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Astros, Yankees, Game 7. This should be fun. This has been a pretty terrific ALCS already, and with a winner-take-all contest to decide it tonight, this could end up being one of the best league championship series we’ve seen in a while.

For the Yankees, the plan seems pretty obvious. CC Sabathia is going to start the game, and given how he’s pitched so far this postseason, Joe Girardi will probably ride his veteran until he gets in real trouble. And then the Astros will deal with Tommy Kahnle and Aroldis Chapman, probably for at least a couple of innings each, with David Robertson around to try and redeem his disastrous Game 6 performance if Sabathia-Kahnle-Chapman isn’t enough to get through nine innings. If anyone besides one of those four take the mound for the Yankees, it will probably be because one of the two teams turned it into an early blowout.

The Astros, though, head into a potential season finale without as much clarity.

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A year ago, the Cubs were baseball’s most dominant team, first putting up 103 regular-season wins and then capping the achievement with their first World Series win in 108 years. (So I was told a few times along the way.) The question wasn’t whether the 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball — that was obvious — but whether the 2016 Cubs were one of the best baseball teams we’ve ever seen.

No one is going to ask that question of the 2017 Cubs.

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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A little later today, Jeff will have a post about the most amazing play we’ve seen all postseason: Yu Darvish drawing a bases-loaded walk — on four pitches — from Carl Edwards Jr. last night. How did a quality reliever throw four consecutive balls to a career AL pitcher who had zero intention of ever swinging? In the NLCS? For the defending champs?

But in this post, I’m going to ask a different question about that at-bat: why did we ever see it in the first place?

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The Astros announced last night that Lance McCullers will take the ball in today’s Game 4 of the ALCS. When asked why he chose McCullers over Brad Peacock, A.J. Hinch responded with a simple answer: “He’s really good.”

McCullers certainly has been really good at times, and he was one of the AL’s best pitchers in the first half of the season, running a 3.05 ERA/2.74 FIP/2.74 xFIP before the All-Star break. But back problems put him on the DL a few times in the second half, and when he did pitch, he wasn’t particularly effective, running an 8.23 ERA/4.29 FIP/4.58 xFIP. At the end of July, I noted that the Astros had a Lance McCullers problem, and they never really got it fixed.

If the Astros were convinced that McCullers was healthy and back to his first-half form, they would have started him in the ALDS. Instead, they went with Peacock as their 4th starter in that series, and used McCullers in relief when that didn’t go well. So why are they showing confidence today in a guy who hasn’t gotten hitters out regularly in several months?

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Last night, the Cubs lost Game 2 of the NLCS to the Dodgers and now head back to Chicago down 2-0 in the series. They lost on a Justin Turner walk-off home run, but the big story after the game was who threw the pitch that Turner drove over the center-field fence. John Lackey, a career starter who had never pitched on back-to-back days, was brought in to face Chris Taylor with a man on in the ninth inning. Wade Davis, the team’s best reliever, did not pitch.

Last year, Buck Showalter was excoriated for leaving Zach Britton in the bullpen to watch Ubaldo Jimenez end the team’s season, and given the drastic shift we saw in postseason reliever usage after that happened, it seemed like no one was in any hurry to be the next guy to lose a road game while holding his closer for a save situation that would never come. After a few weeks of pretty aggressive reliever usage — Maddon called on Davis in the seventh inning of Game 5 on Thursday, after all — this was a pretty surprising decision, and Maddon is taking a lot of heat for going to Lackey to face the middle of the Dodgers order in a situation where a run ends the game.

But of all the decisions he made last night, I actually think that one is one of the more defensible.

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In one of the craziest, weirdest, most bizarre baseball games anyone has ever seen, the Cubs beat the Nationals 9-8 tonight, advancing to the NLCS. The game had everything you could think of and then some: catcher’s interference, RBI strikeouts that maybe shouldn’t have counted, Max Scherzer hitting a batter to force in a run, and Michael Taylor hitting a bomb on a pitch at his eyes. But, unfortunately, the lasting memory of this game might just be that MLB’s replay rule on slides into a base still sucks.

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