Eovaldi Keeps Dealing, García Strikes Back in Rangers’ ALCS Game 6 Rout

Get ready to hear a whole lot about the 2019 World Series. After a 9–2 Rangers victory in Game 6 of the ALCS on Sunday night, the Rangers have evened the series at three and raised the specter that the Astros were hoping would stay buried. Game 7 will take place on Monday night in Houston, unfortunately for Houston. The Astros — the only team ever to lose all four home games in a seven-game series — now have the chance either to exorcise those demons or to relive them all over again. And pitching for Texas in Game 7 will be none other than Max Scherzer, who started Game 7 of the World Series for the Nationals back in 2019.

The Rangers, on the other hand, are looking to make their own history. While the Astros are chasing their third straight World Series appearance, Bruce Bochy’s club is looking to get there for just the third time ever. They’re also hoping to win their first championship.

The invincibility of the road team is just the latest storyline in a series that has had drama to spare. The biggest kerfuffle was the beanball-induced benches-clearing incident that took place during Game 5. On Saturday, the league announced fines for several players and a two-game suspension for Bryan Abreu, who filed an appeal shortly before the game, which kept him eligible to pitch. Houston fans waved signs that read FREE BRYAN ABREU and booed Adolis García lustily all night. García, you’ll recall, committed the crime of objecting to a 98.9-mph fastball thrown directly at his center of mass.

“They do a really good job here of making us feel uncomfortable,” said Mitch Garver after Game 6. “They do a good job. It’s a good rivalry.” For the first eight innings, García gave the crowd exactly what it wanted. Unable to lay off the high hard stuff, he struck out four times, including once at the hands of Abreu. In the ninth inning, however, he had his revenge on Houston, putting four exclamation points on an emphatic victory. With the bases loaded, he finally caught up to an elevated fastball, turning on a Ryne Stanek heater and depositing it in the Crawford Boxes to turn what had started out as a close-fought contest into a rout.

Starting pitchers Nathan Eovaldi and Framber Valdez came into Game 6 on trajectories that were about as divergent as you could imagine. In three postseason starts, Eovaldi was 3–0 with a 2.29 ERA and a matching 2.29 FIP. His brilliance continued, as he held the Astros to two earned runs on five hits over 6.1 innings. He only struck out four, but he also allowed just three hard-hit balls. The first run came in the first inning, when the Astros strung together a softly-hit single, a walk, then another softly-hit single.

Mike Maddux made an early trip to the mound to assure Eovaldi that there’s not much you can do when two weakly hit balls drop in for hits, and besides, any time you keep Yordan Alvarez’s exit velocity under 150 mph, you’ve already won. His words of comfort seemed to work. Over the next four innings, Eovaldi allowed just two baserunners, one on a walk and one on a hit-by-pitch. The only exciting moment came when he couldn’t keep from laughing after a foul tip bounced up into Jonah Heim’s tools of ignorance.

After Friday night’s bullpen meltdown, Bochy seemed determined to let Eovaldi pitch as long as he could. “Once it was 1–1,” Eovaldi said, “it was just go out there and just try to go as long as I can, and try to get as many outs as possible.” He worked through a jam in the sixth inning, allowing one run to score as the Astros made it a 3–2 game. Bochy finally let him call it a night in the seventh inning, after 88 pitches and one last weakly-hit single.

Alvarez came into the game 9-for-13 against Eovaldi, with two home runs and two doubles, for an OPS of 2.091, which is so good as to feel indecent. He also had a 91.6% hard-hit rate, which is what you get when you divide 11 by 12. Alvarez went 2-for-2 against Eovaldi in Game 6, with an intentional walk and an RBI. Amazingly, that lowered his slugging percentage against him. Josh Sborz finally managed to retire Alvarez via strikeout in the eighth inning. Jose Altuve and José Abreu also chipped in two hits apiece, but the rest of the Houston lineup went hitless.

After a hiccup in Game 5, the Texas bullpen continued to work its way out of trouble, in open defiance of the FIP gods. Sborz cleaned up Eovaldi’s mess in the seventh and recorded an out in the eighth, extending his postseason hitless streak to 6.2 innings. José Leclerc and Andrew Heaney combined for 1.2 hitless innings of their own.

Valdez ran a 4.66 ERA during the second half of the season, then came into Game 6 with an 0–2 record and an 11.57 ERA in the postseason. If you’re keeping score at home, all of those numbers are bad. Considering that context, he gave the Astros just about everything they could have hoped for, keeping the game within reach for his offense, which averaged 5.1 runs scored per game during the regular season. He lasted five innings, striking out six Rangers and allowing three earned runs on six hits. Those three runs came on two homers from Texas’s dynamic catching duo of Garver and Heim.

Heim and Garver combined for 37 homers in the regular season. Garver ran a 138 wRC+ with 19 homers in just 89 regular-season games, carrying the offensive load when a wrist injury affected Heim’s production at the plate. Serving as the DH as he has throughout the postseason, he struck the first blow for the Astros, a solo home run in the second inning to tie the ballgame. Coming into Game 6, Heim had only one hit during the postseason: a home run off of Valdez in Game 2. He now has two hits; the second was a two-run job just a couple inches above the glove of a leaping Kyle Tucker. Asked by Ken Rosenthal whether he knew the ball was hit well enough to get out, Heim said, “No, I was blowing it like everybody else.”

After removing Valdez, Dusty Baker summed up the situation nicely: “He gave us quality, other than those two pitches.”

Phil Maton and Hector Neris worked scoreless innings in the sixth and seventh, but Houston’s bullpen faltered in the eighth and ninth. In the eighth, Evan Carter singled off Abreu on a squibber to shortstop that was initially ruled an out. With a short delay while the call was changed, the voice of a producer on the FS1 broadcast could clearly be heard telling someone to run “the package.” The package, of course, was a highlight reel of the Abreu-García fracas from Friday night. The drama was short-lived. After Carter stole second, Abreu struck García out for the fourth time. That brought up Garver, who ripped a double down the left field line, scoring Carter to make it 4–2; he finished the game 3-for-4 with two RBIs.

Things got worse for the Astros in the ninth. After Leclerc escaped a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the eighth, Rafael Montero created one of his own, loading the bases on a 10-pitch walk to Josh Jung, a chopper off the bat of Leody Taveras that resulted in a tough-luck error for Altuve, and a Marcus Semien single. Baker brought in Stanek, who hit Corey Seager in the calf to bring in a run. That’s when García happened.

Even after García put the game out of reach, the Rangers were looking for more. Travis Jankowski, who had entered as a pinch-runner for Garver, crushed a ball to right. It would have been a home run if not for Gold Glover Kyle Tucker, who made one of his trademark laconic home run robberies.

There are plenty of excellent defenders who can make a tough play look easy, but Tucker has the even rarer gift of making thrilling plays look boring.

Heaney needed just four pitches to slam the door on the Astros in the ninth, setting up the first winner-take-all game of the 2023 postseason. The Texas showdown has so far featured more than enough drama to make up for all of the other one-sided series we’ve seen so far. The Astros will start Cristian Javier, who is 2–0 with a 1.69 ERA thus far in the postseason, but whose 4.19 FIP and 5.45 xFIP tell a very different tale. Meanwhile, Scherzer will be on a very short leash in his second start after a shoulder injury. The Rangers are still looking for a way to retire Alvarez, and hanging over everything is the fate of Abreu, possibly Houston’s best reliever. His appeal will be heard today, so unless his suspension is overturned entirely, he won’t be available in Houston’s biggest game of the year. Someone is going to the World Series. Someone is going home.