NLCS Game Seven: Don’t worry. Be happy.

Posted on by
1
Arizona Diamondbacks

The Snakes start the pennant party after Phillies pinch-hitter Jake Cave flied out to end NLCS Game Seven.

So this is what the World Series will hoist. One team who got there with a bang—or several. One team who got there with whispers, almost, belying the pre-strike warning of the reptile that gives them their name.

It’s not that the Diamondbacks really intended to get to the World Series on the quiet side. But if the Rangers bludgeoned their way to the Series with back-to-back demolitions of the Astros in Houston, the Diamondbacks pried their way to the Series with four wins that could be called cool, calm, collected by comparison.

“We were silent, and we made damage,” said their shortstop Geraldo Perdomo, after the Snakes more or less nudged the Phillies home for the winter with a 4-2 National League Championship Series Game Seven win. “Be happy and enjoy what you do. That’s all. That was the message.”

Go ahead. Cue that ancient Bobby McFerrin hit. Don’t worry. Be happy. It wouldn’t be the worst theme song you could attach to a pennant winner.

The biggest lead by which the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies this set was a four-game margin in Game Six in Philadelphia. They won the National League pennant Tuesday night with a win in which it was harder to determine which was more profound, a small pack of squandered Phillies chances or a thick enough pack of quiet Diamondbacks opportunity seizings.

It was almost as though the smiling Snakes snuck their way to the World Series in the end. From their first Game Seven run scoring on a soft grounder the Phillies couldn’t turn into an inning-ending double play in the first to three of the least noisy fly outs finisher Paul Sewald got the Phillies to hit to end it.

Come to think of it, it was as though the underestimated Arizona gang wasn’t even fazed when Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm hit Diamondbacks starter Brandon Pfaadt’s first pitch of the second inning into the left center field seats. Pfaadt certainly wasn’t. He got second baseman Bryson Stott to fly out to the center field track, then struck catcher J.T. Realmuto and right fielder Nick Castellanos out swinging to prove it.

Pfaadt only looked shaky two innings later, when Bohm wrung him for a one-out walk, and Stott doubled him home to give the Phillies what proved a very short-lived 2-1 lead. Realmuto followed with a line single to left sending Stott to third which brought Castellanos to the plate.

The guy who began looking like Mr. October during the Phillies’s division series dispatch of the Braves and continued when he homered during his first plate appearance of this NLCS had gone 0-for-21 entering this plate appearance. Pfaadt struck him out swinging. Then the righthander shook off a four-pitch walk to left fielder Brandon Marsh to strike spaghetti-bat center field sweeper Johan Rojas out on three pitches.

And again the Diamondbacks didn’t resemble a team of no-names whose postseason days were going to be numbered by Philadelphia’s comparative star power.

Third baseman Emmanuel Rivera started unfurling that evidence with a leadoff line single up the pipe in the top of the fifth. Shortstop Geraldo Perdomo bunted him to second, perhaps ill-advised considering the wasted out and second baseman Ketel Marte’s swinging strikeout to follow.

Enter Corbin Carroll, the rookie about whom it’s very fair to say the Diamondbacks world revolves these days. After scoring that first run in the first, and in the middle of a 3-for-4 night, Carroll shot a base hit into center to send Rivera home to re-tie the game and push Phillies starter Ranger Suárez out of it.

Then catcher Gabriel Moreno greeted reliever Jeff Hoffman with a base hit after Carroll stole second, enabling the rook to be run number three before Moreno was caught trying to stretch to second. Meanwhile, Carroll also spent his evening tying a postseason rookie record for hits in a winner-take-all contest.

Most teams run out of an inning when they could do more damage might go into mourning at that point. Not these Diamondbacks. Their reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply shook off Kyle Schwarber’s bottom of the fifth-opening double to get Phillies shortstop Trea Turner to ground out to third and Bryce Harper, the dangerous convert to first base, to fly out to the track in left.

That was enough to prompt Snakes manager Torey Lovullo to get Mantiply the hell out of there and bring Ryan Thompson in to lure Bohm into a pop out Marte caught at the back of the infield for the side.

You could almost hear the still-underestimated Diamondbacks—who swept their way to this set in the first place by pushing the Brewers out of the wild card series and the oh-so-superior Dodgers out of a division series—thinking, if not whispering, “We do this kind of stuff to them all through the pictures.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Two innings later, the Snakes delivered what proved to have been one of the least dramatic knockout punches of the entire postseason. After José Alvarado relieved Hoffman for the Phillies with one out, Perdomo singled to left and Marte doubled him to third—making Marte owner of the longest postseason-career-opening hitting streak at sixteen.

Up stepped Carroll. Proving he could do things the quiet way as well as any other way, he lofted a sacrifice fly to left for the fourth Diamondbacks run and the final run of the game. Don’t worry. Be happy.

Then came Zack Wheeler, the Phillies’s Game Five starter who pitched like an ace when they needed it most to take a 3-2 NLCS lead, to pitch an inning and a third’s spotless relief. During which Harper lost the grandest opportunity to overthrow the Diamondbacks for good when he batted in the bottom of the seventh.

Cristian Pache pinch hit for Rojas with one out and walked off Diamondbacks reliever Andrew Saalfrank. Schwarber worked out a full count walk. Exit Saalfrank, enter Kevin Ginkel for the Snakes, and Turner flied out to bring Harper to the plate. The guy who sent the Phillies to the World Series last year with that eighth-inning homer in the mud hit one out to center field this time, but with not enough to avoid landing in center fielder Alek Thomas’s glove for the side.

“Just missed it,” Harper lamented postgame. “Not being able to come through in that moment, just devastation for me. I feel like I let my team down and let the city of Philadelphia down, as well. That’s a moment I feel like I need to come through.”

He was hardly alone. These Phillies who’d bombed the Diamondbacks in a 10-0 Game Two blowout scored a grand total of four runs in three of their NLCS losses and went 1-for-7 with men in scoring position in Game Seven alone.

“I would say frustrated is the correct word,” said Castellanos, maybe slightly less for himself than for his team. “Just because the potential of this team is so much greater than going home before the World Series. Last year, when we lost Game Six, there was a lot of, ‘All right, we got here. Now we can build off that.’ Knowing how we feel about this team and coming up short from the year previous, it’s a disgusting feeling, honestly.”

When pinch hitter Jake Cave flied out to right against Sewald to end Game Seven, the Phillies may have been more voluminous in their self-criticisms than the Diamondbacks were celebrating their first pennant since 2001. And the clubhouse celebration has been described politely as mayhem, from drenching general manager Mike Hazen to first baseman Christian Walker passing out the cigars.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

It doesn’t mean you have to stay silent in the end. It also doesn’t mean the Snakes will count themselves out no matter how monstrous the Rangers might look. Maybe they figure that, if they could finally dismantle the big bad Phillie phloggers there’s no reason to fear the Texas wrecking crew. Yet.

“We were coming here to play our best baseball,” Lovullo said postgame about his and his team’s pre-game thinking, “and that’s been the messaging, and it’s been very consistent throughout the course of the year. Today is going to be our finest hour, and I just wanted to make sure that they knew that’s how I felt.”

“The Brewers were supposed to beat us,” Thompson said. “The Dodgers were supposed to beat us. The Phillies were supposed to beat us. They’re gonna say that the Rangers are supposed to beat us, too. We’ll see how it goes.” He could afford to be sanguine, since the Rays released him earlier this season but the Diamondbacks took a flyer and he rewarded them by becoming one of their key bullpen bulls.

And Lovullo could afford to be just a little self-congratulatory. Knowing that famed sports talking head Chris (Mad Dog) Russo swore to retire from radio if the Diamondbacks got to the World Series, Lovullo couldn’t resist. “I would love to see him quit if we won today,” the manager said before Game Seven began. “There’s nothing better than a wise guy New Yorker saying something and then having to chomp on those words.”

Except maybe a manager who shepherds the guys the world doubted to baseball’s biggest dance. Or, a team that finally doesn’t let the insane asylum known as a Citizen’s Bank Park crowd intimidate them out. Just don’t ask the Snakes to explain how they pulled it off. “I don’t even know if there is an explanation,” Carroll said. “It’s just magic.”

But you might ask Harper. “Watching them prior to this series, I don’t think anything scared that team,” he said graciously. “I don’t think they had any doubts in their minds of coming back here and playing in Philadelphia. I don’t think that team is scared of any situation or any spot.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

If that’s what got the Diamondbacks to the forthcoming World Series, don’t knock it. Baseball has enough too-serious-for-their-own-good teams as it is. Just try to picture most of this postseason’s vanquished (the Phillies aren’t exactly a gang of mopes, after all) approaching things that Diamondbacks way. Not to mention a lot of the teams who couldn’t make the postseason in the first place.

They’d sooner toast each other with castor oil martinis than be caught thinking, Don’t worry. Be happy. And where are those guys now?

ALCS Game Seven: Seriously!

Posted on by
Reply
Adolis García

García after scoring in the first after his own long RBI single. It was the prelude to a two-bomb, five-hit, five-steak night and nailing the ALCS MVP.

They may yet call the now-concluded American League Championship Series The Adolis García Show. And all it took was getting enraged over being hit by a Game Five pitch to kick the usually exuberant Rangers right fielder into overdrive that went to warp speed in Game Six then ludicrous speed in Game Seven. Seriously?

There are plenty who say the two sweetest words in a baseball fan’s vocabulary are “Game Seven.” They certainly were for the Rangers Monday night, blowing the Astros away from the ALCS, 11-4, taking all four games played in Houston while they were at it, and hoisting García as the ALCS Most Valuable Player while they were at it.

How do you possibly follow a dramatic late-Game Six grand slam after spending the earlier parts of that game striking out four times? García made the answer too easy in Game Seven: A first-inning RBI single for the second of three Ranger runs in the frame. A leadoff home run in the top of the third. A two-run single in the top of a four-run fifth. A one-out homer in the top of the eighth.

And, more than a little egg on the face of Astros relief pitcher Bryan Abreu, who’d drilled García so noisily in Game Five but came into Game Seven with the Astros already on life support. With one and all mindful that his two-game suspension wouldn’t be served until next season, after all, Abreu drilled the Rangers’ designated hitter Mitch Garver with one out in the top of the sixth, the out being (of all people) García popping out to Astros first baseman José Abreu.

One out later, Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe hit a two-run homer to make things 10-2. García’s eighth-inning bomb might not have been absolutely necessary given the final outcome, but had to be as delicious an exclamation point to slam onto this set as anything else the Rangers might have found in making sure the Astros’ chances to become repeat World Series winners disappeared.

Seriously!

The Astros hardly helped themselves in the end. Bedeviled by injuries during the season and, almost inexplicably, playing below .500 at home while being a road powerhouse, manager Dusty Baker had to juggle and struggle to keep them in the races as well as take advantage of the Rangers’ September struggles to win the American League West by dint of having won the season series against the Rangers.

They knew the Rangers wouldn’t be pushovers. They had to know the Rangers made themselves more formidable with the five-game winning streak by which they opened their postseason. They simply didn’t bargain for how formidable the Rangers would prove in the ALCS despite the Astros winning all three games of the Arlington leg of the set.

In those three, the Astros out-scored the Rangers, 23-12 in Globe Life Field. But in Minute Maid Park, the Rangers out-scored them, 27-10, including back-to-back blowouts in Games Six and Seven. Any Astro fans thinking the road-warrior nature of the set would turn after Astros second baseman José Altuve’s dramatic three-run homer in the top of the Game Five ninth had that thinking yanked inside-out several times over.

The Astros only looked as though they seized the ALCS momentum there, and when DH Yordan Alvarez opened Game Six’s scoring with an RBI single in the top of the second. But Garver answered with a solo homer in the bottom of that inning, Rangers catcher Jonah Heim parked a two-run homer in the third, and—after another Houston run in the sixth—Garver whacked an RBI double in the eighth and García dropped his three-run bomb in the ninth.

And that bomb turned out to be just a prelude to García’s Game Seven destruction. On a night now-ancient Max Scherzer could have been had, but with only three runs to offer including veteran third baseman Alex Bregman’s third-inning, one-out solo homer, the Astros were had, instead.

They got nothing off Jordan Montgomery, usually a Rangers starter but coming out of the bullpen on an all-hands-on-deck night for both sides, over two innings despite pushing to first and second in the fourth. They could pry only one run out of Aroldis Chapman with Alvarez’s RBI single in the seventh; they could yank only one run out of Rangers finisher José Leclerc when Altuve hit Leclerc’s first pitch of the ninth down the line and over the right field fence.

This time Altuve’s eleventh-hour demolition went to no avail.

The Rangers jumped all over Astros starter Cristian Javier after Marcus Semien opened with an infield ground out. Corey Seager batted next and fired the opening salvo with a drive over the right center field fence. A walk and a theft of second later, García sent one flying toward the left field wall and stood a moment or two admiring it before it clanged off the wall and he was held to a single.

Before anyone had a chance to roast him for the moment’s admiration, García atoned for the extra base he didn’t take on that hit by stealing second himself, enabling Garver to send him home. By the time the evening ended, almost nobody was liable to remember that that first-inning drive might have just missed being a homer.

“He was hot,” Baker said postgame, “and he’s been hot the whole series. We did strike him out quite a few times. But he got us. There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can point to in that ballgame. And so we just got beat. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason. Sometimes you lose and sometimes you get beat. There’s a difference. We got beat.”

This time, no Astro pitcher even thought of letting García have it with a pitch his next time up after that long single. If anything, Astroworld and elsewhere was more likely to question why Baker didn’t elect to pitch around him the rest of the way. And, why Baker didn’t get one of his higher-leverage relief arms, Hector Neris, up and ready before Rangers left fielder Evan Carter’s two-run double started the Ranger runaway in the fourth.

First, they may have to finish questioning why he clung stubbornly to weak-hitting veteran catcher Martín Maldonado instead of reaching for better-hitting Yainer Díaz (whose season included 45 extra base hits) later in games.

They may also revisit questioning why owner Jim Crane and his front office pulled in no pitching depth last winter, letting Baker lean heavily on inconsistent Javier and Framber Valdez, and rookies Hunter Brown and J.P. France, while dealing with early-season injuries to Altuve and Alvarez. That’s where Crane felt enough of a pistol to his head that he gave the go signal when future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander was made available for trading by the Mets who’d signed him as a free agent last winter.

The Rangers didn’t make it easy for themselves to get here, starting September 1-6 and finishing it 2-4 to fall into a tie with the Astros after they were up in the AL West by as many as 6.5 games at one point in June. Keeping the proverbial eyes on the prize wasn’t exactly simple after that.

“When you get the right group of guys with the right leader in the dugout,” said general manager Chris Young, himself a former major league pitcher including for the Rangers his first two years, “you never underestimate a group’s talent and the way they come together and the way they pull for each other. It’s not always about the team with the most talent. It’s the team with the right talent.”

None more right, it turned out, than a guy on whom the Cardinals gave up and the Rangers almost did. García—who defected from Cuba on a flight layover in Paris following a not-so-successful stint in Japan—was signed by the Cardinals but designated for assignment by them. The Rangers signed him, designated him, but had to keep him when he found no takers.

Lucky they. García became a two-time All-Star including this season. Then, the Rangers came to this postseason and he turned it into his coming-out party. Especially Games Six and Seven. Especially setting a new postseason record with fifteen ALCS runs batted in, thirteen of which came in the set’s final four games.

But the Rangers and people around the team point to things that might have been obscured during his Game Five explosion over getting drilled his next time up after a three-run homer. They talk about his exuberance, yes, but they also use words and terms like “work ethic,” “a good leader,” and “empathy.” They’re not words just thrown around the way the Rangers threw the Astros around in the end.

“The ones who really dig in and lean in to the moment and enjoy it,” said Michael Young, a longtime favourite as a Rangers player who now works in their front office, “are the ones who have the most success. These last two games, there is nobody who had more fun than Adolis did. He enjoyed every last pitch. And it was obvious.”

The Rangers await whomever comes out on top between the Phillies and the Diamondbacks in National League Championship Series Game Seven Wednesday night in Philadelphia. The Astros go home to a few questions and few simple answers.

Their success in recent years, including six division titles in seven years, four pennants, and two World Series titles (the first of which will remain tainted forever, alas), may have spoiled them a little. Even to the point where they’ve started talking the way you expect out of the Yankees.

“Not a success,” Maldonado said of the year as a whole. “Of course not. I think for us a success is winning the World Series.”

“No,” Bregman said. “I think winning the World Series is a success.”

But now Baker has spoken of retiring at last. Altuve and Bregman enter the final season of their contracts. Veteran outfielder Michael Brantley—who missed most of the season recovering from shoulder surgery, then hit for a modest .653 OPS this postseason despite a home run helping the Astros nail their division series triumph—is thought to be considering retirement. There could be a few other changes coming.

Right now, the Rangers wouldn’t change a bloody thing. And their manager Bruce Bochy—who came out of retirement to take the bridge thinking a shot at the World Series was worth it, and who’s now managed thirteen postseason elimination games to wins as well as five pennants plus having three World Series rings managing the 2010s Giants—wouldn’t change a thing.

“So much heart and determination,” Bochy said of his Rangers as the champagne sprayed the clubhouse Tuesday night. Maybe none bigger than the outfielder who’d led the Rangers’ blast furnace all the way to a World Series engagement.

Seriously!

ALCS Game Six: Seriously?

Posted on by
Reply
Adolis García

That was Game Five: Adolis García at home, plunked and brawling over it. This was Game Six: García’s grand slam in Houston turning a tight Ranger lead into a blowout win.

Were the Elysian Fields demigods drunk Sunday night? Did Bryan Abreu appealing his two-game suspension, enabling him to pitch if called upon, absolutely have to mean he and Adolis García would square off again, in the top of the eighth, two nights after their confrontation turned into a bench-clearing brawl, three ejections, and the Astros taking a 3-2 American League Championship Series lead?

And did García just have to shake off his fourth swinging strikeout of the Game Six evening at Abreu’s hand only to turn a tight Ranger lead into a 9-2 blowout with a grand slam in the top of the ninth? Seriously?

Of course, to both. Because a) those demigods can rarely resist the opportunity for farce. And, b) because this is baseball, where (said before, saying again) anything can happen—and usually does.

The top of the ninth was absurd enough, with the Rangers loading the pillows on Astro reliever Rafael Montero with a leadoff walk (Josh Jung), a fielding error when José Altuve couldn’t handle Leodys Taveras’s high chopper charging in from second, and Marcus Semien setting García’s moveable feast table with a sharp base hit to left.

This is where you could see those Elysian demigods snickering behind their heavenly brewskis as Astros manager Dusty Baker brought Ryne Stanek in from the bullpen. Stanek got credit for the “win” when the Astros blew the Rangers out in Game Four, and now someone among the demigods had to have had the devil on the horn reminding him to collect his due.

First, Stanek hit Corey Seager with a pitch on 1-0 to send Jung strolling home with the fifth Rangers run. Then, Stanek had García at a 1-1 draw, before throwing him a fastball right atop the bull’s eye of the strike zone. It disappeared midway back into Minute Maid Park’s Crawford Boxes faster than any known American highway speed limit allows.

Thanks, Dev, you could hear the Elysians purring. Eff you, Ol’ Splitfoot, you could hear Astroworld fuming.

Two air outs to follow ended the inning but not García’s glory. On the night Abreu could pitch while appealing his two-game suspension for throwing at García in Game Five, García—who probably should have drawn a similar suspension for starting the brawl to follow when he got into Astro catcher Martín Maldonado’s grille over the driller—made himself the Rangers’ man of the hour.

Maybe even the entire ALCS, too. Even if Rangers starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi could stake a claim with six and a thirds’ stout two-run, five hit pitching in which he struck out fourr and walked three. But Eovaldi, the solid defenders behind him, and the solid enough bullpen bulls to follow him, made you ponder whether they were merely toying with the Astros allowing a pair of runs on a first-inning RBI single (Yordan Alvarez) and a sixth-inning sacrifice fly (Mauricio Dubón).

Before García unloaded, he’d spent the night striking out swinging twice against Astro starter Framber Valdez, once against Astro reliever Phil Maton, and of course against Abreu. He looked so overmatched in those turns at the plate you could have forgiven him for wondering whether to carry a window, a door, or a great oak tree up to the plate his next time up.

Concurrently, Rangers designated hitter Mitch Garver enhanced one of his finest postseason nights—a game-tying solo bomb in the second; a two-out single telegraphing Josh Heim’s two-run homer in the fourth—by taking out late insurance for his team. After Abreu struck García out, Garver slashed a 3-1 slider on a high line to left that bounced once, ricocheted with a clang off the scoreboard wall, and enabled road-running mid-game Rangers left field insertion Evan Carter (leadoff infield hit; steal of second) to come home in the eighth with the fifth Rangers run.

The Minute Maid audience spent most of the evening booing lustily every time García checked in at the plate and cheering just as lustily every time he struck out. Then he sliced that ninth-inning salami. That was enough to quell the crowd’s appetite and send them starting to strike for the exits before the bottom of the ninth.

And, for Rangers reliever Andrew Heaney to throw four pitches for three ground outs to end the game. If you were an Astro fan still in the ballpark, those four pitches seemed like a mercy killing, no matter that the ALCS was now merely tied at three, but given this year’s Astros’ comparative weakness on the road including a 1-4 postseason record there so far.

Just don’t ask Astros left fielder Michael Brantley. “That doesn’t matter,” he said postgame. “It’s in the past. We need to turn the page and be ready for tomorrow.” They’ll need a lot more than page turning if precedent still matters—including the one saying that no team who lost more at home than on the road in the regular season has yet reached a World Series.

“It’s something you can’t explain,” Dubón said. “We could come tomorrow and win tomorrow and everybody would forget about it. It’s part of baseball. We win on the road. This year, we didn’t win at home and we have one more game to prove it.” Unfortunately, for this year’s Astros, that last remark could be taken two ways.

The Rangers probably couldn’t care less. They were a home powerhouse (.617 percentage) and just under .500 on the road during the season. Three of the four best road teams this year (the Braves, the Orioles, the Dodgers) were punted out of the postseason early.

The Astros, number four on the road overall, might be on the threshold of a postseason exit, but they’re still the Astros, and—in the phrasing of a one-time Astros coach—they’re not out of it until they’re out of it.

And the Rangers know it. Seriously.

Ask them why it’s been the visitors walking into the other guys’ houses and looting and plundering them, and Garver is stuck for an answer. “Seems a little odd nobody is winning at home,” he said postgame. “And I would like for it to stay that way.”

Stuck for an answer, too, is manager Bruce Bochy. “That’s the million dollar question,” said the man who managed the Giants to three World Series-winning games in five years on the road. Including the first of the lot—against a different collection of Rangers, in 2010. This group won’t take the Astros for granted no matter where they’re playing.

“I said it in August, it’s going to be a dogfight all the way to the end,” said Garver. “Really, really good ball club on both sides. They have pitching. They have hitting. But so do we. It’s one game to settle it all, and I think everyone is excited for that.”

Bochy is on record prominently as saying he doesn’t really like a lot of drama. Do you think Game Six changed his mind a little? He’d just been handed the Astros’ heads on a plate courtesy of one of the most dramatic late-game detonations in his team’s history.

“It’s been entertaining with me,” he said postgame. “It’s intense. There’s no getting around it. People ask you, ‘Are you having fun?’ Yeah, it’s fun, you try to enjoy it, but it’s intense out there. That’s what I came back for, to be in this situation. It’s exciting”

Seriously? What happened to the wish for little to no drama? Maybe Bochy knows that wish’s last stand disappeared the moment García’s salami did. Seriously.

NLCS Game Five: All things small and big

Posted on by
Reply
Zack Wheeler

Zack Wheeler pitching almost spotlessly in NLCS Game Five did as much to save the Phillies season as their early running and mid-game bombing did.

Ask, and you shall receive. The Phillies asked Zack Wheeler to pitch like an ace in National League Championship Series Game Five—and he did. They asked their hitters to step up and swing when it mattered—and they did. They asked their bullpen to hold fort—and they did.

Their reward for doing those things was a handy 6-1 win in Chase Field and a trip back to Philadelphia with not one but two chances to punch their World Series tickets. The Phillies, of course, not to mention the throng liable to greet them in Citizens Bank Park come Monday, would prefer it not take that long.

All it took otherwise was for the Phillies to put Games Three and Four behind them, the ones in which their overtaxed bullpen let the Diamondbacks waste a grand start by Ranger Suárez in the former and their overtaxed bull Craig Kimbrel implode them toward a come-from-ahead loss in the latter.

Not to mention Kyle Schwarber starting the Game Five ball rolling in a way you don’t expect of the bombardier who showed up nuclear in the sixth inning, beating one into the ground to take a slow enough roll toward third, a region left open with the Diamondbacks in a slight shift toward second, that he beat out for a leadoff hit.

Not to mention Bryce Harper sending him to third with a one-out single shot right back up the pipe, Bryson Stott lining him home with a single. And, Harper coming home on a double steal while inadvertently colliding with a momentarily-stunned Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno as the throw from Snakes second baseman Ketel Marte to the plate went off it. It was the first time any Phillie stole home in any postseason.

Not to mention Wheeler and his Diamondbacks counterpart Zac Gallen engaging a pitcher’s duel that was noiseless, generally, until Schwarber opened the top of the sixth by turning Gallen’s 2-0 hanging breaking ball into a satellite flying over the Chase Field pool and several rows into the seats behind it. Giving Schwarber the all-time National League Championship Series home run lead with eleven.

Not to mention Harper, one out later, wrestling back from 1-2 into a full count before driving a fastball slightly over the middle of the zone and a little further into the same general real estate where Schwarber’s leadoff bomb landed.

Not to mention J.T. Realmuto abusing the Diamondbacks’ third reliever of the evening, Luis Frias, for a two-out two-run homer in the top of the eighth, which could have been considered repayment for Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas—the hero of the Snakes’ Game Four win with his unlikely eighth-inning, game-tying two-run homer—hitting Wheeler’s first pitch of the seventh over the right center field fence for the only score of the evening for his team.

Not to mention the Phillies bullpen keeping the Diamondbacks off the board the final two innings despite a couple of dicey moments in the ninth, when Evan Longoria drew a two-out walk off Seranthony Domínguez and took second on defensive indifference before Perdomo landed on first after his bouncer hit Domínguez’s leg and deflected to shortstop.

Manager Rob Thomson reached for Matt Strahm. Strahm landed a swinging strikeout on Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll to finish off. The Phillies reached for ways to express how it felt to shake off such a heartbreaker as the Game Four loss.

“I just want to win. That’s it,” said Harper, whose evening included a grand first inning play when he speared Diamondbacks DH Pavin Smith’s hard grounder lunging right and onto a knee before taking it to the pad himself. “Whatever that takes, whatever that’s going to be, whatever that’s going to look like. That was a big game for us. Coming in here and getting one is huge. That’s a good team over there. We took advantage of everything we could.”

Harper also tended Moreno at once after the double-steal collision, perhaps mindful that Perdomo has been under concussion watch before in his career and was caught in the head on a backswing during the D-Backs’s wild card set. “The way he went down,” Harper said postgame, “I was making sure he was good and stable.”

(Memo to: Social media idiots. It wasn’t a dirty play. Harper came straight down the base line without trying to collide with Moreno. Moreno moving from in front of the plate to reach for the throw crossed into Harper’s path, unintentionally but technically blocking the plate without the ball in his mitt, illegally, leaving Harper nowhere to go at that moment.)

The collision to one side, Realmuto seemed less impressed by his own home run than by the double steal that made Harper the second-oldest (at 31) ever to steal home in a postseason game. (Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson at 37 remains the oldest; he did it in the 1955 World Series.) “After what [the Snakes] did to us the last two games, they had all the momentum in the world,” the Phillies catcher said postgame. “So we had to try to do something early in the game to get it back. That was a great call by [Thomson] putting that on.”

The plot was simple. Stott would take off for second and draw Moreno’s throw while stopping just short of the pad. It looked like Stott getting himself caught in a rundown, but Marte winged his throw home almost immediately after Stott stopped with Harper, instructed to “be aggressive” by Phillies third base coach Dusty Wathan, gunning it home.

“It just shows you,” said Phillies shortstop Trea Turner, “how being aggressive and putting pressure on those guys — not just them but everybody in general, to put pressure on the other side is good and it makes things happen.” Make things happen? The Phillies opened by taking a page out of the Diamondbacks’ grinding book and shoving right back before even thinking about the long ball side of their own game.

For all the Phillies’s basepath daring and bomb launching, though, Wheeler had to have been the player of the game for them when all was said and done. “He gave us exactly what we needed with where our pen was at,” said Thomson. “It’s incredible what he does,” said Harper of Wheeler, who threw 21 first-pitch strikes facing 28 batters. “It’s so much fun to watch. I love playing behind him, and it’s incredible. He’s legit, man.”

Now it’ll be up to Aaron Nola to pick up in Game Six where Wheeler left off in Game Five. As for the rest of the Phillies? Who knows what surprises they might bring? Another double steal including a theft of the plate? Another evening of acrobat defense? Another bomb or three?

You almost hope the set goes the full distance, if only to give the Diamondbacks more chances to show the talent might overcome this edition’s general lack of postseason experience. They’re a young team with a lot of upside and a lot of dynamism in their own right. They showed they, too, can exploit mistakes or misfirings in pushing this NLCS to a two-all tie in the first place.

But if they want to hang around a little longer, they’ll have to find a way to beat the Phillies in the Phillies’ own playpen, where the audience never sleeps and the noise rarely lets up before the final out. The Phillies just won their first NLCS road game. Going home, however, means a lot more to them than just scoring a run.

ACLS Game Five: Drill, brawl, and another drill

Posted on by
Reply
ALCS Game Five

The Rangers and the Astros scrum in the ninth in ALCS Game Five, after Adolis García (bottom-most left) went ballistic when hit by a first pitch from Astros reliever Bryan Abreu.

With one dazzler of an American League Championship Series Game Five play, Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien may have thought he’d saved their season. With one swing an inning later, Adolis García may have thought he’d guaranteed that save.

But that swing provoked a foolhardy act by an Astros reliever costing the team said reliever plus manager Dusty Baker for the rest of the game. And thus provoked, José Altuve sent the Rangers’ season onto life support with one swing in the top of the ninth, leading to a 5-4 Astros win.

The Astros did their level best to continue proving to the Rangers that they were the unmovable force on the road, which they were all season long. The Rangers did their level best to say, “not so fast,” on Friday afternoon. At least, until García inadvertently poked the Houston bear.

There was nothing wrong with García celebrating the moment he unloaded on Astro starter Justin Verlander with Corey Seager (one-out double, then to third on Sean Carter’s single) aboard in the bottom of the sixth, sending a first-pitch fastball over the left center field fence. There was everything wrong with Astro reliever Bryan Abreu drilling García on the first pitch in the eighth.

Abreu was ejected while both benches emptied. Astros manager Dusty Baker argued so vociferously with the umpires that he was ejected post haste. When order was restored, Astros finisher Ryan Pressly had to slither out of the first-and-second jam and did it with a force out and two strikeouts to follow.

Then, Pressly had to slither out of a jam of his own making, surrendering back-to-back singles to Mitch Garver and Josiah Heim, before a line out, a fly out, and a swinging strikeout banked a game the Astros could have lost almost as readily as they won it.

In between those jams, Altuve batted with two on (Yainer Díaz, leadoff single; pinch hitter Jon Singleton, wal), nobody out, and José Leclerc on the mound for the Rangers after relieving Aroldis Chapman to retire the side in the eighth. The delay may or may not have affected Leclerc. Altuve reached down for a down-and-in 0-1 pitch and sent it up and out, over the left field fence.

No one can really prove Abreu’s intent. Watch a replay of the pitch. Astros catcher Martín Maldonado is set for a pitch coming low under the middle of the zone. The pitch shot up and in and off García’s left tricep. García got right into Maldonado’s grille as if thinking Maldonado might have called for a duster but set up to make it look unintentional.

Six umpires called drilling García deliberate. If Abreu really wanted to drill him, he might have disguised it better (say, throwing the duster on the second or third pitch, assuming there would be one) instead of letting him have it on the first pitch. Abreu probably knows well enough to know that you should worry more about getting the man out than sending him messages about previous over-exuberance—especially when you weren’t the one at whose expense he was over-exuberant.

García isn’t exactly a green rookie. It took him long enough to make the Show to stay as it is. Had he just taken his base, he might have kept the Rangers in the game instead of triggering a bench-clearing brawl that ended up possibly harming Leclerc with the extra down-time.

“Everybody on their side is going to say it wasn’t [intentional],” said Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien. “Everybody on this side is going to say it was.”

“I was saying, ‘My bad, it wasn’t on purpose’,” Abreu said postgame. “He was like, ‘bullsh@t’.”

“We know it’s the playoffs,” said umpiring crew chief James Hoye. “We don’t want to make a mistake in a situation like that. So we’re going to make sure that everybody is on the same page, that we all felt the same way. And to a T, all of us felt like that pitch was intentional.”

It’s not impossible, too, that the umpires acted more upon the moment’s emotions when ejecting Abreu for the pitch, García for launching the scrum, and Baker for arguing as wildly as he did over Abreu’s ejection. Abreu did end up hit with a two-game suspension. He could wait until before Game Six to appeal, which would keep him available for Six and Game Seven if it goes that far, though it might keep him out of the World Series’s beginning if the Astros get there.

García probably escaped suspension because he was drilled and furious, but it would not have been out of line for baseball’s government to suspend him, either, for launching the brawl in the first place instead of just taking his base. Especially since his immediate target was Maldonado, not Abreu.

“My plan for [García],” Abreu said postgame, “was just to try to get the ball up and in. That’s my plan with him—up and in, and slider down and away. I just missed the pitch and he just overreacted.”

“I think the optics of the situation are really bad,” said Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe. “It’s the playoffs. You’re allowed to get excited. He got excited. He celebrated because that was a huge swing for us. To have to wear 98 [mph] on the arm after something like that, it’s pretty disappointing.”

Altuve’s ninth-inning nuke made the optics a little bit worse for the Rangers now. The ALCS moves back to Houston. Granted the Astros weren’t a great road team this season, granted the Rangers took it to them in the first two games in Houston this set, but the Astros are not exactly pushovers. Especially not with someone like Mighty Mouse able to hit bombs when the eleventh hour is about to toll.

But it doesn’t keep Baker from a few trepidations over whether the García drill might linger in the minds of both teams if things get testy in Game Six, which is scheduled to pit Framber Valdez starting for the Astros against Nathan Eovaldi for the Rangers.

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said Saturday during a workout in Houston. “I mean, it’s going to be what it’s going to be. You have to wait and see, just like me. We don’t script it; it just happens.” That’s just about the last thing either team needs right now.