Juan Soto has three RBI as Nationals take Game 1 on the road.
Astros starter’s 19-game winning streak comes to end
HOUSTON — Juan Soto and the Nationals quickly derailed the Cole Express.
A 20-year-old prodigy with a passion for the big moment, Soto drove in three runs with a home run in the fourth inning and a two-run double in the fifth as the Nationals tagged Gerrit Cole and the Astros 5-4 in the World Series opener Tuesday.
‘‘After the first at-bat, I just said, ‘It’s another baseball game,’ ’’ Soto said. ‘‘In the first at-bat, I’m not going to lie: I was a little bit shaking in my legs.’’
Not even a history-making homer by the Astros’ George Springer — and another drive that nearly tied the score in the eighth — could deter the Nationals.
Ryan Zimmerman, still full of sock at 35, also homered to back a resourceful Max Scherzer and boost the Nationals in their first World Series appearance. The franchise began as the Montreal Expos in 1969.
‘‘They waited a long time,’’ Nationals manager Dave Martinez said.
Otherworldly almost all season, Cole looked downright ordinary. Trea Turner singled on the second pitch of the game, and the Nationals ended Cole’s 19-game winning streak that stretched back 25 starts to May.
‘‘I didn’t have my A-game tonight,’’ said Cole, who yielded five runs and seven hits in seven innings.
It wasn’t what Cole or anyone else at Minute Maid Park expected, especially after he led the majors in strikeouts, topped the American League in ERA and finished second in the majors in victories to teammate Justin Verlander during the regular season.
It was a further testament to an eternal truth about baseball: It doesn’t matter what you do the whole season if you don’t get it done in October.
‘‘I think he’s been so good for so long that there builds this thought of invincibility and that it’s impossible to beat him,’’ Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. ‘‘So when it happens, it is a surprise to all of us because we’ve watched for months this guy completely dominate the opposition.’’
Soto finished with three hits and a stolen base. Three days shy of his 21st birthday, the wunderkind also snared Michael Brantley’s bid for a tying hit in the eighth.
After homering in the last four games of the Astros’ World Series victory against the Dodgers in 2017, Springer set a major-league record by connecting in his fifth Series game in a row to pull the Astros to 5-3 in the seventh. But reliever Daniel Hudson threw a fastball past rookie Yordan Alvarez with the bases loaded to end the inning.
In the eighth, Springer put a charge into a drive to deep right-center, and it appeared as though he might have hit a tying two-run homer. Springer took a couple of hops out of the batter’s box to watch but had to settle for an RBI double when the ball glanced off the glove of a leaping Adam Eaton at the fence.