GREINKE DOES TRICK FOR ASTROS
Pitcher bails Houston out of several jams as teams combine to strand 22 baserunners
The Washington Nationals came into Friday night on an eightgame playoff heater, they were playing the first World Series game in the District of Columbia since 1933, and their starting pitcher had a 0.71 ERA in the post-season. The Houston Astros countered with a starter sporting a 6.43 ERA in the playoffs. But, baseball. Houston’s Zack Greinke was spotty but ultimately effective, holding the Nationals to one run in almost five innings of work. He allowed seven hits and three walks, but had six strikeouts, several of them bailing him out of jams. Anibal Sanchez couldn’t quite do the same on the mound for Washington, surrendering four runs in five-plus innings of work.
The 4-1 Houston win was their first of the series. Instead of a Game 4 on Saturday with a daunting 3-0 deficit, the Astros have a chance to even the series, and guarantee themselves at least one more home date with another win.
The Astros got the key hits that the Nationals did not in Game 3, a mirror image of Game 2, when Washington piled up a bunch of rollers and little darts that blew open a tight game in the late innings. On Friday, it was Houston’s Josh Reddick who blooped a single into shallow left to plate the game’s first run, and then Michael Brantley hit a sharp comebacker that Sanchez couldn’t quite handle for the second run. Brantley drove in another run with a roller through the right side of the infield. These were just the breaks that a wobbling Astros team needed.
The Nationals, meanwhile, couldn’t bring home an Anthony Rendon double in the first, and hit into a double play with two men on in the second. In the third, they had the bases loaded but Asdrubal Cabrera struck out to allow Greinke to escape unscathed, again.
The teams combined to leave 22 runners on base in a slog of a game that lasted more than four hours.
Patrick Corbin is scheduled to start Game 4 on Saturday night for Washington. The Astros are expected to use a bevy of relievers.
Nationals starter Sanchez was asked this week to evaluate the Spanish of his manager, Dave Martinez, a native New Yorker. He said that Martinez was better at Spanish than Sanchez was at English. So, Martinez was asked before Game 3 how he picked up the language.
Martinez, whose parents are Puerto Rican, said he understood Spanish a bit from speaking with his grandmother as a child, but only the basics.
He was drafted as an 18-yearold by the Chicago Cubs and assigned to play winter-league ball in Puerto Rico. He was considered a native player, and when he met with reporters who asked him questions in Spanish, he answered in English.
“They were not very happy,” Martinez said, giving the “not” some emphasis. “As a matter of fact, I got a six-foot piece of barbed wire thrown at me in my first game I played. So I took it upon myself after that to learn.”
Martinez insisted to his Latin teammates that they force him to speak to them only in Spanish, and he said he did the same thing to his grandmother. No lessons, but just learning by osmosis.
George Springer did not homer for the Houston Astros in Game 2 of the World Series, which was unusual. The outfielder had gone yard in five straight Series appearances, dating to Houston’s win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2017. The fifth of those homers broke a record he shared with some decent company: Lou Gehrig and Reggie Jackson.
“I mean, obviously those are two of the most historic names in the game. Iconic names,” Springer said on Friday. “It’s great to be among them. It’s great to be in company like that. But at the end of the day, like I’ve said, I’d much rather win.”
Springer, Houston’s leadoff man, is piling up homer-related marks: his 12 home runs in the playoffs are the most by a leadoff hitter, and the 42 he has hit this season, between regular season and playoffs, are the most ever by a leadoff man in a single season. He broke the record of 40, set in 2017 by … George Springer.
If you have just started watching the baseball playoffs, you might be confused as to why so many people at Nationals Park are wearing shark costumes. It’s a Baby Shark thing, which began in the summer when utility man Gerardo Parra, battling a long slump, changed his walk-up music to Baby Shark, the earworm of a song that was popular with his young children. He started hitting, and given baseball’s attitude toward superstitions, he kept it.
The Nationals now make shark-bite signals with their hands when they reach base, and the whole home stadium is basically desperate for a Parra plate appearance so they can go nuts with the song.
“It’s blown up pretty big.
Everyone seems to be doing it,” said Washington pitcher Patrick Corbin, who is scheduled to start Game 4. “People are wearing shark outfits. It’s like Halloween out there. It’s great.”
Corbin said that Parra has added an element of goofiness to a team that has struggled in the post-season in all of its previous trips.
“I’ve gotten to play with Parra before, and having him back here I knew he’d be an energy boost and somebody that would have fun,” Corbin said.
More than once, Parra has been caught giving the normally stoic Stephen Strasburg an extra-long hug in the dugout. Strasburg is 4-0 in the playoffs with 40 strikeouts and two walks in 28 innings. Hug more often, everyone.
The Toronto Blue Jays announced a perplexing change to their training staff on Friday, with head trainer Nikki Huffman leaving the team.
“Over the past four years, Nikki has contributed significantly to our evolution of providing cutting edge training and care to our players,” general manager Ross Atkins said in a statement released by the team.
Huffman joined the Jays from Duke University in 2015 to head a new high-performance department, and became head trainer two years later when the organization split with longtime trainer George Poulis. Some players have clashed with the high-performance staff, most notably Josh Donaldson, whose final months with the Blue Jays were injury-plagued.
Marcus Stroman, the former Blue Jay who worked with Huffman at Duke and in Toronto, tweeted on Friday that he was excited to have Huffman “back in my circle.”
Minutes earlier, he had tweeted “Sometimes you need to remove your people from toxicity in order to see them prosper.” Perhaps that’s just a coincidence.