have had to do that again Wednesday night. Whether he’d be Max the Knife or Max the Knifed, he did have a history of sheer survival on the mound going in. But he also had over a month’s rest and rust. And these Astros aren’t quite the same Astros he held off four years ago, but they’re just as formidable—and they flayed him for a 6.55 ERA in two starts on the season.

Plus, Globe Life is a hive where big bops thrive, and Scherzer has averaged 25 home runs surrendered per 162 games lifetime. That won’t paralyse his Hall of Fame case, but there was always the chance that one, two, or even three Astro bombs might murder him and the Rangers in Game Three. And these Astros were a far better road (.630 win percentage) than home team (.481) on the regular season.

Well.

Scherzer and Astros starter Cristian Javier matched shutout innings in the first. But the slider that’s done slightly over half his lifelong lifting began disobeying his orders after that. Fatally. Scherzer said postgame that, while his arm feels good (“That’s the number one thing”), he doesn’t know how he’ll be used the rest of the postseason.

The Rangers may not know just yet, either. Not even if manager Bruce Bochy said he had decent stuff and made “some mistakes.” Scherzer did throw eleven first-pitch strikes and nailed fourteen called strikes. But a little over half his strikes were put into play. The wipeout slider deserted him. The Astros weren’t inclined to show mercy.

Scherzer plunked Yordan Alvarez on the back foot to open the second, then caught José Abreu looking at strike three—before he loaded the bases on a followup walk and a base hit with nobody out.

Then he got Jeremy Peña to pop out to short center, but he wild-pitched Alvarez home with Martín Maldonado at the plate. Seeking his first ALCS hit, Maldonado then nailed it with a two-run single past Rangers third baseman Josh Jung. Maldonado was thrown out at second trying to stretch, but Scherzer left the inning in a 3-0 hole. Which became a 4-0 hole when José Altuve sent a 1-2 service into the left center field seats.

Scherzer went back out for the fourth. Abreu said a rude leadoff hello with a double to the back of center field, and a ground out later Mauricio Dubón singled Abreu home for a 5-0 Astro lead. Getting ahead in the count on most of the Astros he faced did Scherzer no good in the end. The Rangers went to their postseason-surprise bullpen after four full innings.

Max the Knifed.

Javier (.119 batting average against him in his postseason life) kept the Rangers in check with location more than speed, until Nathaniel Lowe rapped a two-out single into left and Jung sent one into the right center field bullpen in the bottom of the fifth. With Cody Bradford on the mound for the Rangers, center fielder Leodys Taveras pulled a likely sixth-inning homer back against Alvarez.

In the bottom of that inning, Rangers rookie Evan Carter sent Javier out of the game and the Rangers’ hair with a two-out double. But Michael Brantley ran down a likely extra-base hit into an out with a running catch on the track off Adolis García’s followup drive and might have saved the game for the Astros.

It must have put a further jolt into the Astro lineup. Alvarez smacked a bases-loaded, two-run single off Rangers reliever Will Harris with two out in the seventh. Then Lowe and Jung delivered a rerun of their fifth-inning flogging—Lowe with a two-out single, this time to right, and Jung with another two-run homer, this time over the straightaway center field fence.

The Astros added an eighth in the eighth off Jon Gray with Peña’s bouncing single through the right side sending Tucker home. It might have been more but for Seager going into the hole at short to stop Altuve’s one-out smash and throw Dubón out at third, before Martin Perez relieved Gray and rid himself of Brantley on the ground for the side. It seemed off script when García singled Marcus Semien home in the bottom of the eighth.

After Alvarez got thrown out at home to end the top of the ninth, here came one final chance for the Rangers in the bottom—the numbers two and three scheduled hitters were Lowe and Jung, following Mitch Garver, even with Astros closer Ryan Pressly coming into the game.

Garver did his part, wringing his way to a full-count leadoff walk, before Lowe struck out swinging and Jung grounded into a game-ending double play. There went the Rangers’ postseason winning streak. The Astros still have an uphill climb ahead of them no matter how good a road team they were this year. Even if they’ve won six out of their last eight games in Arlington.

Scherzer’s competitiveness hasn’t abandoned him. But after the roughest regular season of his major league life, as Yahoo! Sports’s Hannah Keyser observes, “the problem is not rising to the moment but, rather, succumbing to his own physical limitations.” Succumbing to the very real prospect that he really isn’t Max the Knife anymore.

And, to the very real prospect that, however much the Rangers respect him, however much his teammates admire his undiminished need to compete, they may not be able to afford another chance to find out if there’s even one final quality start—never mind one more miracle performance—left in him this year.

“It comes down to execution,” said Max the Knifed postgame. “I know what I need to do.” He almost sounded like a chastened child who made a huge mistake trying to pass a mud pie off as a chocolate cake. That’s not the way a 39-year-old future Hall of Famer or his World Series-aspiring team wants him to sound.

NLCS Game Two: Was it loud enough?

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Merrill Kelly

Arizona pitcher Merrill Kelly leaving NLCS Game Two in the sixth inning and hearing it from the Citizens Bank Park crowd whose sound he underestimated. He ended up bearing the least of the Phillies’ destruction on the night.

Maybe nobody gave Diamondbacks pitcher Merrill Kelly the memo. Maybe he missed the sign completely. Wherever Kelly happened to be, if and when he was warned not to poke the Philadelphia bear and his native habitat, he learned the hard way Tuesday night and the Diamondbacks whole were dragged into class.

Maybe the Braves sent him a message he never saw. You remember the Braves. The guys trolling Bryce Harper after their second division series game, when Harper got doubled up on a very close play following an impossible center field catch to end the game. They learned the hard way, too. They’re also on early winter vacation.

Before this National League Championship Series even began, Kelly was asked whether the heavy metal-loud Citizens Bank Park crowd might have a hand in the field proceedings. He practically shrugged it off, though in absolute fairness he wasn’t exactly trying to be mean or nasty.

“I haven’t obviously heard this place on the field, but I would be very surprised if it trumped that Venezuela game down in Miami [in the World Baseball Classic],” said Kelly, a righthander whose countenance bears a resemblance to comedian Chris Elliott and who’s considered a mild-mannered young man otherwise. “When Trea [Turner] hit that grand slam, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced—at least baseball-wise, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an atmosphere like that so I hope that this isn’t louder than that.”

That grand slam jolted Team USA into the semifinal round. By the same Trea Turner who’d start Kelly’s Tuesday night with a jolt, hitting a one-out, one-strike pitch into the left center field seats in the bottom of the first. 

Kelly may not have been trying to be snarky, but The Bank let him have it early and often, first when he was introduced pre-game time and then when he took the mound for the bottom of the Game Two first. Loud, clear, and unmistakeable.

The only things Kelly faced louder and more clear than that were Turner’s score-starting blast, the one-ball, two-out laser Kyle Schwarber sent off Kelly’s best pitch, a changeup, into the right field seats in the third, and the 2-1 skyrocket Schwarber sent into the right center field seats leading off the bottom of the sixth.

“He’s really effective because he has a plus-plus changeup,” Schwarber said postgame. “He threw it 2-0 and kinda gave me the window. That’s what it looks like coming out of there. I think that was the first strike [on a] changeup I saw. [The home run pitch] was a little bit more down and away. But, I mean, it came out of the same height. So those are things that you look for.”

“They’re good big-league hitters,” Kelly said of the Phlogging Phillies postgame. “That’s what good big-league hitters do. They don’t miss mistakes.” Neither did The Bank’s crowd, serenading him with “Mer-rill! Mer-rill” chants at any available opportunity. But Kelly actually pitched decently despite the bombs. He only surrendered three hits, but walking three didn’t help despite his six strikeouts.

He’d also prove to have been handled mercifully compared to what the Phillies did to the Diamondbacks bullpen in a 10-0 Game Two blowout.

Once they pushed Kelly out of the game, with two out in the sixth and Turner aboard with a walk, they slapped reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply with a base hit (Bryson Stott), a two-run double (J.T. Realmuto), and another RBI double (Brandon Marsh). Just like that, the Phillies had a four-run sixth with six on the board and counting.

Then, Mantiply walked the Schwarbinator to open the Philadelphia seventh. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo reached for Ryne Nelson. One out later, Harper singled Schwarber to third, Alec Bohm doubled them home with a drive that hit the track, Stott hit a floater that hit the infield grass between Nelson plus Diamondbacks third baseman Evan Longoria and catcher Gabriel Moreno, Realmuto singled Bohm home and Stott to third, and Nick Castellanos sent Stott home with a sacrifice fly.

This time they didn’t need Harper to provide the major dramatics. He’d done enough of that in Game One, hitting a first-inning, first-pitch-to-him, first-NLCS-swing, first-time-ever-on-his-own-birthday nuke one out after Schwarber hit his own first-pitch bomb. That game turned into a 5-3 Phillies win. On Tuesday night, they turned the Diamondbacks into rattlesnake stew.

They made life just as simple for Game Two starter Aaron Nola as for Game One starter Zack Wheeler. Wheeler gave the Phillies six innings of two-run, three-hit, eight-strikeout ball; Nola gave them six innings of three-hit, seven-strikeout, shutout ball. It was as if the Philadelphia Orchestra offered successive evenings of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major—featuring Isaac Stern one night and Itzhak Perlman the next.

“It’s a little more hostile and a little more engaging,” said Turner of the Bank crowd after the Phillies banked Game One. “I think [Kelly] can maybe tell you after tonight what it’s like, but I wouldn’t put anything past our fans. Our fans have been unbelievable. They’ve been great. I don’t know what decibels mean, but I guess we did something cool for AC/DC concert level decibels the other night . . . I would just wait and see and we’ll see what he says after [Game Two]”

“They’re up all game on their feet from pitch number one till the end,” said Nola postgame. “I feel like you don’t really see that too much around the league. That just shows you how passionate and into the game they are. They know what’s going on, and that helps us a lot.”

That was not necessarily what Lovullo wanted to hear before or after the Game Two massacre ended. “Everybody’s talking about coming into this environment,” he said, audibly frustrated, “and I don’t care.”

We’ve got to play better baseball. Start with the manager, and then trickle all the way down through the entire team. We’ve got to play Diamondback baseball . . . Diamondback baseball is grinding out at bats . . . driving up pitch counts, catching pop ups . . . win[ning] a baseball game by just being a really smart, stubborn baseball team in all areas.

That assumes the Phillies will just roll over and let them play it. The wild-card Diamondbacks who steamrolled two division winners in the earlier rounds to get here in the first place looked like anything except an unlikely juggernaut after getting manhandled in Philadelphia. They shouldn’t take the Phillies for granted once the set moves to Chase Field, either.

The Phillies might have been a one-game-over-.500 road team on the regular season, but they beat the Diamondbacks in Chase Field three out of four—a couple of weeks after the Snakes beat them two out of three in The Bank. Until this NLCS it was a little over three months since the two teams tangled. It certainly didn’t phaze the Phillies.

“I still think we’re real confident,” said Kelly. “I think there was a lot to be said about us after the All-Star break about how bad of a slump that we went into. I’ve seen in this clubhouse, I’ve seen from these guys that we haven’t gotten rattled all year. And I don’t want us to hang our heads and pout about it this time.”

But let’s say the Diamondbacks iron up and find ways to neutralise the Phillies’ offensive bludgeons and pitching scythes which, admittedly, might require a kidnapping or three. Let’s say they win all three games at Chase. They might become the only team to be at a disadvantage with a 3-2 series lead.

Because guess where the set would return then. And, unless my prowling has missed something this morning, Kelly didn’t have one word to say about that crowd after Game Two came to its merciful end. It must have been more than loud enough for him.

ALCS Game Two: Rangers bent, not broken

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Nathan Eovaldi

Nathan Eovaldi, after wresting the Rangers out of a bases-loaded jam in ALCS Game Two. It helped the Rangers go up 2-0 despite Houston bombardier Yordan Álvarez’s two-homer day.

The War for Texas is two games in. The Rangers have won them both, in Houston. Despite being bent a lot more in American League Championship Series Game Two than they were in Game One.

That’s what a four-run first, an arduous wriggle out of a bases-loaded/nobody out fifth-inning jam, and a gutsy four-out save does for you. Even on a day when Yordan Álvarez recovers from an apparent virus and a three-strikeout Game One to hit two bombs.

Álvarez turned out trying to play Game One through an ailment that left him unable to hold food down or avoid headaches, not to mention unable to sleep very much. When it came time for Game Two, Álvarez still knew something his team didn’t until game time: he was going to play Monday no matter what, and nothing short of house arrest would stop him.

And if only the Rangers hadn’t jumped all over Astros starting pitcher Framber Valdez in a four-run first inning, Álvarez’s two-homer Game Two might, maybe, have become something beyond just another tale he can tell his eventual grandchildren.

But it still took a large effort by the Rangers to keep the Astros from overthrowing them and sweeping the first Houston leg of this ALCS. Large enough to prove that you can bend but not quite break these Rangers, who held on tight to win Game Two, 5-4.

It took ten pitches and a throwing error from Valdez to put the Rangers up 4-0 before the game’s first out was recorded. With Nathan Eovaldi starting for the Rangers, Ranger fans could have been forgiven if they thought the rest of the game might, maybe, be something of a leisurely game.

Marcus Semien and Corey Seager opened by hitting the first pitch of each plate appearance for back-to-back singles, Seager’s a shuttlecock that landed before Astros third baseman Alex Bregman running out could reach it. Then it took Valdez pouncing upon Robbie Grossman’s dead-fish tapper back but bobbling it a moment before throwing wild past first, allowing Semien to score and leaving second and third.

Then came Adolis García lining a single the other way to right to score Seager, and Mitch Garver pulling a line single to left to score Grossman. Finally, Valdez nailed an out striking Josh Heim out swinging on three pitches, but Nathaniel Lowe replied almost immediately to follow by sneaking a base hit through the left side of the infield to score García.

That wasn’t exactly in the Astros’ game plan. Valdez finally struck Josh Jung out and got a fly out by Leody Taveras to end the inning. It made Álvarez’s first homer, a yanking drive into the second deck behind right field in the bottom of the second, a crowd pleaser but a mere interruption. Eovaldi went from there to sandwich a strikeout between two ground outs to third, the first of which took a grand throw by Jung from the foul side behind third base to get Chas McCormick by a step.

Nor was it in the Astro plan for Valdez to last only two and a third innings, after Heim led off the top of the third with a blast into the Crawford Boxes for the fifth Rangers run.

“I thought the quality of my pitches were good,” the righthander said through his interpreter postgame. “I think they were good and they maybe got a little bit lucky. There were a couple of balls that they didn’t hit well that fell for base hits a couple times. I tried going as far as I could.”

Valdez has a few more things to learn about luck. These Rangers prefer to make their own luck. They might attack with aplomb at the plate but they’re going to turn your mistakes into disaster, too. You’d better not call them lucky, either, when you’re the poor soul who mishandled and then threw away a potential double play grounder that might have kept the Rangers’ first-inning damage down to a small dent.

Bregman nudged the Astros a little closer back with a leadoff bomb ringing the foul pole in the fourth. Then Eovaldi had to shove his way out of a no-out, bases-loaded jam in the fifth by striking pinch-hitter Yainer Díaz and José Altuve out back-to-back before Bregman beat one into the ground toward third—where Jung, whose over-run of Jeremy Peña’s bouncer loaded the pads in the first place, threw him out at first by three steps.

Michael Brantley pulled the Astros back to within a pair with a sixth-inning RBI double. Josh Sborz relieved Eovaldi for the seventh and got the side in order, including a called third strike on Altuve to end it. Aroldis Chapman went out to pitch the eighth and, after a Bregman fly out to center and a Tucker ground out to second, the first pitch he threw Álvarez would be his last of the day, Álvarez lining it hard and fast into the lower right field seats.

“You can never count us out,” McCormick said of his Astros post-game. “We don’t ever quit.” That was true enough to compel Rangers manager Bruce Bochy to get Chapman out of there after Alvarez’s second launch and ask Jose Leclerc for a four-out save.

Leclerc shook off back-to-back walks to get McCormick to force José Abreu at third for the side, then dispatched the Astros in order in the ninth—the hard way. Peña’s deep fly to right collapsed into an out at the track. Díaz’s grounder toward third was stopped by Jung on the slide before Jung threw him out. Altuve’s fly to center was only deep enough to land in Taveras’s glove for the side and the game.

“We’ve had some chances to win some games,” said McCormick, painfully aware the Astros had several grand Game Two chances laid waste. “Usually we do come through with some big hits. We did earlier in the year and, this time around, we haven’t come up with that big hit.”

Indeed. The Astros have been 1-for-9 with men in scoring position all ALCS so far. And, out of their 24 postseason runs thus far this time around, Álvarez is responsible for eighteen of them, either scoring them or sending them home. But even he can’t thwart the Rangers by himself. Not the way these Rangers do things. Not when they can make a two-homer game by him a sidebar.

“We’re jumping on teams early,” Jung said postgame, “and that helps us settle in. Our pitching has been outstanding. You can’t ask for anything more than what they’ve given us.”

Eovaldi has the knack of transforming from a solid regular-season pitcher to a Hall of Fame-level pitcher in the postseason. Even if he wasn’t quite at his pure best in Game Two, he still had enough to keep the Rangers well ahead of the game by the time his outing ended. He now has a 2.87 ERA and a 2.60 fielding-independent pitching rate in nine career postseason series.

“Something just clicks for him,” his catcher Heim said postgame. “I’m not sure. Same preparation. Same mentality that he has had all year. Just something about big games that he loves.”

It may yet prove to be something Ranger fans will love for eternity and beyond. The Rangers are halfway to the World Series, still unbeaten this postseason, and going home to their own inviting playpen in Arlington. They were far better at home than on the road in the regular season—but now they’ve won seven straight postseason contests with six coming on the road.

“We’ll get ’em in Texas,” Astros manager Dusty Baker vowed after Game Two. Ahem. You weren’t exactly out of Texas in Games One and Two, sir. You’ve been gotten in Texas so far.

ALCS Game One: Bad Astro looks, sharp Ranger pitching

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Evan Carter

Evan Carter’s running-and-leaping catch of an Alex Bregman drive that had extra bases stamped on it otherwise ended with doubling up José Altuve in the Game One eighth—on Altuve’s own baserunning mistake.

This was not a good look for the Astros. When Justin Verlander keeps the arguable best remaining postseason offense to the weakest postseason game it’s had this time around but the Astros still don’t win, it’s not a good look.

When Jordan Montgomery scatters five hits in six and a third innings with no Astro scoring against him, before handing off to a bullpen whose regular season was an indictment for arson but has been a challenge to pry runs out of this postseason, it’s not a good Astro look.

When José Altuve, one of baseball’s smartest players, makes an eighth-inning baserunning mistake more to be expected of a raw rookie than a thirteen-year veteran with a Most Valuable Player Award in his trophy case, it’s not a good Astro look.

Astroworld should only be grateful that the Rangers didn’t even think about trolling Altuve the way a certain Brave trolled Bryce Harper on a similar but different play in the National League division series out of which the Phillies shoved the Braves.

Harper didn’t miss second scrambling back to first when Nick Castellanos’s long ninth-inning drive in Game Two was caught on the run and leap by Braves center fielder Michael Harris II, but he was thrown out at first by a hair and a half to end the game and the only Braves win of the set.

Altuve didn’t end American League Championship Series Game One Sunday night, but he did put the kibosh on the Astros’s final scoring opportunity in the 2-0 loss. He’d drawn a leadoff walk against Rangers reliever Josh Sborz, who yielded at once to Aroldis Chapman—a relief pitcher whose best fastball can still out-fly a speeding bullet, but who once surrendered a pennant-losing homer to Altuve himself and is still prone to hanging his sliders.

Then, somehow, Astros third baseman Alex Bregman sent a 2-1 slider off the middle of the zone to the rear end of Minute Maid Park, toward the chain-link fence beneath a Bank of America sign. The Rangers’ rookie left fielder Evan Carter ran it down and still had to take a flying leap to catch it one-handed just before it might have hit the fence and spoiled the Ranger shutout.

“Everybody,” said Astros catcher Martín Maldonado, who probably meant both the Astros themselves and the Minute Maid crowd, “thought that ball was going to hit the wall.”

Carter threw in to shortstop Corey Seager, who tossed right to second baseman Marcus Semien with third baseman Josh Jung pointing to the base emphatically. Semien stepped on the base just as emphatically. It took a replay review to affirm what Seager, Semien, and Jung spotted at once. Second base umpire Doug Eddings rung Altuve up. Altuve never touched second en route back to first.

Ouch!

“I didn’t think he was going to make the play he made—it was a great play,” said Altuve, a man who excels at just about everything you can ask of a veteran except baserunning, what with leading the entire Show with sixteen outs on the bases during the regular season. “You just try to come back to first base (and) that’s what I did.”

“That’s a play,” Semien said, “where I always watch to see what the runner does. Sometimes the umpires are looking at the ball, and that’s exactly what (Eddings) told me. He said he was looking at the ball. He didn’t see it. I tried to remind him. He still called it safe, but luckily that’s a play we can review. I’ve made that mistake before on the bases, so it’s one that we kinda go over in spring training, and all of a sudden in the ALCS, it showed up.”

Carter had also run down and caught leaping a Bregman drive down the left field line in the first. Then he himself accounted for the first Rangers run in the second inning, when he shot a base hit right past diving Astros first baseman José Abreu and gunned his way to second ahead of a throw that was dropped almost inexplicably at the base. Rangers catcher Jonah Heim then singled back up the pipe and Carter, reading the ball almost as a Biblical scholar parses the Beatitudes, scored.

“They always preach to us, especially the ones that can run a little bit, just, ‘Hey, it’s a double until it’s not’,” said Carter, who didn’t play his first major league game until 8 September. “So that’s kind of my mindset. I’m going to get a double until the outfielder tells me that I need to stop. I didn’t feel like I was told I needed to stop, so I just kept going.”

Three innings later, the Rangers’ number nine lineup batter, center fielder Leody Taveras, caught hold of a hanging Verlander sinker and lined it right over the right field fence. That was the second and final blemish against Verlander, the veteran who walked to the Mets as a free agent last winter but returned to the Astros in a trade deadline deal in August.

Altuve’s eighth-inning misstep was only the final among several opportunities the Astros missed all game long. They wasted Abreu’s second inning-opening single almost at once when Michael Tucker forced him at second on a followup ground out, then stranded Tucker on a pair of fly outs.

They wasted first and second with two outs in the third when Yordan Alvarez struck out for the second of three times on the night.

They pushed the bases loaded against Montgomery in the fourth, the only inning in which the Rangers’ 6’6″ tall, free agent-to-be lefthander truly struggled, and Montgomery ironed up and struck Maldonado out swinging on 1-2.

It was only when Astros utility player Mauricio Dubón, playing center field for them Sunday night, slammed a hard line out to center field opening the Houston seventh, that Rangers manager Bruce Bochy decided to reach for the bullpen. Now, the Astros had a clean shot at a bullpen that might resemble the Third Army this postseason but blew 33 out of 63 so-called save situations on the regular season.

Altuve’s baserunning mistake still left the Astros four outs to work with yet and the vulnerable Chapman hardly off the hook with Alvarez checking in at the plate: Chapman’s lifetime postseason ERA in Minute Maid Park was 7.53 entering Sunday night. He fell behind Alvarez 2-1. Then, he threw Alvarez a slider that hung up just enough to be sent into orbit, just as Altuve had done winning that 2019 ALCS.

The only place Alvarez sent this one, though, was on the ground toward first base for an inning-ending out. Then Bochy reached for Jose Leclerc to work the ninth. Leclerc landed a hard-enough earned three up, three down; he went to full counts on Abreu and Chas McCormick before getting Abreu to line out to center for the first out and McCormick to strike out swinging, sandwiching Tucker’s 2-2 ground out to second.

“We just found a way to get a couple of runs across the board,” said Bochy after the game ended. “That was the difference in the game, obviously. But our guy was really good, Monty, terrific job he did. And he got in a couple of jams there and found a way to get out of it.”

Verlander didn’t sound discouraged after Game One despite his solid effort coming up just short enough. “We’ve lost Game One of some playoff series before,” said the future Hall of Fame righthander. “And that’s the great thing about this team. Obviously nobody is sitting in the locker room right now happy. But it’s very matter of fact, okay. We just got punched, how do you answer?”

The Astros have Game Two to start answering, of course. But they might have to find a few more ways to keep Carter from running down and killing their better drives.

Approaching the League Championship Series

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Houston Astros

The Astros are playing for a piece of history as well as a pennant.

Welcome back to Year Two of Commissioner Pepperwinkle’s postseason format. Brought to you by Jack. The makers of Diddley, America’s number one squat.

In the first episode, act one, three out of six regular season division winners got wild card round byes. The other three had to play wild card teams in round one. Two swept, one got swept, and one other wild card team swept the other one. Those sets played almost faster than the speed of sound, light, and the Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote.

Episode one, act two: Two division winners got swept, two more lost in four games. Those sets didn’t quite go beep! beep! but they were played swiftly enough when you look back upon them. And the net result was that the winning teams, collectively, went 20-2. Or, one loss fewer than former major league pitcher David Cone’s 1988 won-lost record.

We pause now for a brief commercial. A lot more brief than the ones which have been, really, the number one culprit in turning baseball games into marathon runs that tried the patience of even those lifetime romantics to whom the lack of a time clock has been one of baseball’s most endearing faculties.

This pause is brought to you by Schtick Razor Blades. No matter how you slice it, Schtick is just too sharp for comfort. Four out of five dermatologists tell you Schtick is several cuts below . . . the surface, and anything else it can reach. Remember, four out of five surveys have been doctored.

Episode two, stage right, begins Sunday night in Houston. Where the numbers one and two finishers in the American League West square off in a contest for not just the American League pennant but Texas bragging rights. Episode two, stage left, begins Monday night in Philadelphia. It’s only a contest for the National League pennant. There’s no intra-division, never mind in-state rivalry at stake there.

What we do have, however, is baseball’s sixth-best regular season team (the Astros) playing its eight-best regular season team (the Rangers) for that American League pennant and that Texas throne. We also have baseball’s seventh-best regular season team (the Phillies) playing its twelfth-best team (the Diamondbacks) for that National League pennant and, maybe, highlight film rights plus a year’s immunity from the sting of the Arizona bark scorpion.

Sunday night, the Astros open at home defiant of the conspiracy theory that the five-day layoff for the bye teams was a killer. They got the same five days off as the Dodgers and the Braves did and they beat the Twins in their division series, 3-1, outscoring the Twins 20-13. They also out-pitched the Twins, 3.25 team ERA to 4.89, with 52 pitching strikeouts to 37.

They weren’t quite as good at avoiding pitching walks as the Twins (16 for the Astros, 9 for the Twins), but they didn’t have to be in the end. The Astros hit for a team .818 OPS to the Twins’s .681. They may not find the Rangers to be ALCS pushovers, either: the Rangers led the American League regular season in hits, runs, home runs, and OPS. The Astros’s formidable pitching might have a war on its hands. But both teams were almost dead even for team fielding-independent pitching: 4.32 for the Rangers, 4.31 for the Astros.

This Texas war has the potential to make the Alamo resemble a ranch barbeque. Especially when each team’s most formidable postseason batter, Rangers shortstop Corey Seager (you know, the guy the Dodgers allowed to escape into free agency) and Astros left fielder Yordan Alvarez, checks in and starts doing damage. When this ALCS ends, Texas will be singing either “Corey, Corey Seager, king of the wild frontier” or “Yordan fit the battle of Jericho.”

The Astros—please, let’s knock it off about Astrogate at last, if only because a) second baseman José Altuve was indeed what his former teammate Carlos Correa said, “the one guy who didn’t use the trash can” and objected loudly when it was used during his plate appearances; and, b) Altuve and third baseman Alex Bregman are the only two remaining position players from the 2017-18 Astrogate teams.

But the Astros are playing for a piece of baseball history. If they turn the Rangers aside, then go on to win the World Series against either the Phillies or the Astros, they’d be the first repeat Series champions since the 1978 Yankees. If they meet and do it to the Phillies, they’d also be the first since 1978 to do it to the guys they beat the year before.

The Rangers are playing their first ALCS since winning back-to-backs in 2010-2011 . . . but losing both those World Series, especially to that staggering Cardinals overthrow in Games Six and Seven in 2011. (David Freese, call your office!) They haven’t even smelled the postseason since losing a division series to the Blue Jays in 2016, never mind gotten far enough to play for the pennant.

So the War for Texas involves one team playing for history and another time trying to augment its own on the positive side of the ledger. They can both hit. They can both pitch, even if some observers wonder just when the Rangers’ ordinarily unsteady bullpen runs out of postseason mojo. They’ll throw out future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander (Astros) against Jordan Montgomery (Rangers—and the guy who runs Yankee fan temperatures up the scales because the Yankees let him escape in 2022) for Game One.

And they’re both managed by men who know how to keep the horses running reasonably while not letting the moments overwhelm them too heavily. Bruce Bochy vs. Dusty Baker. It almost sounds like Casey Stengel (the Yankee version) vs. Joe McCarthy (also the Yankee version). Almost. Though I can’t imagine either man having any kind of flair for Casey’s Stengelese triple-talking wit and wonder.

So on with the show. Brought to you by The Company. Who remind you that sixty-seven years after its birth, it’s now . . . sixty-seven years later.