ASTROS REFLECT: ‘WE RAN OUT OF WINS’
Best team in franchise history proves not to be the most successful one
Judging either by statistics or by the oldfashioned eyeball test, the 2018 Astros indeed may have been better than the 2017 team that won the franchise’s first World Series championship.
But in the crucible of October, the team that lost four in a row to the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series looked less like the buzzsaw that posted 21 wins during September and more like the crew that trudged through July and August at four games above .500.
The Red Sox, of course, had a lot to do with the outcome. From their ability to seize the course of the game with early runs through their gift for key defensive plays and the indefinable timing of capitalizing on almost every missed Astros opportunity with a successful counter, the Boston team that has thus far won 115 games this year looks a lot like last year’s champions.
“When you get two evenly matched teams up against each other, there’s going to be swings in momentum and big at-bats and a little bit of luck, a little bit of bad luck,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. “And they outplayed us. They did a really good job of having an excellent game plan and executing it. … We ran out of wins.”
Although a 4-1 series win smacks of dominance, especially with the Red Sox running off four wins in a row after losing the opener at Fenway Park, the margin between the teams at times was as thin as the space between the ball that Boston’s Mitch Moreland banged off the left-field scoreboard during the sixth inning of Game 5 and the glove of the Astros’ Tony Kemp,
who two days earlier made a leaping catch on a drive by Steve Pearce to stem a Boston rally in Game 3.
“That one,” Kemp said, referring to Moreland’s hit, “was a little higher. I didn’t think I was going to get it. But I gave it my best effort.”
With George Springer, Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve at the top of the lineup, the 2017-18 Astros have seized the initiative more often than not. In this series, Boston scored twice in the first inning of Games 2, 3 and 4 to ramp up the stress on Houston’s starters, and only in Game 4 did the Astros take a lead into the middle innings.
Be it a result of Boston’s patience at the plate or the rigors of a long season, the best starting staff in Major League Baseball through the AL Division Series was not the game’s best for one week in October.
“Gerrit Cole (in Game 2), he didn’t feel great,” Hinch said. “Charlie Morton (in Game 4) to come back, just to throw 35 pitches for this team. And all he talked about (Thursday) was how he let that group down, and he didn’t.”
Betts plays a key role
Despite running off a team-record 103 wins, the Astros came up empty in similar fashion during the regular season.
During their struggles in July and August, they lost four in a row to the Seattle Mariners from Aug. 9-12 and three to the Texas Rangers from July 27-29. In each case save one, opponents won by getting to the Astros starters early in much the same fashion as the Red Sox this week.
In most cases, Red Sox leadoff hitter Mookie Betts played a role, with a double and run scored in Game 2, a hit and run scored in Game 3 and a hit by pitch and run scored in Game 4. Only in Game 5 did Betts fail to reach base as the leadoff man.
The rest of the order was relentless as well.
Game 2 turned Boston’s way on Jackie Bradley Jr.’s bases-loaded double off Cole in the third, followed by single runs in the seventh and the ninth off the Astros’ bullpen. The Astros’ offense, meanwhile, was held to two hits by five Boston relievers after taking a 4-2 lead in the third.
Game 3 was defined by the failures of the Astros’ bullpen, which surrendered five runs and five of Boston’s nine hits, and three innings of one-hit work by the Red Sox in relief of starter Nathan Eovaldi.
Game 4’s move by Hinch of switching Alex Bregman into the leadoff spot revived the rest of the Astros’ lineup — only the eighth spot in the lineup failed to produce a hit although Bregman was held hitless in his new slot.
But the game also featured the moment that will leave the Astros grinding their teeth in perpetuity — umpire Joe West’s call of fan interference to wipe out a first-inning home run by Altuve.
Other key moments were two sparkling defensive plays by the Red Sox — Betts’ eighth-inning throw from right field to get Kemp trying to stretch a base hit into a double, and left fielder Andrew Benintendi’s diving catch against Bregman to end the game — and a tough catch that Springer was unable to make in the sixth, followed by Bradley’s two-run homer that gave Boston a lead it never relinquished.
And while the Crawford Boxes got Justin Verlander in Game 5, particularly on Rafael Devers’ first-row, three-run homer in the sixth, the long-delayed playoff redemption of Red Sox starter David Price played a key role from the vantage of Kemp, who had a close-up look on both fronts.
Based on his knowledge of Minute Maid’s left-field flight patterns, Kemp said of Devers’ ball, “Once it got halfway there, I knew it was gone. No one else knew except me. But, yeah, I knew the ball was gone.”
As for Price, he said, “(Carlos) Correa came up to me and said it was the best changeup we had ever faced from him. Usually, it’s in the dirt or out of the zone, but today he had a four-pitch mix and did a good job.”
Staff, lineup struggle at end
And so it ends: The best regular-season pitching staff from April through September couldn’t maintain the pace in October, and it got limited help at key points from an offense that once again struggled at times at home.
For Boston, meanwhile, MLB’s best offense during the regular season was good enough and patient enough — mixing 20 walks and four hit batters with 11 extrabase hits — to prevail.
Instead of a period for primetime drama and postseason parades, late October and November in Houston will be a time for reflection, recuperation, surgery for some, free-agency decisions for others, as the best team in Astros history — but not the most successful — retreats from view, proud for what it accomplished, regretful for what it did not.
“For us to do what we did this year was special,” said Dallas Keuchel, a survivor of the worst times in Astros history, a bulwark in moments of triumph and now, a free agent. “To be a part of something like this for a full 162 is the best feeling in the world.”