Dangerous curves

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Anthony Rizzo

Anthony Rizzo’s Game One home run is the only Yankee run to come home off a fastball so far this ALCS. The Astros are breaking them—a diet of breaking balls they can’t seem to hit, that is.

I don’t have a dog in the American League Championship Series hunt. I tend to admire individual Yankees and Astros and not to root for either team. As a personal preference, and in spite of Commissioner Rube Goldberg’s less-than-the-very-best-people postseason construction, the National League Championship Series tangling between the Phillies and the Padres is just a little more fun.

Not just yes but hell yes: I enjoyed seeing Aaron Judge smashing a 62-year-old American League single-season home run record. I enjoy every time I watched mighty mite Jose Altuve at the plate, especially knowing Altuve really was one of the few Astros who actually didn’t want any Astro Intelligence Agency-pilfered signs banged his way when he was at the plate.

And it’s still a kick seeing Justin Verlander defy his age (he’s Jack Benny’s age at this writing), pitching into the Cy Young Award conversation this season, then opening this ALCS by turning the far younger Yankees into his personal lab experiments in Game One. That, folks, is what a Hall of Famer does when he’s staring into Yankee eyes from the mound.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking merely that the Astros hit better than the Yankees to take their 2-0 ALCS advantage. The Astros can hit. They’ve been able to hit like F-15s or Stealth bombers since the first time they dispatched the Yankees from a postseason five years ago. Even the best pitchers in the business know they’re in for a fight when someone in Astro silks checks in at the plate

(Want to know one reason why Astrogate and the team’s largely, apologetically non-apologetic replies pissed people outside Houston off? Because we knew good and damn well they didn’t need an illegally installed closed-circuit television network and a front-office-down intelligence agency’s black-bag job stealing signs to do it. Those teams and this Astro team could turn seaweed into base hits and clumps of weeds into interstellar orbiting satellites.)

But here’s a bulletin for you. These Astros are also pitching the Yankees to death. That formidable Yankee offense has been manna to an Astro pitching staff whose mantra seems to be not just throw your best stuff as often as you can throw it but, also, those guys are vulnerable to curves, whether they’re on beautiful women or on the pitches coming out of your hands.

Several analyses I’ve seen indicate that this year’s Yankees will turn fastballs into powder but breaking balls will turn them to jelly by comparison. They hit .252/.357/.482 when seeing fastballs coming up to the plate but .221/.282/.401 when seeing breakers, whether curve balls, sliders, cutters, or changeups.

Don’t be shocked if there’s a sign in the Yankee Stadium home clubhouse before Game Three, a yellow diamond sign advising, “Dangerous curves ahead.”

Verlander threw breakers over half the time in Game One. Framber Valdez barely showed them any heat in Game Two; his repertoire for the evening consisted almost entirely of either “Dead Man’s Curve” or “Slip Slidin’ Away.” His relief (Brayan Abreu, Ryan Pressly) threw a combined 41 pitches and 36 were breaking balls. (Pressly threw 21 breakers including changeups out of 22 pitches closing the game out.)

The Yankees scored twice in each game. You’d think they’d catch the hints. Both RBI hits in Game Two (both in the fourth inning, too) came when the batters (Anthony Rizzo, run-scoring ground out; Gleyber Torres, beating out an infield grounder for a base hit) put breaking balls into play. In Game One, one of the two Yankee runs came likewise: Harrison Bader hitting a slider over the left center field fence in the top of the second.

Rizzo caught hold of a rising full-count fastball in the top of the eighth and pulled it into the right field seats. That’s only one of the four Yankee runs in the ALCS so far coming when the batter got himself a fastball to hit, and only one of the three Yankee plate appearances resulting in a run coming home involved contact with a breaking ball—and two of those came on contact soft enough.

Unless they want to see nothing but a diet of breakers—and unless that generous menu portion of breaking balls starts taking tolls on even well-seasoned Astro arms—the Yankees’ survival in this ALCS just may depend long term on whether they quit offering at every one thrown their way, force the Astros to show them the heat that matters most to them, or figure how to make contact with the breakers that can begin by getting more balls past the infield.

If they don’t, all these Astros have to do to keep these Yankees from doing damage is to send Jayne Mansfield’s corpse into their sights.

Oh, brothers!

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Austin Nola

With this swing and NLCS Game Two base hit, Austin Nola became the first ever to nail a hit off his brother in postseason play. Pending the NLCS outcome, it gives Austin bragging rights over Aaron for just about eternity, for now . . .

For the first time in postseason history, siblings faced each other as pitcher and hitter. Little brother Aaron Nola, pitching for the Phillies, against big brother Austin Nola, catching for the Padres. Bottom of the second in Petco Park, two out, and an early/often 4-0 Phillies lead was cut in half a few minutes earlier.

Little brother was something of a star entry from almost the moment he arrived in the Show. Big brother got to the Show the hard way, even switching from his original shortstop position to the tools of ignorance behind the plate. Little brother had five years in Show before big brother got anything close to a clean shot.

Now, little brother lured big brother into an inning-ending bounce out to third base. Three innings later, though, Austin let Aaron know big brother was watching him carefully enough. With one out, and after several throws by little brother to first to keep Padres shortstop Ha-Seong Kim (leadoff single) from thinking too much about theft, big brother struck.

Few things in life satisfy quite so much as getting little brother back after he got you good the first time. Fewer times than that does big brother get little brother good and start what shoves little brother to one side for the day.

Kim took off with the pitch and without looking back while Austin slashed a line single the other way to right, starting a five-run Padres uprising that ultimately put paid both to Aaron’s afternoon and the game, an 8-5 Padres win that sends the National League Championship Series to Philadelphia even-up at one game each.

All that while the Nola boys’ parents A.J. and Stacie Nola sat in the stands, A.J. doing his level best to avoid favouritism by sitting with a Phillies jersey (Aaron’s, of course) over a Padres jersey (Austin’s, of course) around his torso. They must have been thinking of tireless backyard Wiffle ball contests between the two that seeded tireless travel-ball jaunts in an RV to get the brothers from game to game.

They must also have been thinking they’d sooner have seen the inside of the House of the Rising Sun in the boys’ native Louisiana than to see them squaring off against each other with the National League pennant at stake.

“Of course you always root for your brother and want him to do well,” Austin told a reporter after Game Two ended. “It has been strange. But we talked about this beforehand. It was understood between us that this is competitive. There’s no empathy here. We both want to win . . . Now that it’s the postseason, and it’s all-out—bottom line, I hope you do well next year, you know?”

Easy for him to say.

Six pairs of siblings squared off against each other in postseason play before Wednesday: Sandy Alomar, Jr. and Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar (1996, 1997), Dane Iorg and Garth Iorg (1985), Clete Boyer and Ken Boyer (1964), Irish Meusel and Bob Meusel (1921, 1922, 1923), and Doc Johnston and Jimmy Johnston (1920). The Boyers, the Meusels, and the Johnstons did it in World Series play.

Not one of them was a pitcher facing the other at the plate.

“That’s crazy, that it hasn’t happened ever,” observed Padres pitcher Mike Clevinger postgame. “You’d think that somehow, sometime, it would line up. That is crazy. Crazy. Amazing. That’s just wild. It’s awesome. Romantic. It’s like a storybook. Always. And you never know. If it took 100 years for this to happen, you think about how, 100 years from now, that could still be the only time that it happened. That is crazy.”

After Kim dove across the plate with the third San Diego run, Padres left fielder Jurickson Profar smacked Aaron’s first pitch to right to set first and third up with a single out. Juan Soto—the Padres’ spotlight trade deadline acquisition, who struggled somewhat to rediscover his well-regarded mojo after the deal, and the only Padre who’s had a taste of World Series triumph (as a 2019 National)—pulled a high, hard liner deep into the right field corner, sending the elder Nola brother home with the game-tying run.

Aaron nailed Manny Machado after ball one with three straight strikes including a big swinger for strike three. Phillies manager Rob Thomson lifted Aaron for lefthander Brad Hand with lefthanded Padres second baseman Jake Cronenworth due to hit. But a Hand curve ball sailing inside caught Cronenworth in the back as he turned trying to avoid it, and the Padre ducks were on the pond.

Up stepped Brandon Drury, who’d started cutting the early 4-0 Phillie lead in half with a leadoff home run in the bottom of the second. Up the pipe went his full-count line single with the runners in motion, home came Profar and Soto, and into the 6-4 lead the Padres went. Then Josh Bell—who followed Drury in the second by hitting Aaron’s first pitch right past the foul pole for a home run—lined one the other way through first and into right to send Cronenworth home and Drury to third.

Having broken the Hand, the Padres now faced righthanded Phillies reliever Andrew Bellatti. Kim returned to work himself into a bases-reloading walk, but Trent Grisham fought to a full count before lining two foul down the first base line and then looking at a nasty third strike on the inside corner.

Machado would add a little extra insurance in the bottom of the seventh against another Phillies reliever, David Robertson, freshly re-installed off the injured list, when he hit a 2-2 service about 424 feet over the center field fence. Except for Phillies first baseman Rhys Hoskins hitting Padres reliever Robert Suarez’s first pitch into the left field seats to open the top of the eighth, that was all the Phillies had to say for having their early swat-and-slash 4-0 lead eviscerated for keeps.

That lead began against Padres starter Blake Snell, who’d retired them in order in the top of the first, with designated hitter Bryce Harper lining a single over the middle and just above Kim’s upstretched glove. Right fielder Nick Castellanos followed to fight a jam pitch off the other way to right and falling in front of Soto, who struggled with the afternoon sun most of the time before the shadows began crossing the park.

Then it was Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm sending a line bloop into center to score Harper, second baseman Jean Segura swinging a strikeout, and center fielder Matt Vierling flying a long one the other way to right which Soto clearly lost in the sun despite trying to shield his eyes from the glare, scoring Castellanos. Then, it was shortstop Edmundo Sosa blooping one into short left to score Bohm, and left fielder Kyle Schwarber grounding one to first.

Drury knocked the ball down unable to handle it for a double play but able to step on the first base pad to get Schwarber for the second out—with Vierling scoring the fourth Phillie run. Hoskins then sent one high to right. Soto shaded his eyes again. This time, he had it for the side retired. From there he was hell bent on atonement. He finally got it when he sent Big Brother Nola home in that five-run fifth.

“I wish I could have taken a snapshot and just held the moment for like a day, you know, because that’s how fun it is,” said big brother after the game. “And I’m sure he would say the same thing, that stepping in the box and you get your brother in a situation, you know . . . just facing him in a big-league game is enough to just hold the moment.”

“I want to beat him,” little brother said. “I want to go to the next round and let him go home.”

Well, now. Until or unless Aaron gets Austin out later in this NLCS, especially in a moment where one false pitch might otherwise equal a game starting to upend and break open again, big brother has bragging rights on kid brother for . . . well, eternity may or may not be quite enough. Yet.

Postseason power teams better off?

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Kyle Schwarber

The Schwarbinator’s sixth inning bomb in NLCS Game One dropped Bryce Harper’s jaw and every jaw in Petco Park Tuesday night.

Reality check time. The Guardians’ overall small-ball offense abandoned them in Game Five of the American League division series they squandered to the Yankees. (I’ll mention the squander further in due course.) And the Yankees won the best-of-five in five because their slugging superiority won out in the end.

Sure, enough stellar pitching helped big enough. Guards manager Terry Francona’s reluctance to start ace Shane Bieber in Game Five probably did almost much as his batters’ inability to solve Cortes or a pair of early Yankee bombs to cost them the season.

Now, take a look very carefully.

For the peck-and-poke Guards, 5 percent of their ALDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits and 2 percent ended with home runs. For the bump-and-thump Yankees, 6 percent of their ALDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits and five percent ended with home runs.

On the regular season, six percent of Guardian plate appearances ended with extra base hits and two percent ended with home runs. Eight percent of Yankee plate appearances ended with extra base hits and four percent ended with home runs. (Aaron Judge’s AL record-setting 62 accounted for one percent of the latter.)

Neither team relied upon or got the long ball that much in the division series, but getting just a little bit more of it made as big a difference for the Yankees as getting top of the line pitching from Gerrit Cole in Game Four and Nestor Cortes in Game Give. Getting just a little bit less of it left the Guardians vulnerable whether facing Cole, Cortes, or a sore-armed snowball thrower.

Even as the ALDS was ending the National League Championship Series between the Phillies and the Padres opened with a 2-0 Phillies win. Zack Wheeler outdueled Yu Darvish on the mound by a hair, and Darvish surrendered both Phillie runs—on solo home runs by Bryce Harper (in the top of the fourth) and Kyle Schwarber (a mammoth 488-foot blast leading off the top of the sixth)—while the teams’ pitching otherwise kept each other to four measly hits, three for the Phillies and one for the Padres.

Much as they struggled through an early-season slump, injuries, and a mid-season remake, the Phillies ended eight percent of their regular-season plate appearances with extra base hits and ten percent of their National League division series-winning plate appearances with them. They also ended three percent of those NLDS plate appearances in homers and three percent of their regular-season plate appearances likewise.

The Padres—likewise riddled by injuries and a mid-season remake, not to mention losing Fernando Tatis, Jr. to injury and then a suspension for actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances—ended seven percent of their regular-season plate appearances with extra base hits and two percent with home runs. Six percent of their NLDS-winning plate appearances against the Dodgers ended in extra base hits; two percent in home runs. The Dodgers? Ten percent of their NLDS plate appearances ended with extra base hits but two percent likewise ended with home runs.

I was led to look at those percentages after reading a splendid Baseball Reference analysis by Russell A. Carleton, “Too Reliant on the Long Ball?” Examining 1995-2021, Carleton determined that the postseason team with the higher home run percentage won 54 percent of their games and the one with the higher home runs-to-runs scored ratio won 51 percent of the time. “It doesn’t appear that power teams are in any danger in the playoffs,” he writes, “and might even be a little better off.”

In other words, Carleton would like one and all to know or to re-learn, seemingly, we can one and all knock it the hell off with our home run hypocrisies. You know: we hate the presumption of home run prevalence except when our teams detonate them, just as we hate the presumption of strikeout prevalence except when our teams’ pitchers strike the hell out of the other guys.

The moral of the story is that home runs are a perfectly reasonable way to power an offense. They are no better or worse than any other approach at winning playoff games. I’m sure there’s some element of “feast or famine,” but usually when people say that, they forget about the fact that while there will be famine, there will also be feast.

By the way, during the regular season eight percent of the Astros’ plate appearances ended with extra base hits and three percent ended with home runs. Seven percent of their plate appearances while sweeping the Mariners out of their ALDS ended with extra base hits and four percent ended in home runs. That’s slightly less than the Yankee percentages when all is totaled out. But only slightly.

Meanwhile, you might care to note that a measly seven percent of all major league plate appearances on the regular season ended with extra base hits and three percent ended with home runs. Care to know what the Show average was? Seven percent, extra base hits; three percent, home runs. Too.

“So once again,” Carleton writes, “if you hear someone trying to scare you because a team doesn’t play small ball in the playoffs, and that they are too reliant on home runs for their offense, you can tell them with confidence that it doesn’t actually make a difference. There’s nothing wrong with hitting home runs. It’s generally a good thing.”

It certainly was for the Yankees making way to the ALCS at last. It certainly was for the Phillies drawing first blood in their NLCS. Play all the small ball you want, I’m all for it, except for those out-wasting, scoring-probability-wasting sacrifice bunts. You can win small. Just not every time out.

Don’t fool yourselves that small ball-heavy teams don’t need slugging percentage personnel to, you know, get more of the runs home than a small ball-alone team in the long run. Or, the postseason short run. The Yankees had three (Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo) with 30+ bombs on the season and prevailed. The Guardians only two who hit even 20+ bombs on the season and lost. Hardly the sole reasons, of course. But the difference helped make a difference.

Unless they’ve got Coles, Corteses, Wheelers, Darvishes, Nolas, Snells, Verlanders, Dominguezes, Haders, and Holmeses on the mound, the small ball-alone or small ball-mostly teams play with at least single hands tied behind their backs.

The Yankees rock and troll

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Yankee Stadium

A spent champagne bottle placed on home plate after the Yankees won a trip to the ALCS Tuesday night. The Yankees had to celebrate their win in a hurry—they open against the Astros Wednesday night.

The good news is, Year One of Comissioner Rube Golberg’s triple-wild-cards postseason experiment isn’t going to have an all also-ran World Series, after all. It still yielded a pair of division-winning teams getting to tangle in the American League Championship Series.

The bad news is, those two division winners are still the Yankees and the Astros, after the Yankees sent the AL Central-winning Guardians home for the winter with a 5-1 win Tuesday that wasn’t exactly an overwhelming smothering.

What it was, though, was the game for which the Guardians shot themselves in the proverbial foot. Specifically, two Guardians, one of whom is old enough to know better and the other of whom needs a definitive attitude adjustment.

Guardians manager Terry Francona has more World Series rings this century (two) than Yankees manager Aaron Boone (none). Francona is considered by most observers to be one of the game’s smartest managers who’s made extremely few mistakes and learned from one and all; Boone is one of those skippers about whom second-guessing is close enough to a daily sport in its own right.

But when push came to absolute shove for rain-postponed AL division series Game Five, Boone proved willing to roll the dice Francona finally wasn’t.

After Gerrit Cole held the Guards off with a magnificent Game Four performance Sunday but the rain pushed Game Five from Monday to Tuesday, Boone was more than willing to throw his original Game Five plan aside—Jameson Tallion starting and going far as he could to spell the beleaguered Yankee bullpen—and let Nestor Cortes pitch on three days’ rest for the first time in his major league life.

Francona wouldn’t even think about changing his original Game Five plan, opening with his number-four starter Aaron Civale, who hadn’t even seen any action this postseason until Tuesday, then reaching for his bullpen at the first sign of real trouble. He wasn’t willing to let his ace Shane Bieber go on three days’ rest for the first time in his major league life.

Mother Nature actually handed Francona one of the biggest breaks of his life when she pushed Game Five back a day. Either he missed the call or forgot to check his voicemail. “I’ve never done it,” said Bieber postgame Tuesday, about going on three days rest. “But could I have? Sure.”

“It’s not because he can’t pitch,” said Francona after Game Five. “It’s just he’s been through a lot. You know, he had [a shoulder injury in 2021] and he’s had a remarkable year, but it’s not been probably as easy as he’s made it look.”

It might have been a lot easier on the Guardians if Francona handed his ace the chance to try it, with reinforcements ready to ride in after maybe three, four innings. Even year-old-plus shoulder injuries deserve appropriate consideration, of course. But Bieber surrendered a mere two runs in five-and-two-thirds Game Two innings. Francona’s hesitation when handed the chance helped cost him a shot at another AL pennant.

Civale didn’t have it from the outset. He had as much control as a fish on the line jerking into death out of the water. Giancarlo Stanton slammed an exclamation point upon it when he slammed a hanging cutter the other way into the right field seats with two aboard and one out.

The Guards’ pen did surrender two more runs in the game, including Aaron Judge’s opposite field launch the next inning. But they spread those runs over eight and two-thirds innings’ relief while otherwise keeping the Yankees reasonably behaved. They gave the Guards every possible foot of room to come back and win it.

That was more than anyone could say for Josh Naylor. The Guards’ designated hitter had already raised temperatures among enough Yankees and around a little more than half of social media, when his Game Four home run off Cole resulted in him running the bases with his arms in a rock-the-baby position and motion.

Naylor intends the gesture to mean that if he hits you for a long ball he considers you his “son” in that moment. It wasn’t anything new for him or for those pitchers surrendering the 20 bombs he hit on the regular season. And Sunday’s blast was the third time Naylor has taken Cole into the seats in his major league life. He was entitled to a few bragging rights.

Cole himself thought the bit was “cute” and “a little funny.” He wasn’t half as offended as that half-plus of social media demanding Naylor’s head meet a well-placed fastball as soon as possible. Yesterday, if possible. The Yankees found the far better way to get even in Game Five than turning Naylor’s brains into tapioca pudding.

“We got our revenge,” Yankee shortstop Gleyber Torres all but crowed postgame. Torres even did a little rocking of the baby himself in the top of the ninth, after he stepped on second to secure the game-ending force out. “We’re happy to beat those guys,” he continued. “Now they can watch on TV the next series for us. It’s nothing personal. Just a little thing about revenge.”

Naylor was also serenaded mercilessly by the Yankee Stadium crowd chanting “Who’s your daddy?” louder with each plate appearance. Every time he returned to the Guards’ dugout fans in the seats behind the dugout trolled him with their own rock-the-baby moves. And his most immediate postgame thought Tuesday was how wonderful it was that he’d gotten that far into their heads.

Some say it was Naylor being a good sport about it. Others might think he was consumed more with getting into the crowd’s heads than he was in getting back into the Yankees’ heads. The evidence: He went 0-for-4 including once with a man in scoring position Tuesday.

Oh, well. “That was awesome,” he said postgame of the Yankee Stadium chanting. “That was so sick. That was honestly like a dream come true as a kid—playing in an environment like this where they’ve got diehard fans, it’s cool. The fact I got that going through the whole stadium, that was sick.”

Josh Naylor

Rock and troll: Yankee fans letting Josh Naylor have it on an 0-for-4 ALDS Game Five night.

Did it cross his mind once that his team being bumped home for the winter a little early was a little more sick, as in ill, as in not exactly the way they planned it? If it did, you wouldn’t have known it by the way he continued his exegesis. “If anything, it kind of motivates me,” he began.

It’s fun to kind of play under pressure. It’s fun to play when everyone’s against you and when the world’s against you. It’s extremely fun.

That’s why you play this game at the highest level or try to get to the highest level: to play against opponents like the Yankees or against the Astros or whoever the case is. They all have great fanbases and they all want their home team to win, and it’s cool to kind of play in that type of spotlight and in that pressure.

Wouldn’t it have been extremely more fun if the Guardians had won? Did Naylor clown himself out of being able to play up in that spotlight and its pressure this time? Those are questions for which Cleveland would love proper answers.

So is the question of how and why the Guards didn’t ask for a fourth-inning review that might have helped get Cortes out of their hair sooner than later, after a third inning that exemplified the Guards’ hunt-peck-pester-prod limits.

They went from first and second and one out in the top of the third—one of the hits hitting the grass when Yankee shortstop Oswaldo Cabrera collided with left fielder Aaron Hicks, resulting in a knee injury taking Hicks out of the rest of the postseason—to the bases loaded and one out after Guards shortstop Amed Rosario wrung Cortes for a four-pitch walk. They got their only run of the game when Jose Ramírez lofted a deep sacrifice fly to center.

Now, with two outs in the top of the fourth, Andres Giménez whacked a high bouncer up to Yankee first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who had to dive to the pad to make any play. The call was out, but several television replays showed Giménez safe by a couple of hairs. Perhaps too mindful of having lost three prior challenges in the set, the Guardians’ replay review crew didn’t move a pinkie. Francona seemingly didn’t urge them to do so.

Never mind that it would have extended the inning and given the Guards a chance to turn their batting order around sooner, get Cortes out of the game sooner, and get into that still-vulnerable Yankee pen sooner. Francona’s been one of the game’s most tactically adept skippers for a long enough time, but not nudging his replay people to go for this one helped further to cost him an ALCS trip.

These Yankees don’t look proverbial gift horses in the proverbial mouths. An inning later, with Torres on first with a leadoff walk and James Karinchak relieving Trevor Stephan following a Judge swinging strikeout during which Torres stole second, Rizzo lined a single to right to send Torres home. That was all the insurance the Yankees ended up needing.

Especially when these so-called Guardiac Kids, the youth movement whose penchant for small ball and for driving bullpens to drink with late rallies, forcing the other guys into fielding lapses, winning a franchise-record number of games at the last minute, had nothing to say against three Yankee relievers who kept them scoreless over a final four solid shutout innings.

Especially when they actually out-hit the Yankees 44-28 and still came up with early winter. The trouble was, the Guards also went 3-for-30 with men in scoring position over Games One, Two, Four, and Five, and had nobody landing big run-delivering blows when needed the most. Their ability to surprise expired.

Now the Yankees have a chance for revenge against the Astros who’ve met them in two previous ALCSes and beaten them both times. They had to hurry their postgame celebration up considerably—the ALCS opens Wednesday night.

The Guardians could take their sweet time going home for the winter and pondering the season that traveled so engagingly but ended so ignominiously.

“Winning the division was the first part,” Hedges said postgame. “Wild-card round. Put ourselves in position to beat the Yankees. And we wanted to win the World Series, but that’s a good Yankees team. The cool thing is, now we have a bunch of dudes with a ton of playoff experience in the most hostile environment you can imagine.”

The Guards were bloody fun to watch for most of it. Then Cole, Stanton and Judge rang their bells in Games Four and Five, and they had nothing much to say in return. The Guardiac Kids were the babies who got rocked. There was nothing much fun about that.

The valiant but vanquished Mariners

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Jeremy Peña

The Mariners fought the Astros off long and luminously in their ALDS Game Three, but Astros rookie Jeremy Peña brought the fight near to the end with his eighteen-inning, scoreless tie-breaking bomb that proved the end of the Mariners’ season.

Maybe nobody really expected the Mariners to get to their first postseason since the wake of the 9/11 atrocities in the first place. Maybe nobody really expected them to stay there when they up and bumped the Blue Jays to one side in a wild card series.

But they did.

Maybe nobody expected them to survive against the American League West ogres from Houston. Even if they made a reasonable enough-all-things-considered 7-12 showing against them on the regular season. Even if they’d beaten the Astros two out of three in two first-half sets.

They didn’t.

But a three-game sweep out of their division series still stings, no matter how valiant the Mariners effort was. Even if the series was as close as a closed clothespin, the Mariners compelling the Astros to win the first two games by comeback.

Mariners fans and just about everyone else couldn’t possibly have been surprised that Yordan Alvarez was the bombardier who flattened the Mariners in Games One and Two, first with that jolting three-run homer to turn a 7-5 lead into an 8-7 Game One win in the bottom of the ninth, then with a just-as-jolting two-run homer in the Game Two bottom of the sixth.

But going long distance two games’ worth in Game Three to see it end via Astro rookie Jeremy Peña’s leadoff bomb off Penn Murfee, after Luis (Rock-a-Bye) Garcia held them at bay over four relief innings with only one measurable threat against him, had to sting soul deep.

After a marathon exhibition of run prevention—the 42 combined strikeouts (20 by Astro batters, 22 by Mariners batters) set a postseason record; the Astros going 11-for-63 and the Mariners going 7-for-60 all night, it couldn’t feel otherwise.

“It’s kind of what we’re accustomed to, playing those tight games and finding a way,” said Mariners manager Scott Servais postgame Saturday night. “I mean, that is a big league game, with the pitching and defense that was fired out there. We just weren’t able to put anything together.”

“This at-bat,” Pena said, after his homer broke the foot-thick ice at last, “was not going to be possible if our pitching staff didn’t keep us in the ballgame. They dominated all game. Their pitching staff dominated all game.”

Sometimes you had to think what was wrong with these Astros—if they were going to prevail anyway against the Seattle upstarts, how the hell could they not have just done it in the regulation nine? Didn’t they want to avoid wheeling Justin Verlander to the mound in a Game Four if they could help it?

Now, of course, Verlander and Framber Valdez can have a little extra rest/rejuvenate time before opening the Astros’ unprecedented-in-the-divisional-play-era sixth consecutive American League Championship Series. They won’t know their opponent until things are settled between the Guardians and the Yankees in New York Monday night.

But how could these Astros, whose stocks in trade include becoming the biggest pains in the ass in the AL West with runners in scoring position, do worse with RISP (0-for-11) than the Mariners (0-for-8) did all night long?

How could Kyle Tucker and Jose Altuve hitting back-to-back one-out singles and pulling off a double-steal in the top of the second end with Mariners starting pitcher George Kirby striking Chas McCormick out to strand them?

How could Kirby plunk two Astros in the top of the third—Alvarez leading off, Trey Mancini to set up ducks on the pond—and escape with his life after McCormick’s deep fly to center was run down and hauled down by Julio Rodríguez?

How could the Astros plant first and second on Kirby with one out in the top of the seventh—and strand them by way of Christian Vazquez flying out to center and Altuve striking out?

How did Mariners reliever (and erstwhile Rays bullpen bull) Diego Castillo slither out of second and third and one out in the top of the ninth by striking Vazquez and Altuve out back-to-back swinging?

How did six Mariners out of the bullpen keep the Astros hitless from the tenth through the fifteenth, with their only baserunner of the span coming when Paul Sewald plunked McCormick to open the the top of the twelfth?

And how did Murfee save Matthew Boyd’s bones midway through the top of the sixteenth, after Boyd surrendered a base hit (Alex Bregman) and a walk (Kyle Tucker) following a leadoff fly out? Murfee got Yuli Gurriel to line out to fairly deep right center and Aledmys Diaz to pop out beyond first base in foul ground.

The longer this one went, the more improbably it continued to look. And not one muscle in T-Mobile Park dared obey any Mariner fans’ thoughts of making for the exits.

The Mariners proved just as good at leaving runners for dead as the Astros until the eighteenth. They stranded Cal Raleigh on third in the second, Ty France on first in the third, J.P. Crawford on first in the fifth, Rodríguez on second (a two-out double) in the eighth, Eugenio Suarez (leadoff single) and Mitch Haniger (one-out plunk) in the ninth, France (two-out walk, then stealing second) on second in the thirteenth, Haniger on first in the fourteenth, and Carlos Santana (two-out single; to second on a wild pitch) on second in the seventeenth.

This game threatened to end as a classic case of long-term, non-constructive abandonment against both side. (For the first time in his major league life Altuve took an 0-for-8 collar, big enough to fit Secretariat.) It only began with Astros starter Lance McCullers, Jr. pitching two-hit, six-inning shutout ball, and Mariners rook Kirby plus his defense keeping the Astros at bay for seven innings despite six hits and five walks.

Raleigh, the Mariners catcher, played all eighteen innings with a thumb fracture and a torn ligament or two that he’s dealth with for over a month. Some call it toughness. Others might call it foolishness.

He had a Clete Boyer kind of regular season at the plate: 27 home runs (leading all Show catchers) plus 20 doubles but a .284 on-base percentage. He clinched the Mariners’ postseason trip in the first place with a game-winning home run; he scored what proved the game-winning run that pushed the Blue Jays out of the postseason.

The league-average Mariners backstop who handled his pitchers well enough to help them deliver a collective 3.30 ERA on the season struck out three times in six plate appearances Saturday night, batted only once with a man in scoring position, in the bottom of the ninth, and hit into a force out.

At last Raleigh will be able to visit a hand specialist and get that paw repaired. Who knows what further damage catching two games’ worth without a break might have done? The spirit may be willing but more often than not all or part of the body can be defiant. Which reminds me that Rodríguez’s late-season back injury needs to be pondered more thoroughly, too—did he feel lingering after-effects the rest of the way?

But Peña turned on Murfee’s full-count fastball almost down the central pipe and sent it over the left center field fence and turned all eyes upon him. Peña, the rookie who slotted in at shortstop for the departed Carlos Correa. And, earned no less than his manager Dusty Baker’s lasting respect.

“You could tell by his brightness in his eyes and his alertness on the field,” Baker said postgame, “that he wasn’t scared and he wasn’t fazed by this. Boy, he’s been a godsend to us, especially since we lost Carlos, because this could have been a disastrous situation had he not performed the way he has.”

It proved a disastrous situation for the Mariners in the end. They’re likely to remain competitive with a few patches to sew and gaps to fill during their off-season. But nobody can accuse them of going down without one of the grandest and longest fights in postseason history, either. Be proud, Seattle. There was honour to spare in this defeat.