Not If, But When: Astros Dispatch Yankees, Advance to World Series

Baseball isn’t scripted or preordained. There’s no knowing who will win any given game; Jacob deGrom lost to the A’s this year and the Pirates swept the Dodgers. It’s a game of thin margins, and with huge volatility; some games a smashed line drive leaves the park, while others it finds a fielder’s glove. It’s a game defined by its uncertainty – but be honest, you knew the Astros were going to win on Sunday, right?

It sure didn’t feel that way at first. The Yankees shuffled their lineup yet again, and the new configuration paid early dividends. Leadoff hitter Harrison Bader looped a soft liner for a single. Two batters later, Anthony Rizzo flatly refused to get out of the way of a baseball headed in his general direction, as is his custom. He was rewarded with first base, and shortly with a run when Giancarlo Stanton and Gleyber Torres followed with singles. Rizzo added to the tally more conventionally in the second, doubling home a run to put the Yankees up 3-0.

Unfortunately for New York, the game moved inexorably forward, and so too did the Astros. Houston’s lineup is beatable, but it’ll take your best. Nestor Cortes didn’t have his in Game 4. He came out with his customary guile, changing speeds and mixing pitches through two scoreless innings. When he took the mound for the third, something changed.

His fastball, never blazing, lost another three ticks on average. He lost command over the pitch, too, throwing five straight outside the rulebook strike zone to Martín Maldonado to start the inning (one was called a strike). By the time he finished walking Jose Altuve, he’d given up on it altogether, looking to land sliders and cutters instead. Jeremy Peña made him pay; he didn’t respect the fastball at all, sitting on the cutter, and when Cortes hung one in an attempt to battle back into the count, Peña unloaded on it for a three-run homer.

As it turns out, injury was to blame. That ill-fated cutter was the last pitch Cortes threw; Aaron Boone and the training staff escorted him off the mound immediately after. That left the Yankees with a lot of innings to cover, with a bullpen they mostly don’t trust. I count roughly three relievers they’ve treated like high leverage arms: Wandy Peralta, Jonathan Loáisiga, and Clay Holmes. Maybe you can include Lou Trivino in that mix, but he was gassed after throwing two innings last night. Three relievers, seven innings? That doesn’t sound like a very good equation.

The Yankees came up with a novel solution: just make the entire seven innings out of those relievers. That sounds desperate. Peralta averaged an inning per appearance this year, as did Holmes. Loáisiga used to be a multi-inning reliever, but he pitched 48 innings in 50 appearances this year.

Seven innings from three one-inning relievers? It’s a long-shot, but when you’re faced with seven innings against the Houston lineup, long-shots might have to do. And it almost worked! Peralta got into early trouble, giving up a run in that fateful third inning, but he soldiered on for 40 pitches, tying a season high, and two-plus innings. Loáisiga came in to clean up after Peralta walked Yordan Alvarez to lead off the fifth, and held Houston off in the fifth and sixth.

In the meantime, the Yankees bats got to work. Aaron Judge had an off night, but Bader and Rizzo picked him up. In the fourth, Bader singled and advanced to second on a passed ball before Rizzo drove him home. That tied the game at four. Lance McCullers Jr., perhaps still suffering from champagne elbow, lasted five innings but gave up four runs, done in by that pesky Bader/Rizzo combination.

Bader wasn’t done. In the bottom of the sixth, after another clean sheet by the New York bullpen, he ambushed a Héctor Neris sinker and deposited it in the left field seats. All of the sudden it was 5-4 Yankees. Were we all wrong to assume we knew how the last chapter of this book went?

As it turns out, we were not. The Astros, as they’ve done in every game this postseason, eked out more runs. Rallies aren’t always pretty, even for good teams. Tonight was a great example of that, as the Astros struggled mightily against Loáisiga but still broke through.

Altuve started the rally in seventh with a broken bat infield single, beating Loáisiga to the first base bag by millimeters. Peña followed with what could have been a disaster, a four-hopper to second base that could maybe, just maybe, turn into two outs if the Yankees hurried. Torres gambled, feeding an off-balance shovel to the front of the second base bag, in position for a charging Isiah Kiner-Falefa to turn two. Kiner-Falefa gambled, taking a direct route to the back of the bag so that he could pull off one of those nifty tag-shuffle-fire pivots for maximum muscle behind his throw to first.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, second base doesn’t exist in a quantum superposition where the front and back of the bag are somehow in the same location. Torres’ feed eluded a lunging Kiner-Falefa and trickled harmlessly through the infield dirt. What could have been two quick outs instead became first and second with only one away.

It felt like a spell had been lifted from the Astros, like this was bound to happen as soon as any Yankee faltered. Alvarez pummeled a groundball single, 109 mph off the bat, to score Altuve and then tie the game on the very next pitch Loáisiga threw. Alex Bregman flicked a 2-2 sinker into right field to plate Peña, this time against Holmes, who entered after that game-tying single. In the blink of an eye, the Astros led again, inevitably.

While the Yankees had to cobble together bullpen innings, the Astros showed off their own strategy: just build the entire bullpen out of closers. Neris (regular season ERA/FIP: 3.72/2.35) gave up the aforementioned home run to Bader in an otherwise clean sixth inning. Bryan Abreu (1.94/2.12) threw a scoreless seventh. Rafael Montero (2.37/2.64) pitched a perfect eighth. That left Ryan Pressly (2.98/2.31) to pitch the ninth, against the Yankees’ most dangerous hitter – and also Aaron Judge.

After summarily dispatching Jose Trevino, Pressly treated Bader with caution. He attacked him with secondaries, mostly out of the zone. In a 2-1 count, Bader went after a front-door slider and pounded it towards first base. For a moment, it looked like he might have a single. Yuli Gurriel had to make a tough play on the ball, and Pressly was slow off the mound. But Gurriel beat Bader to the bag himself. That was the only brief ray of hope; Judge tapped back to the mound on a nasty slider to close the book on the inning, the game, and the ALCS.

The Astros aren’t actually inevitable. Nothing about baseball is inevitable. The other guy lives in a big house too; if any number of breaks had gone differently, we might be looking at a different series. Judge hit a ball roughly two feet short of clearing the fence in Game 2 in Houston; Torres missed Kiner-Falefa’s glove by inches in the seventh inning tonight. Anyone who tells you that those two things were bound to happen is lying.

Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this was always going to happen. The Astros are in the World Series again, just like always. They knocked off the Yankees to do it, just like always. They’re doing it on both sides of the ball, just like always. Next comes the good part: seeing what happens when the mighty Astros meet the plucky Phillies. Nothing is written in advance – well, except the first paragraph of this article, which I wrote on Saturday. Some outcomes you can just see coming, even if you don’t know it for sure.