Passan: Are the Astros inevitable? Inside their pursuit of perfection
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Jeff PassanESPN
NEW YORK — There’s a hardness to this Houston Astros team, one honed by years hearing every insult imaginable, existing as flypaper for vitriol, living a life of perpetual villainy. It’s something that, by now, everyone who wears the uniform understands won’t wane, because the narratives that surround them are more stone carvings than pencil drawings. For all their magnificence, all the brilliant baseball they’ve played in their first seven games this postseason, the Astros, to those outside the Houston metropolitan area, won’t ever be anything other than the worst version of themselves.
Even with a mostly turned-over roster, that will not change. And accepting that — not embracing it but bearing it — has taken this exceptional group of baseball players and supercharged it. The Astros are going back to the World Series for the fourth time in six years. They finished an American League Championship Series sweep of the New York Yankees on Sunday night with a 6-5 victory that booked a date Friday in Houston for Game 1 against the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies.
That they did it by erasing a pair of deficits and scratching out another one-run victory — their fourth in seven games during this undefeated postseason sojourn — fit this team. The Astros have done what any group abiding the weight of its own misdeeds might: absorbed the negativity, internalized it and converted it into fuel. For some, it propelled growth, for others anger. For everyone, it’s something.
“The scorn that we take — this team is mentally strong,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said. “Sometimes when you go through adversity, it makes you stronger.”
Make no mistake, this Houston team is strong — mentally, physically, emotionally. It succeeds in spite of its failures and because of them. One can accept that the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme during the 2017 season sullied their World Series victory while acknowledging that what they’re doing in 2022 — placing themselves on the verge of an all-time postseason run — is wondrous, cognitive dissonance be damned.
Just look at the scores of their seven wins: 8-7, 4-2 and 1-0 in the division series against Seattle, followed by 4-2, 3-2, 5-0 and 6-5 against the Yankees. Six of the seven games taut, tight, capable of going sideways at any moment. But none did. The Astros defused bomb after bomb, stared down situations tense and intense, and emerged on the better end each time. And now they find themselves in rare company, alongside the 1976 Cincinnati Reds and 2007 Colorado Rockies, who went 7-0 out of the gate in the playoffs, and one win shy of the 2014 Kansas City Royals‘ record of eight straight wins to start a postseason.
The red-hot Phillies, fully embracing the team-of-destiny rhetoric that rightly accompanies a group that rode a No. 6 seed to the World Series, are all that stand between the Astros and perfection. That an unbeaten postseason is even a possibility in an October that saw the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 101-win Atlanta Braves and New York Mets teams bow out in their first series reinforces the aberrant nature of Houston’s run.
“Today was really the first time I thought about it,” said Lance McCullers Jr., the Astros’ Game 4 starter and one of just five players left from the 2017 team. “I saw a lot of people making a big deal about an undefeated postseason. It really hadn’t hit me. I mean, baseball is so hard. These teams are so good. Like, Seattle, I said it the other day: I don’t think anyone else could beat Seattle. They were playing unbelievable. We come here [to New York] — once again, close games. We just scratch and claw and find a way.”
Since baseball’s postseason expanded in 1969, only the Big Red Machine have run through a postseason blemish-free, back in ’76. In the wild-card era, the closest to flawless were the 2005 Chicago White Sox and 1999 Yankees, who went 11-1. An 11-0 mark remains a moonshot for the Astros, too, with the Phillies primed to start Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler in Games 1 and 2 and left-hander Jose Alvarado and right-hander Seranthony Dominguez getting four needed days of rest and a Bryce Harper-led lineup carving pitching staffs for the better part of a month.
But it’s by no means out of the realm of possibility. In seven games, Astros pitchers have held opponents to a .178/.248/.291 line — essentially turning a pair of playoff teams’ lineups into nine hitters who would be demoted to Triple-A for ineptitude. In 33 innings, Astros relievers have allowed two runs — a 0.55 ERA — on 14 hits and 10 walks while striking out 42. Their everyday players have committed just one error, and a borderline one at that, on a bad-hop, in-the-hole backhand from Jose Altuve that precipitated an offline throw. And they’ve managed to score enough to win, despite Altuve’s offensive disappearance and, in the ALCS, New York keeping Yordan Alvarez in check.
Near perfection with room for improvement is a frightening combination, and yet that’s where these Astros are: in their fourth Fall Classic in six years.
“Baseball is wild,” McCullers said. “The reason you don’t see a lot of teams going to so many postseasons, so many league championships, so many World Series is the game isn’t played on paper. The best teams don’t make it every year. They don’t win every year. And somehow, some way we’ve found ourselves the best team in the American League the last few years. We’ve won the American League championship many times. Now, we’ve gotta try to finish it off.”
They couldn’t in 2019, when they lost in seven games to the Washington Nationals, or in 2021, when Atlanta ambushed them and won a championship in six games. This year, though, they’re determined to — for Baker, who is more than 2,000 wins deep into a managing career that still doesn’t include a championship, and for Michael Brantley, the veteran left fielder missing the postseason following shoulder surgery. They want to do it as the ultimate validation for McCullers’ and Justin Verlander‘s returns from arm surgeries. And they want to do it to put to rest the idea that the only way the Astros win championships is by cheating.
Nobody in the Astros’ dugout was banging on a trash can Sunday, and still, there they were, down 3-0 and without a droplet of sweat on their brow. Rookie shortstop Jeremy Peña, the ALCS MVP, launched a three-run home run to tie the game. Later, trailing 5-4 in the seventh inning, the Astros parlayed an error on a potential double-play ball hit by Peña into a deluge: first an Alvarez RBI to score Altuve, then a go-ahead RBI single by Alex Bregman to plate Peña. At that point, Baker turned to Bryan Abreu, who threw a scoreless inning, followed by Rafael Montero and Ryan Pressly, who continue to overwhelm hitters.
This is an idealized version of the Astros — one better than everyone else at run prevention and plenty good with the bat to make that stinginess stand up. They are an exquisitely constructed unit that marries stars with depth and spits on the vagaries of small-sample baseball that define October. And what those in the opposite dugout or their opponents’ stands think about that simply doesn’t matter to them.
“I mean, it’s not like Tupac. It’s not us against the world, you know?” Baker said — and he said it with conviction, perhaps having convinced himself that really is the case, even when evidence suggests otherwise. Part of his job, as manager, is to write his own narrative, to grab a hammer and chisel and etch the Astros a different kind of history. Houston brought him in during the aftermath of the scandal to help forge a new identity, which was an impossible task, really.
Baker, like everyone in the Astros’ clubhouse, takes the most convenient pieces and parts of the past and leverages them to create a new future. Though these Houston Astros aren’t those Houston Astros, they cannot deny that their past informs their present. It helped make them who they are. And that’s the team that the Yankees and Mariners and everyone else in baseball wants to be.
TAMPA, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays overcame an eight-run deficit to beat the Baltimore Orioles 12-8 on Wednesday night in the largest comeback in the majors this season.
Tampa Bay matched the biggest comeback in franchise history. The Rays also rallied from eight down in a 10-8 victory over the Los Angeles Angels on Aug. 18, 2012, and in a 10-9 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on July 25, 2009.
It tied the Orioles’ largest blown lead over the past 50 seasons. Baltimore last gave away an eight-run lead on April 28, 2017, against the New York Yankees. The Orioles led that game 9-1 entering the bottom of the sixth inning before losing 14-11 in 10 innings.
Baltimore had an eight-run second inning on Wednesday. Colton Cowser smacked a three-run home run, Cedric Mullins added a solo shot, Gunnar Henderson had an RBI single and Ramón Laureano hit a three-run homer.
Tampa Bay’s Christopher Morel hit an RBI double in the third, and Jake Mangum‘s two-run single cut it to 8-3. Curtis Mead hit a two-out triple in the fourth and scored on a Junior Caminero single. Brandon Lowe‘s two-run homer in the fifth made it 8-8. And Jonathan Aranda had a two-run single in the Rays’ four-run seventh.
Lowe has at least a hit and a run in seven consecutive games, the longest active streak of its kind in the majors. He is batting .464 (13-of-28) with two home runs, five RBIs and eight runs during that span.
Caminero had four hits and two RBIs for the Rays.
Entering Wednesday, teams were 0-134 when trailing by eight or more runs at any point this season.
“It’s a tough game,” Orioles manager Tony Mansolino said. “It really hurts. But tomorrow, we’ll have to bounce back and try to figure out how to win a game.”
Three teams came back from eight runs behind last season in the majors. Pittsburgh was the most recent team to rally from more than that, erasing a nine-run deficit in a 13-12 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on Nov. 23, 2023.
ESPN Research and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — The good news for the Yankees on Wednesday was they scored a run after 30 consecutive scoreless innings. The bad news was they again didn’t score enough to win.
The Yankees fell to the Los Angeles Angels 3-2 to extend their season-high losing streak to six games. The Angels will look to complete a four-game sweep Thursday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees, whose lead in the AL East has shrunk to 1½ games, will look to emerge from an offensive funk that has produced seven runs in seven games.
“That’s baseball,” Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge said. “We know what we signed up for. You’re going to play 162. You’re going to hit a little rut like this, but you can’t give up. You can’t mope about it. You just got to show up the next day and you got to be ready to play.”
Jazz Chisholm Jr. ended the Yankees’ scoreless innings streak in the second inning with a moonshot solo home run down the right-field line, giving New York its first run since the ninth inning Saturday against the Boston Red Sox. Two innings later, Cody Bellinger launched another solo shot to give the Yankees their first lead since last Thursday when they defeated the Kansas City Royals 1-0.
But the Yankees mustered only one other hit — a ground ball from Bellinger in the sixth inning that was ruled a single after it bounced off Trent Grisham as he ran to second base for the inning’s second out. Yankees manager Aaron Boone said he believed his team’s at-bats Wednesday were better than they were Tuesday — when he said he noticed his players pressing — and pointed to four walks as progress.
But the Yankees went 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position and are 5-for-48 (.104) with 12 strikeouts, four walks and three RBIs in such situations over their past seven games.
“We just got to break through now like we’re capable of offensively,” Boone said.
Judge, the two-time AL MVP who is a heavy favorite to win a third this season, has gone 1-for-19 with 11 strikeouts, two intentional walks and a home run over the past five games. He went 0-for-4 on Wednesday with two strikeouts, a 94.7 mph groundout and 107.9 mph flyout.
“Guys are pitching, they’re doing their job,” Judge said. “Sometimes we’re faltering on doing our job. But it’s tough to say. I think it just comes down to us not executing, us not doing our job. Maybe a little passive in certain situations. But all we can do is show up tomorrow ready to go.”
The Angels broke through to retake the lead in the eighth inning Wednesday without a hit when, after three walks, shortstop Anthony Volpe mishandled a ground ball on what should’ve been a routine, inning-ending double play. Volpe, a Gold Glove winner in 2023, was charged with his ninth error of the season, the second most among shortstops across the majors.
“Right off the bat, I got to be aggressive, go get the ball, make the play,” Volpe said. “As far as that, that’s all it is. It’s the first read off the bat.”
The lack of execution trickled to the offensive side in the bottom of the inning. The Yankees appeared ready to mount a rally when Jasson Dominguez walked and Oswald Peraza was hit by a pitch to begin the inning. But they were left stranded as Grisham, who was given the green light to swing away with one strike after failing to drop down a bunt, popped out, before Judge flied out and Bellinger popped out to extinguish the threat.
“When we’re not scoring a lot of runs, we got to execute on the highest level on the little things,” Boone said. “And we haven’t done that this week a handful of times when we had some opportunities.”
Latin singer Nezza said that she is “super proud” of performing the national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium on Saturday night and that she has “no regrets.”
Her surprising 90-second rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ game against the Giants — and a behind-the-scenes video she shared on social media of team representatives discouraging it beforehand — quickly went viral. It has become a flashpoint for Dodgers fans frustrated by the team’s lack of vocal support for immigrant communities impacted by the deportation raids across the U.S., including numerous neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.
“This is my moment to show everyone that I am with them, that we have a voice and with everything that’s happening it’s not OK,” Nezza, 30, told The Associated Press. “I’m super proud that I did it. No regrets.”
Nezza said she hadn’t yet decided whether to sing in English or Spanish until she walked out onto the field and saw the stands filled with Latino families in Dodger Blue. Before that, as shown in the singer’s TikTok video, a Dodgers employee had told Nezza, “We are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t transferred or if that wasn’t relayed.”
The Spanish-language version Nezza sang, “El Pendón Estrellado,” is the official translation of the national anthem and was commissioned in 1945 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Peruvian American composer Clotilde Arias.
Nezza says her manager immediately received a call from an unidentified Dodgers employee saying their clients were not welcome at the stadium again, but the team denied that in a statement to the AP.
“There were no consequences or hard feelings from the Dodgers regarding her performance,” the Dodgers said in the statement. “She was not asked to leave. We would be happy to have her back.”
Despite the Dodgers’ statement, Nezza said she does not think she will return to the stadium but said she hopes her performance will inspire others to use their voice and speak out.
“It’s just shown me, like, how much power there is in the Latin community,” Nezza said. “We’ve got to be the voice right now.”
The Dodgers have not gone on the record regarding the arrests and raids made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the areas just a short drive from Dodger Stadium, but player Enrique Hernández posted about it on Instagram over the weekend.
“I am saddened and infuriated by what’s happening in our country and our city,” Hernández posted in English and Spanish. “I cannot stand to see our community being violated, profiled, abused and ripped apart. ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and human rights.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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