HOUSTON — Game 5 resided at an extreme pole along the baseball entertainment spectrum. It’s not a game you want to experience every night, but it’s something about which we’ll be talking and of which we’ll be trying to make sense for a while. At least until Game 6.

That said, the aesthetic appeal of the game can certainly be debated: the way fly balls were leaving Minute Maid Park gave the night something of a College World Series feel during its peak-offense period. If you recall, that was an environment that forced the college game to make adjustments to its bats and balls to suppress run scoring, to provide sanity.

One of the overriding themes of the sport this season is the speed at which it has changed, how extreme it has become so quickly. The game continues to evolve even in the postseason, where the average launch angle is 11.9 degrees — up a fraction of a degree from the 11.8 mark during this year’s regular season and 10.8 degrees in 2015 regular season. The average air ball is traveling 291 feet, up from 287 feet in the regular season.

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For most of this postseason, the primary story tying all these disparate series together has been the significant change in the way pitchers are deployed. After Andrew Miller’s dominance last October, aggressive bullpen usage has become the norm. The tone was set in the very first Wild Card game, when Luis Severino got one out but the Yankees advanced anyway, thanks to 8.2 dominant innings from their relief corps.

But now, here we are at the end of the month, and the two bullpens left standing combined to give up 15 runs last night. To be fair, the two starters combined to give up 10 runs, so they didn’t exactly impress either, but neither bullpen had any ability to hold any kind of lead last night. And the players entrusted with those opportunities just looked exhausted.

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I don’t know exactly what it is we just watched. From almost the very first pitch, Game 5 was unrelenting, and it didn’t let up for five hours and seventeen minutes. Even now, I’m afraid it might not be finished — if I turn the feed back on, the Astros and Dodgers might be in the 81st inning. It doesn’t feel right that the game is completed. It also very much needed to end, because it was becoming a matter of survival. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

I’m still not entirely sure that was a good baseball game, in one sense of the word. It was driven by homers, some of them silly, and I wouldn’t call the pitching quite sharp. Each of the bullpens was an absolute nightmare, after the starters threw a combined 8.1 innings, and the overall aesthetics left something to be desired. It wasn’t a game marked by its crispness. The only thing that stopped it from being the longest-ever nine-inning baseball game is that it had to progress to the tenth. The allotted nine innings weren’t enough. They should’ve been enough.

But they weren’t enough, and for that reason, and for so many others, that was a good baseball game, in the other and more obvious sense of the word. Every baseball game asks two things: that you play, and that you play to the end. Every game has a winner, and every game has a loser, and as with any such competition, the drama’s a product of probability swings. Game 5 had more than almost any other World Series game on record. On several occasions, it seemed like it was over. The winning run scored on the game’s final pitch, which was pitch number 417. Hopes were dashed, over and over and over again, as the World Series went completely off-script. That was a contest that spiraled out of control.

As with Game 2, it’s an impossible assignment to do the game justice through writing. We are mostly just fortunate that this series has been so evenly matched. But Alex Bregman won it with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. Here are the times the game seemed over before that.

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Source: FanGraphs

One of the most insane baseball games anyone has ever seen. We will have attempts at analysis later. Now, just amazement.

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HOUSTON — The investigative team of Ben Lindbergh, Rob Arthur and Alan Nathan might have to get back to work. Not only has the ball played differently since 2015 when it became livelier, now the World Series ball is playing differently players told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci.

“Lance McCullers took the blindfold test in the bullpen,” said Charlie Morton, Houston’s Game 4 starter, referring to another Astros pitcher. “He could tell which ball was which with his eyes closed. It’s that different.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the top of the fifth inning of Saturday’s Game 4, Cody Bellinger faced Charlie Morton and struck out. This was nothing too terribly weird — for a good long while, Morton was dominant, and the Dodgers could hardly muster a threat. Bellinger was just another hitter put away. Yet the strikeout meant Bellinger was 0-for-13 in the World Series, with eight whiffs. It’s true that, in circumstances like these, people can make far too much of small-sample underperformance. It’s also true that, in circumstances like these, players can get into their own heads. Bellinger has never played under any greater pressure. It almost wouldn’t be possible.

In the top of the seventh inning, Bellinger drilled a one-out double, and he scored the tying run on Logan Forsythe’s two-out single. Later, in the top of the ninth inning, Bellinger drilled a tie-breaking double, scoring Corey Seager with nobody out. The inning got only larger from there, and the Dodgers knotted the series. If Bellinger didn’t have the team’s two biggest hits, he had two of the top three or four.

But let’s quickly go back to the strikeout. The count was 1-and-2, and Morton came after Bellinger with an inside breaking ball. Bellinger attempted a mighty swing.

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Following the final game of the regular season, Jose Altuve told a small group of reporters that once October rolls around, “everybody starts with zero wins and zero losses, and everybody’s average is zero.”

Nearly a month later, the Astros are even-steven with the Dodgers in the World Series and Altuve’s average (.322) is farther above zero than anyone’s in the postseason (minimum 20 at bats). That’s hardly a surprise. The 27-year-old second baseman captured his third American League batting title this year, hitting a career high .346. He doesn’t consider it his biggest personal accomplishment to date.

“That would be the Silver Slugger,” Altuve told the scribes, citing an honor he was awarded last year. “With the batting title, they only care if you hit .300/.320, but the Silver Slugger is all around — doubles, triples, home runs — and I’m 5’ 5” and 160 pounds.”

His numbers have been anything but Lilliputian. Over the past four seasons, the Venezuelan spark plug has a .334/.384/.496 slash line and 254 extra-base hits. And while he leads MLB in one-base hits over that same period, it’s not as though singles are a bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »

HOUSTON — The power of the role of the manager has diminished as more authority is concentrated in the front office. But the manager position is a significant one and never more important than on the World Series stage. Managers can win and lose games. And it was decision-making in Game 4 that was particularly fascinating in the Dodgers’ 6-2 win to even the series Saturday.

Game 4 was about a lot of things. Cody Bellinger ended his three-game slump. Joc Pederson warranted his placement on the postseason roster, and the evening was also a game about human and managerial decision-making. Read the rest of this entry »

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