The Absurdity and Insanity of Game 5 and of the Astros

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.

MLB seems to be promoting some of this offense, intentionally or not, by way of a ball that possesses less air resistance and travels further, a ball that debuted in the middle of 2015 and might have become juicier still. And in the World Series, it’s a ball that doesn’t just have lower seams but which pitchers say is also slick to the touch and affecting their sliders. While the World Series pitch-movement data amounts only to a small sample and is perhaps inconclusive, it nevertheless features an awful lot of missed locations and hard-hit balls.

Records are meant to be broken, it is said. Perhaps not quite at this pace, though.

Twenty-two home runs have been hit in the series, a mark that has already surpassed the previous record of 21, set during a seven-game series back in 2002. The 2002 Series was the only in history with more than 17 home runs hit. And we still have at least one game to play in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Fourteen different players have homered, also a record. And Sunday’s Game 5, exceeding five hours, was the second longest in World Series history by total minutes played. It’s hard to fathom now that, way back in 2014, we were writing and discussing a depressed run-scoring environment. That’s no longer a problem.

And whether or not they’ve purposely arranged for a different sort of ball, there are reasons to think home runs might remain ubiquitous for a while. First of all, the league might very well appreciate all these home runs. Moreover, a number of hitters have altered their approaches in recently years; many more could follow. That cannot change so easily. Those adjustments are probably more permanent. Talk of swing planes and launch angle and exit velocity isn’t going away. Even if a ball is juiced, it still must be hit in the air to do damage. And more hitters are launching more balls with authority.

Many of the Astros and many of the Dodgers hitters have changed the way they approach their craft. And for a number of reasons — including the Astros’ 13-12 extra-innings, walk-off victory last night and my own personal time constraints (I was forced to write this piece before an 8 a.m. flight on Monday) — I am going to focus on the Astros.

The Astros hit five home runs. In a game a started by Clayton Kershaw and finished by Kenley Jansen, that’s remarkable. What’s not just remarkable but also improbable, is that Houston batters swung and missed just 13 times in the process — against 194 pitches faced. So while a lot of talk is going to focus on a juiced and perhaps slipperier ball, let’s also give the Astros some credit. It’s this blend of power and contact that’s allowed the club to field one of the great offenses of all time, trailing only the 1927, 1930 ,and 1931 Yankees in wRC+ (121).

“Look, how do I describe it? I don’t know,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch. “They’re pretty awesome when they get going together. We talked about tandem ABs and putting one at-bat after another. We’re relentless when we’re good. There were some pretty good at-bats at the bottom of the order, too.”

Let’s first consider the home runs.

The Dodgers hadn’t lost a game when leading by four runs this season, but Yulieski Gurriel’s three-run shot brought the team back from a 4-0 deficit.

It also sent Kershaw into a state of disbelief.

The Narrative lives.

Kershaw had begun to rewrite/dismantle The Narrative this October, the one that suggested he could not pitch effectively in the postseason. He entered Sunday, through four starts, holding opponents to a .174/.220/.419 slash line. But he’d had, like so many pitchers, trouble with the home run.

Gurriel’s shot was the eighth Kershaw allowed this postseason in 28 innings. And all the pitch locations have been middle-in to right-handed hitters. Perhaps Kershaw should have stayed away from that location with the Crawford boxes looming. Kershaw said Saturday he wasn’t going to have the unusual park dimensions influence his plan off the mound. The pitch location of the home runs allowed by Kershaw this postseason:

“He was rolling,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He was throwing the ball well, good rhythm. And I don’t know, I think that the Gurriel pitch… took a good swing on a pitch and kind of was just left out over. Other guys, Correa, hit a slider that was down; it was in off the plate. And those guys competed. They kept grinding and got the big hit when they needed.”

But the narrative perhaps shouldn’t be that Kershaw cannot pitch well in the postseason. Perhaps it’s that just about no one can pitch well in this postseason, in this environment, particularly this World Series given the quality of the offenses (and maybe the quality of the ball).

When we think about the game’s remarkable power surge, Jose Altuve is a person of interest, a player who’s transformed from a curiosity and elite contact hitter to a flat-out slugging star.

Like so many hitters, Altuve is no longer just trying to make contact. He’s not afraid to strikeout, though he’s still not doing much of that.

Now he’s swinging out of his shoes:

If the game’s smallest player can launch and slug, who can’t?

George Springer is the reverse Altuve, a player who’s always possessed plus power but who has made dramatic contact gains. He’s now a complete hitter. But he still does makes the greatest impact doing this:

That was shades off Pujols-Lidge. Springer’s shot appeared to ignite a small ammunition dump atop the train tracks at Minute Maid Park.

Exit velo: 112 mph. Launch angle: 27 degrees: Distance: Union Station.

Presumably motivated by a combination of humiliation and disgust, Brandon Morrow refused to track the flight of the ball, instead just staring indignantly in the direction of first base.

The ballpark did gift some home runs during the series, including this homer from Carlos Correa that had a launch of 48 degrees — 48 is almost always fly out — and nearly scraped the surface of the closed roof. It was a roof that again trapped sound to help produce rock-concert-like decibels enhance home-field advantage.

Morrow’s focus was trained on the left fielder, whom he must have assumed would catch the ball. But, alas, the Crawford Boxes. While some cited that homer as evidence of a juiced ball, it was more a product of the park, as the fly ball went 169 feet up and 328 feet out and is a fly out in about any other stadium.

Brian McCann also homered, which proved to be more than insurance, but I’ve reached GIF fatigue.

While the Astros put on a home-run derby exhibition, the decisive hit did not leave the park, of course: it was Alex Bregman’s walk-off single against Jansen. And in this power- and strikeout-laden game in 2017, it was a ball in play that won the day. And I’d like to focus on that for a moment.

“This is the best offensive ballclub that we were going to see all year,” Roberts said. “And they can slug you. They spoil pitches. They’re athletic. And credit to them. But our guys did the same thing. They just got the hit when they needed.”

It is power and contact that has made the Astros so remarkable in this age of velocity and strikeouts, which many, including this author, have detailed.

The Astors improved from 28th in zone contact last year (83.6%) to first this season (88.8%). They trimmed their strikeout rate by 6.1 percentage points, from 23.4% last season to 17.3% this one, the lowest mark in baseball. The next-best strikeout reduction this season was that of the Indians (-1.7 points).

Said Astros GM Jeffrey Luhnow of the approach to Tyler Kepner of the New York Times earlier this summer:

“Power’s exciting, power sells tickets and power wins games, at times,” Luhnow said. “But power usually comes at the expense of rally-killing strikeouts in other instances. It’s not a satisfying brand of baseball, and I don’t think it’s a winning brand of baseball, necessarily, to have 30-home run hitters with 200 strikeouts a year.

The Astros added that contact ability without sacrificing power. Said Astros hitting coach Dave Hudgens to the NYT: “I don’t want guys swinging at a pitch unless they can hit a homer.”

As wild as Game 5 was, as slippery and juiced as the ball might be, let’s appreciate how efficient, how powerful, this Astros’ lineup is. It’s historically good and it helped pave the way for an absurd and entertaining Sunday night.

And if the Astros can improve like this — launch for more power while making more contact — others are going to try. In a game started by two Cy Young Award winners on Sunday, 25 runs were scored, seven home runs were hit. This World Series has been a microcosm of the extremes sweeping the game. The Astros are out in front of some trends, which is in part why they’re a game away from a World Series title. But what happens when the rest of the game tries to catch up? The game has never been more extreme and maybe it will only become more extreme.