My immediate thought
when I realized it was pretty much over, that the Astros dream for a repeat was
dead, and Boston was probably going to walk to a 4th title in 15
years, was that now I remembered how cruel October could be. How rarely the
best team wins.
That’s not totally
fair. Boston is the better team. Even if some advanced metrics saw Houston’s
103-wins as more impressive than Boston’s 108-wins, the Red Sox were better,
they were healthier, and they played better. But it is so close. It is so, so
close.
The Astros actually
hit better in the series, with a better OBP and equivalent slugging. The Red
Sox, though, clustered 3-4 hits together in the same inning a few more times.
The Astros got 1-2 hits in many innings, but never the big hit to break things
open. The Red Sox scored a bunch of runs with two outs in an inning. The Astros
hit a bunch of line drives with two outs in innings that found Boston’s gloves.
The Astros got unlucky
on the Altuve fan interference call. The Red Sox got lucky when JBJ’s hit off
the monster rolled on tarp for a few extra seconds allowing all three runners
to score – the last of which was the difference in Game 2.
Boston did not get
lucky, they were better. They are a great team, one that pounded every mistake,
that got huge at-bats from the bottom of their lineup, that patiently extracted
all the life out of the Astros record-setting pitching staff. But the Astros
didn’t get lucky either.
The margins are so
close. The same margins that made the Giants a team that won Three World Series
in five years, the same margins that have the Dodgers potentially going 0-6 in
World Series Titles despite winning the division six straight years.
It’s a nice bit of
comforting irony that in a vacuum, the 2018 ALCS saw the Astros as chokers,
losing all three games at home despite coming to Houston with the advantage,
failing to score runs against David Price on short rest with their season on
the line, giving up oodles of runs with what was the best pitching staff
baseball has seen in a long time. Of course, it’s hard to call them chokers
when those same players won the World Series the season before, including
winning Game 7 on the road.
The ‘moneyball and
fancy-stats don’t work’ arguments would be in full force today if not for that
little fact, that this team won the World Series last year, beating a team
about as good as the 2018 Red Sox in the World Series, beating them in Game 7
in their building. That team that was so clutch last year, coming back
time-and-time again, couldn’t do anything this time around.
The memories of 2017
will never go away, a wild, wild ride that involved them playing some skittish
baseball to beat New York, and then inspiring baseball to beat LA. I’ll relive
the magic of Game 5 a million times. It won’t negate the empty feeling of 2018,
where a dynasty that could have been was not. But it sure helps to know that at
least one year the Astros did beat the odds.
Of course, it helps to
know they’ll be very good in 2019. That Correa should be healthy for a full
season, not a shell of himself for three months due to a gimpy back. That maybe
Altuve won’t be hampered in the playoffs. That they have the best pitching prospect
in baseball in Forrest Whitley who should be ready to contribute; same with
Kyle Tucker on the other side. But of course, they aren’t without questions as
well, be it the older players in the lineup that went from great in 2017, to
average in 2018, to either worse-than-average or gone in 2019, to counting on
the continuing brilliance of Verlander and the sustained excellence of Morton,
to getting another great year from the bullpen. So many things could go wrong,
but maybe they won’t.
One of the many reasons
I love baseball is that because the playoffs are so random, the line between
winning and losing is so small, that people don’t get all ‘The Ringz’ crazy
about baseball. We normally don’t judge players purely on their postseason
performance. We accept Mike Trout is the best player in baseball despite his
team’s struggles even getting to the postseason.
But despite that, it
still hurts to lose in the playoffs, to see 162-games of so much done away by
so little. For baseball to run away and hide for the winter, cruelly going away when we need it most, when the nights get shorter and the air crisper. But of course, on the other end of that dark, cold, winter, is the promise of Spring in February, and pitchers and catchers reporting, and us getting to do this all over again.
