Let’s start in the middle. In the bottom of the sixth inning, Yordan Alvarez hit a ball far. How far? Over-the-batter’s-eye far:

The titanic blast — 450 feet, 112.5 mph off the bat — put the Astros up 3–1 in Game 6 of the World Series, a lead they never relinquished. Houston now has its second championship in franchise history. It’s a title made possible by so many contributors, both old and new, strong individually and unstoppable as a collective. From the beginning of the postseason, many called this Astros team flawless. It had no apparent weakness. In simulations, it would steamroll its opponents, and that’s more or less what happened. Sometimes, dominance takes the form of an extended rally. Sometimes, it channels into a single swing.

José Alvarado routinely touches triple digits and throws a nightmare cutter. For the fourth time this series, he was asked to face Alvarez. In hindsight, letting Zack Wheeler stay in the game might have yielded a better outcome. Alvarado had been erratic his last few outings, and Wheeler didn’t look fatigued, at least to the naked eye. But Phillies manager Rob Thompson had been aggressive throughout the postseason, and to great success. He stuck to his plan. The move backfired not because Thompson made an unacceptable mistake, but because Alvarez, and by extension the Astros, were simply better. In sports, a “choke” usually refers to self-inflicted asphyxiation. Not here. The Phillies fell victim to their opponents, not themselves.

But before Minute Maid Park fell into pandemonium, it was in a stasis. Hope existed for Phillies fans – Wheeler looked liked himself again, his velocity having rebounded. His sinkers, perfectly commanded, ran into Astros hitters and broke bat after bat. But his teammates couldn’t capitalize on the parade of zeroes. For Framber Valdez stood on the mound for Houston, a towering figure the Phillies failed to fully comprehend. If not for a Kyle Schwarber solo homer in the sixth, they would have mustered no runs and just one additional hit. Valdez didn’t bring his A-game – he threw his fair share of uncompetitive pitches, with a few down the pipe – but a competent version of the lefty sufficed. When the game turned in Houston’s favor, it was Valdez who led the cheering brigade.

With a one-run lead, Wheeler started off against a meek opponent: Martín Maldonado. But the Silver Slugger candidate had one trick up his sleeve. In the postseason, the veteran backstop has a history of crowding the plate. Maldonado presumably knew Wheeler would try to attack inside. And when that happened, his preparation paid off – a sinker hit Maldonado on his elbow, right where it’s protected by a pad. Call it disingenuous, call it devious, but it was deemed a legal hit-by-pitch. The Phillies challenged to no avail. The call on the field stood, and Houston had a baserunner to lead off the inning.

Replacing an All-Star shortstop with a rookie shouldn’t be possible, but this season, the Astros did just that. If you’ll recall, Jeremy Peña hit a go-ahead home run in the 18th inning of ALDS Game 3, a three-run home run in ALCS Game 4, and was hitting over .400 in the World Series. He has the poise of someone who not only frequents the rodeo but calls it home. Upon seeing a fastball, Peña promptly lined it up the middle. Runners stood at the corners. Thompson got up to relieve his ace, then hailed for Alvarado.

It’s almost comical that the Astros received Alvarez in a throwaway trade. The tweet announcing its existence now lives in infamy, visited by taunting fans as part of a pilgrimage. It’s also impressive how the organization nurtured him into the power-hitting threat he is now. Alvarez had been ice cold up to this point, making it easy to forget that he slashed .306/.406/.613 in the regular season. But in a series-defining moment, he reminded us of his status as one of the best hitters in the game. In one fell swoop, Alvarez came through.

The Astros weren’t done yet. They took advantage of a distraught Alvarado, who walked Alex Bregman, then allowed him to advance to second on a wild pitch. Kyle Tucker struck out swinging for the second out, and in came Seranthony Domínguez. But you know it isn’t your day when Christian Vázquez of all hitters notches an RBI single. Any insurance is good insurance – being up three runs rather than two feels enormous, especially in Game 6 of the World Series. The Phillies couldn’t bridge that chasm, and they went out with a whimper, not a bang.

Innings seven, eight, and nine were examples of the gap between the Astros and Phillies. Granted, it’s one thing to protect a three-run lead and another to chase a three-run deficit. But consider that behind the one-two punch of Alvarado-Domínguez, the Phillies had Zach Eflin, David Robertson, and if necessary, maybe Andrew Bellatti. The Astros went with Héctor Neris and Bryan Abreu, who aren’t even their best relievers, in the seventh and eighth, then used Ryan Pressly to shut the door. Philadelphia received attention this year for constructing a lineup that prioritized offense over defense. Houston ran out a squad that hit for a similar amount of thump without sacrificing contact or run prevention. Fittingly, the Gold Glove-winning Tucker (whose 129 wRC+ this season would have been second-best on the Phillies) made a mad dash towards foul territory to secure the final out:

This is no criticism of the Phillies, who weren’t supposed to make it all the way here. As the sixth seed in the National League, they had to topple the division-winning Cardinals, the red-hot Braves, and the like-minded Padres just to have a chance at World Series glory. Each confrontation contained a comeback, rally, or moment that seemed to defy all odds. The Phillies marched to the beat of their own drum against the Astros, too – upending a 5–0 deficit in Game 1, slamming five home runs off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 3, relying on Nick Castellanos, defensive wizard. In the end, those bursts of magic couldn’t stave off the Astros. But a deep postseason run is a good starting point for the Phillies, and with additions this offseason, they could find themselves in another championship chase.

As the Astros spilled out onto the field, much of the attention shifted to Dusty Baker. The 73-year-old legend has enjoyed a lengthy managerial career consisting of 25 seasons, 3,884 regular-season games, and three World Series appearances. But this marked the first time he’d won it all as manager, providing an exclamation point to his Cooperstown resume. Baker seldom strayed from his toothpick-savoring, at-times stubborn ways. He arguably left pitchers in too long on multiple occasions, missing opportune moments to extinguish the Phillies’ flames. Nonetheless, the Astros prevailed. Perhaps they would have even without Baker, but to disregard any element of these Astros is to disregard them as a whole.

Not long ago, organizational turmoil threatened to close the door on the Astros. In the wake of the sign-stealing scandal, much of Houston’s front office turned over, as did the big-league roster. For some, it’s difficult to disassociate these two eras of Astros baseball from each other – the old one led by the ruthless Jeff Luhnow, and the latest one piloted by James Click, who oversaw the growth of players like Cristian Javier and the aforementioned Peña and Valdez, all of whom played an integral role in Houston’s triumph. A clean victory doesn’t wash away what happened in the past, but that doesn’t mean we should discredit the new regime, either. The 106 games and championship won by the Astros this year are a testament to what an organization can accomplish when every part of it is in sync.

Meanwhile, the Phillies and their fans will head home, wondering what could have been. What if Edmundo Sosa’s fly ball in the second inning had landed 15 feet to the left, resulting in a three-run home run? What if Wheeler had stayed in to pitch and retired Alvarez? What if Schwarber had swung away in the eighth, instead of awkwardly bunting against the shift? It’s natural that these questions linger. But time has passed, rendering those questions unanswerable. The Phillies will have gone to sleep, and they will have woken up, the sunlight of a new day upon them. It’s a day without baseball, a day with little reason to celebrate. Gradually, however, the ice will thaw. The sound of the bat will ring through batting cages, and balls will find themselves nestled in gloves, just where they belong. And the Phillies will gather once more, armed with the knowledge that it’s the heartbreaks that define and motivate us.

The field of hitters in the World Series is loaded. Both sides feature old and new stars who can tear the cover off the baseball. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bryce Harper has been the most productive of all of them, with a .514 wOBA to this point. You have to go all the way down to the low .400s to find the next players on that list, but if you do, you see Jeremy Peña (.427 wOBA) and Alex Bregman (.407 wOBA). Peña has had the best stretch of his short career in these playoffs, delivering two-strike hit after two-strike hit. But the Astros third baseman, who has been penciled in right behind Peña and Yordan Alvarez, has also been fantastic.

There’s a reason Bregman is sitting fourth in the lineup behind three stars. His knack for not chasing breaking balls and getting to high velocity makes him an ideal hitter to follow Peña and Alvarez. Peña’s weakness is chasing sliders off the plate, while teams have consistently challenged Alvarez with high heat. But that approach has to change when facing Bregman, making it tough for any reliever to get through this stretch of the lineup unscathed. Interestingly, while Bregman’s chase rate hadn’t faltered at all, his ability to get to high velocity has only come around in the last month after a rough regular season, when Bregman posted a .242 wOBA against pitches thrown 96 mph or higher. To be honest, that surprised me. I know he doesn’t have crazy bat speed or hit the ball harder than most, but to the naked eye, he has one of the quickest triggers in the game.

When I say trigger, I’m referring to the time it takes Bregman to start his downswing and get to impact. If we were able to get our hands on his bat sensor data, I’d be very willing to bet this is where Bregman stands out amongst his peers. That skill makes him a great candidate to routinely beat high velocity. That’s a subjective thing to say without concrete data, but perhaps I can provide some video evidence. Let’s look to Game 3 of the ALCS:

Before this fastball, Bregman saw five upper-90s four-seamers from Gerrit Cole. If a very good hitter sees the same pitch six times in a row, I don’t doubt they’ll be able to make an adjustment like Bregman did here, even against Cole’s plus fastball. He had fouled off two heaters in this at-bat, and looked slightly late. Those swings, likely combined with the knowledge that Bregman had struggled with high velocity this year, was enough for Cole to stick to his guns and continue with the high heat. Unfortunately for him, Bregman adjusted by choking up and shortening his swing even further as he drilled this 100 mph fastball on the black right back up the middle at 105.7 mph.

By this time, Bregman had already laced a few liners off triple-digit fastballs. He had a hit in all three of his appearances against Andrés Muñoz in the ALDS, with the hits against fastballs coming in Games 2 and 3. Here they are:

Two fastballs over 101 mph, both of which were barreled over 105 mph to give Bregman a single and double, respectively. Both came on 0-0 counts, so I’m inclined to think Bregman was sitting on this pitch. He took Muñoz yard in Game 1 on a hanging slider, so he probably anticipated that the Mariners reliever wouldn’t go back to the pitch. Of course, even when you sit on a 101 mph fastball, you still have to barrel it. That’s a tough task for any hitter and Bregman made it look quite easy.

And it’s not as if Bregman was cheating his load or leg kick for those pitches against Cole and Muñoz. It looks natural for him to get his bat on plane and in the hitting zone very quickly. Given that, you might ask why Bregman was so bad against high velocity this year. As I said before, he had a .242 wOBA against these pitches, and it’s not like his .298 xwOBA was much better. Of the 23 home runs he hit in 2022, not a single one came on a fastball thrown 96 mph or higher. His swing type should enable him to hit these pitches well, but sometimes the eye test doesn’t align with a hitter’s outcomes. Still, by the looks of it, his performance in 2022 may have just been a blip. The following table shows Bregman’s performance against fastballs 96 mph and higher throughout his career:

The gap between his wOBA and xwOBA can probably be explained by a combination of bad BABIP luck and spray angle, but nonetheless, a career .363 xwOBA on this group of pitches is impressive. Focusing on just launch angle and exit velocity might miss out on some context, but it’s still a good representation of Bregman’s ability to hit these pitches hard in the air. If you exclude 2022 from the totals, Bregman’s wOBA/xwOBA split is .356/.385. Now, excluding 2022 isn’t exactly fair; this season did indeed happen! But I wanted to show you what Bregman had done before his struggles this year.

Even relative to the rest of the league, Bregman was a great hitter against high velocity. His .363 xwOBA against the pitch group since 2017 ranks him 26th in the league among hitters who have seen at least 750 of these fastballs. This was a proven skill that suddenly fell off hard in 2022 despite it being Bregman’s healthiest season in terms of games played since 2019. Sometimes a hitter’s mechanics get out of whack, and they just suddenly can’t handle a pitch they never had an issue with before. When that happens, it makes sense for high velocity to be the first thing a pitcher goes to. After all, fast things are hard to hit! After churning through swings from various months, I realized Bregman’s stride was slightly more open than it was in the playoffs. Here are two representative swings on inner-third pitches. The first is from June and the second is from September:

Unfortunately for Bregman, even such a small difference in stride direction made a huge difference in his batted ball quality. If you re-watch the swings from the playoffs, you can see Bregman staying near neutral to slightly closed. In the two swings above, Bregman’s stride leads to his front hip leaking out early. As a result, he flared a fly ball and chopped a groundball. The front foot rotation tells you where his direction is heading in both pitches. He is losing his center of balance while trying to throw his hands at the high velocity. His swing is so short that he is still able to get to it, but the slight mechanical difference distorts his bat path enough to ruin his contact quality. Now that we know this, we can better understand why Bregman has been so fantastic in the postseason from a mechanical perspective, but do the batted ball statistics match? Yes, they do indeed.

His .518/.468 wOBA/xwOBA split gives us additional context to the quality of contact Bregman made. There is a gap between the two, but it doesn’t really matter in this case. A .468 xwOBA is still a very, very high mark. He is on the short list of hitters who seem especially well equipped to deal with the high velocity playoff pitchers bring to the mound. The swings I showed you against Cole and Muñoz are good examples of that, but I’d like to take you through an at-bat from Game 4 of the World Series when Bregman faced José Alvarado. Bregman looked overmatched to start, but he eventually came out on top even though he was down 0-2 in the count. The bases were loaded with no outs. Alvarado came in to limit the damage. Here’s how it started:

On the 0-0 count, Bregman took this 101 mph sinker, which ran back over the front door. Coming from Alvarado’s arm slot, this pitch is a doozy. Good decision to take. Down 0-1, he had to be aggressive to try and drive a runner in:

Bregman was definitely swinging for a 101 mph sinker again. He didn’t recognize the spin, and the pitch broke under his barrel. He checked in with the umpire to see if the pitch was in the zone to reinforce his understanding of where it ends up after it breaks. Heading into the 0-2 count, Bregman had to cover the diving cutter and the turbo sinker:

This pitch was slightly higher than the previous one and allowed Bregman to get a little more of barrel on it. Realistically, you can’t cover every zone against Alvarado with the sweet spot of your barrel, as he has two pitches that break in opposite directions. This is the very best you can do if you’re simultaneously trying to beat 101. By the looks of it, Bregman had no problem doing so in the next pitch:

That pitch was meant to run over the front door like the first one, but Alvarado committed the biggest sin when it comes to front-door sinkers: He let it run over the middle of the plate and right into Bregman’s ideal bat path up and away. Bregman was doing his best to cover the high velocity while down in the count, and he did. In Game 1 of the series, he had a very uncomfortable at-bat against Alvarado and wasn’t able to cover the sinker or cutter. He knew he had to make a slight tweak to get a different result. Swings like this are why he leads all players in the postseason in hits (six) and wOBA (.518) against heaters 96 mph and above.

Don’t get me wrong, a .518 wOBA against the best fastballs isn’t sustainable. Not even Aaron Judge posted a wOBA like that while hitting every fastball to the moon this season. However, the combination of Bregman’s swing and career-long skill of hitting high velocity makes him significantly more capable of producing hot streaks like this one than the vast majority of players in the league. Here I’ll remind you that over the course of a season or a career, a player doesn’t perform to their average mark the entire way. There are hot and cold streaks wrapped in there that bring them to their true average. Bregman is having one of those hot streaks, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

As his team takes a crucial 3-2 lead heading back to Houston, don’t be surprised if Zack Wheeler and the rest of the Phillies’ pitching staff avoid heaters against Bregman. The Phillies have no room for error, which means they must avoid Astros hitters’ strengths. Right now, Bregman’s swing mechanics are locked in to beat these pitches and the Crawford Boxes are lurking in left field, just waiting for him to yank one out like he did against Luis Severino in the ALCS.

Aaron Nola had a rotten first start of the World Series. He gave up five runs before he finished three innings, and while the Phillies bailed him out en route to a 6–5 win, that game surely left him with a bad taste in his mouth. When he took the ball again for Game 4, he was likely hoping to change the story once and for all.

He had a plan, too. In Game 1, Nola had gotten beaten in a silly way. He came out pumping fastballs, and the Astros were only too happy to feast. They collected six hits; five, including a three-run home run by Kyle Tucker, came on fastballs. Time after time, he threw a perfectly serviceable fastball up there, and the Astros pounced on it. Some were blooped. Some were smashed. Nearly none were missed; the Astros swung at 16 fastballs and came up empty exactly once.

That’s hardly surprising. The Astros were one of the best teams at hitting fastballs this year. They were the best, period, on fastballs below 95 mph. Even with playoff adrenaline, that’s where Nola lives. It’s a bad recipe against such a fearsome offensive team; if you can’t make the Astros swing and miss, you’re going to have a long night — or a short night, measured in innings.

In Game 4, Houston came out swinging yet again. Nola threw nine fastballs in the first inning, and the Astros swung at six. They missed exactly one: the first pitch of the game to Jose Altuve. Nola started Tucker with two straight fastballs in the second inning, and he was on them both times. Something had to change. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been watching the playoffs, you’ve likely heard at least one broadcaster call Houston right fielder Kyle Tucker underrated. In Game 1 of the World Series, Tucker did his best to remedy the situation, blasting home runs in his first two at-bats. On Monday, MLB announced that after two years as a Gold Glove finalist, Tucker had finally won the award. Still, he’s not the right fielder everyone’s talking about:

Nick Castellanos stole Tucker’s thunder not once but twice, saving Game 1 with a sliding catch, and making a nearly identical play on the first pitch of Game 3. As if that wasn’t enough, the World Series’ third-most talked about play in right field didn’t belong to Tucker either:

Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — In the aftermath of Houston’s Game 4 win over the Phillies, as reporters started to file into the visiting clubhouse and mill around the lockers of the three relievers who’d closed out the game, Justin Verlander was pulling on his shoes and heading for the exit. When someone asked him to stop for a chat, he politely declined, saying he needed to get to bed early before his start in Game 5.

What followed probably wasn’t the biggest game of Verlander’s life; he’s started clinchers and elimination games, and win or lose on Thursday, the Astros were going to head back home with plenty of reason for optimism. But at 39 years old, in possibly his last game for the team that he’s taken to the deepest reaches of the playoffs every year since his arrival in 2017, this might have been his last chance to win a World Series game.

Verlander’s ineffectiveness in the World Series has been one of baseball’s great mysteries for 16 years. Despite innumerable accomplishments and accolades not only in the regular season but also in the ALDS and ALCS, he entered Game 5 with a career World Series record of 0–6 and a 6.07 ERA in eight starts, the worst record in MLB history.

That ended on Thursday in Philadelphia. Verlander evaded, inveigled, and scattered just enough to stay out of big trouble. He allowed just one run over five eventful innings, which was just enough to scratch the zero off the front of his Fall Classic record and move the Astros, with a 3–2 win, to within a game of their second World Series title. Read the rest of this entry »

Blame Mike Petriello. I don’t think that anyone is actually wondering whether you should, as a fan of the batting team, root for a double play. You shouldn’t! Don’t do it. Don’t even think about doing it. But after it came up on last night’s Game 4 broadcast, I thought I’d at least quickly go over why this is a bad idea that you shouldn’t consider.

Let’s set the stage. In the top of the fifth inning, Alex Bregman stood at the plate with the bases loaded and nobody out. The Astros already led 1-0 and were looking for more. Bregman was in an 0-2 hole against José Alvarado. Naturally (well, maybe), it’s time to talk about whether you should be rooting for a double play if you’re pulling for the Astros.

Q: Should you prefer a double play here if you’re Houston?
No.

Q: Are you sure? It would put the Astros up 2-0, which is a lot of runs.
Yes, I’m sure.

Q: How likely are the Astros to win if Bregman strikes out?
I used our WPA Inquirer to look up an estimated winning percentage for the Astros with the bases juiced, a one run lead, and one out in the top of the fifth. They stood to win 73.9% of the time.

Q: How about if he hits into a double play?
If it’s a 6-4-3 double play that scores a run and leaves a runner on third, they’re 74.7% likely to win. If the double play erases the runner on third instead, it’s 74.3%. Given where the infield was playing, I don’t think a home-to-first double play was very likely. In fact, I think the 6-4-3 type was the only real consideration.

Q: Hey! They’re gaining win probability by hitting into a double play, aren’t they?
That wasn’t really a question. In any case, sure, if Bregman had only two options – double play or strikeout – he’d prefer to hit into a double play. Baseball has all kinds of outcomes, though! Some of them even let you reach base. Those are a lot better than hitting into a double play.

In his career, Bregman hits .215/.268/.375 after 0-2 counts. He strikes out 32.5% of the time, which is notably not 100%. He’s also a fly ball hitter after 0-2, because he’s a fly ball hitter all the dang time. He has a 34.7% groundball rate when he puts the ball into play after 0-2 counts, right in line with his overall mark.

Alvarado is quite good when he gets ahead 0-2, which does matter. Let’s give him a ton of the benefit of the doubt and say that Bregman will strike out 50% of the time, while only reaching base 10% of the time. That’s a goofy assumption, to be clear – that’s a lower OBP than Alvarado has allowed on 0-2 in his career and far lower than the major league average. Bregman is an elite contact hitter, and he had the platoon advantage. The real number is probably at least double that, but I’m trying to be charitable here.

Let’s break it down like this: 50% strikeouts, 10% one-base singles, 15% groundouts, and 25% outs in the air. With Jose Altuve on third base, let’s say 60% of those fly balls score runs. We’ll even make all the groundouts double plays.

Using those same WPA Inquirer numbers, the Astros were 87.1% likely to win if Bregman reached safely while scoring only one runner, whether by walk, hit by pitch, or single. They were 78.3% likely to win if he hit a sacrifice fly without advancing the runner on second. Sum it all up, and account for the fact that a fly ball that doesn’t score anyone is the same as a strikeout, and that gets Houston’s win percentage to 76%. That’s meaningfully better than the chances of winning after they hit into a double play.

If we make some more reasonable assumptions, this falls apart even further. Let’s say Bregman reaches base 15% of the time, still far lower than a reasonable estimate but at least less punitive towards him. Let’s also say that he hits a double or two-base single once in a while, and that only 85% of his groundouts are double plays instead of 100%. That’s another goofy assumption – when Bregman has grounded out in a double play situation (runner on first, less than two outs), the defense has turned a double play 40.2% of the time in his career.

With these still-goofy numbers, we’re up to 76.9%. That’s a lot better than hitting into a double play. If I used my actual baseline assumptions instead of stacking the deck in favor of the strange assertion that Houston fans should be rooting for a double play, I get a 78% chance of Houston winning with Bregman down in the count 0-2.

Q: That’s a lot of numbers. Give it to me in one word. Should Houston fans have been rooting for a run-scoring double play?
No.

Baseball is a funny game, a remarkable and even ridiculous one for the way it can produce such radically different games on consecutive nights as in Games 3 and 4 of this year’s World Series. On Tuesday, Bryce Harper and friends hit five home runs at the expense of Lance McCullers Jr., accounting for all of the runs in the Phillies’ 7-0 romp. On Wednesday, Cristian Javier and three Astros relievers produced the first combined no-hitter in postseason history while winning 5-0, with all five runs coming within a seven-batter span in the fifth inning. From talk about how devastated the Astros might be and the possibility of the Phillies closing things out at home, the conversation turns to whether the Phillies can bounce back before the series, now knotted at two games apiece, shifts back to Houston.

Combined or not, the no-hitter is The Big Story, and rightly so, as it’s just the second of any kind in World Series history after Don Larsen‘s 1956 perfect game, and the third in postseason history, with Roy Halladay’s 2010 Division Series no-hitter the other. Halladay did so for the Phillies, at Citizens Bank Park, against the Dusty Baker-managed Reds, by the way. Of course there’s the fact that Javier, the majors’ toughest pitcher to hit in terms of both batting average (.169) and BABIP (.228) among those with at least 140 innings pitched, had already done the heavy lifting in a combined no-hitter on June 25 of this year against the Yankees.

What you might not have noticed about Wednesday’s game was that the Astros won without the benefit of a home run, a feat that hadn’t happened since October 15, when the Guardians and Padres both won Division Series contests (Game 3 for the AL, Game 4 for the NL) while keeping the ball in the park. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – Momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher, and once Cristian Javier is in motion, he tends not to stop. The 25-year-old, nominally Houston’s no. 4 starter, had one of the best high-stakes starts you’ll ever see. He and three relievers threw the second no-hitter in World Series history, and the first combined no-hitter in any round of the MLB playoffs.

Just 24 hours ago the Phillies teed off on Lance McCullers Jr., sending 45,000 fans at Citizens Bank Park into a lusty froth. Five home runs for the Phillies and an offensive no-show from the Astros made an upset run to a title seem as real a possibility as ever. But Javier and the Astros came back with a vengeance, giving as good as they got and then some to win 5-0 and level the series.

Astros right-hander Ryan Pressly, who closed out the game, called Javier one of the most underrated starters in baseball.

“There’s not a moment that’s big enough [for him],” Pressly said. “He just goes out there and does what he wants to do… He doesn’t get the credit [for] how he goes out there and handles his business. The lights aren’t big enough. I mean, we’re on the biggest stage in baseball and he goes out there and does what he normally does.” Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – It’s not just that Bryce Harper homered on the first pitch he saw in Game 3. For a first-pitch home run to put his team up in the first inning of his first career home World Series game — and a 402-foot bomb at that — it was a pretty casual event on Harper’s end. Almost nonchalant. This is what he does:

But when he got back to the dugout, he shouted for Alec Bohm, the on-deck hitter, to come back to him. It was reminiscent of the famous shot of Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman chatting in the on-deck circle as the Astros teed off on Tyler Glasnow in Game 5 of the 2019 ALDS. Bohm led off the next inning and hit the first pitch he saw into the left field seats.

If you’d turned off the game then, you would’ve seen a representative sample of what turned into a 7-0 rout. The Astros couldn’t get out of first gear against Ranger Suárez and the four relievers who followed him. And while Lance McCullers Jr. threw the kitchen sink at the Phillies, he got the sink, the faucet, and the backsplash kicked right back at him. Philadelphia managed six hits and a walk against the veteran right-hander, but five of those six hits were home runs and every single baserunner scored. Read the rest of this entry »

All day, the weather radar predicted that the skies would open at a particularly inconvenient time for the Phillies and Astros. While MLB waited as long as it could to see if the wind shifted, by 7 p.m. local time, it was clear the weather would not cooperate. (Rain in late October in the Mid-Atlantic region? Whoever could have foreseen such a thing?) As such, Game 3 of the World Series has been postponed 24 hours, with better weather ahead; the nighttime forecasts for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are for clear skies and temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Ideal Fall Classic weather, in other words.

Game 3 of the #WorldSeries has officially been postponed. Here is an updated look at the Series schedule:
– Game 3: Tuesday
– Game 4: Wednesday
– Game 5: Thursday
– Travel Day: Friday
– Game 6 (If Necessary): Saturday
– Game 7 (If Necessary): Sunday pic.twitter.com/a61nzKUBM5

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 31, 2022

Moreover, if neither team sweeps all three games in Philadelphia, the scheduled off day between Games 5 and 6 will remain intact. That pushes a potential Game 6 to Saturday night and Game 7 to Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »