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ALCS: Astros vs. Red Sox

UTexasFight

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TheFlagship
TheFlagship

Take the loss pussy

immortal13
immortal13

Very aggy

Beau Vine
Beau Vine

It's pretty fucking hard to get work done when it's Friday and the NLCS is starting tonight and the ALCS is starting tomorrow, and the writers are bringing out the big guns.  (Go ahead and neg this, S

Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54302

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BOSTON — The two best teams in this land played October baseball for 4 hours and 3 minutes Saturday night. And just as we all expected, the lasting image of this storied postseason tussle was …

America’s most beloved umpiring legend, Joe West, getting drilled in the shoulder by a throw to second base.

So welcome to Westworld. And if a Joe West highlight reel isn’t quite what you expected when the 108-win Red Sox met the 103-win Astros, in a game pitched by Chris Sale and Justin Verlander, hey, just be reassured that it wasn’t you.

It was an ALCS Game 1 that had all the makings of an autumn classic. But what we got instead Saturday was Astros 7, Red Sox 2, in a game that featured 14 walks, three hit batters, two wild pitches, one ejected manager, one confiscated catcher’s mitt, not to mention a 9-6 forceout that got overturned by the replay center and the magical sight of Joe West trending on Twitter — through no fault of his own for a change.

It was 243 minutes of October baseball. But they won’t be shipping the video files to the Louvre — or Cooperstown — any time soon, because this was one of the oddest postseason games ever played. But when someone suggested to Astros mini-dynamo Alex Bregman afterward that this was one ugly triumph by his plucky squad, he was having none of it.

“No. There’s no such thing,” Bregman said. “I think the only thing that matters is finding a way to win a game.”

Well, he’s right about that. Before this season, there had been 173 best-of-seven series in baseball history. The Game 1 winner has won 111 of them. That’s 64 percent of the time. So it’s the winning that does in fact matter most. And when you win, nobody asks how. Right?

But the how-they-won portion of this game was so bizarre, we’re here to fill you in on just some of the stuff that happened in Game 1 that (hopefully) you may never see again. So if you’re ready, here goes:

West Side Story

It was the eighth inning of what was still a one-run game. Houston’s Jake Marisnick had just entered the festivities as a pinch-runner. Four pitches later, he found himself breaking for second in search of the first stolen base of his postseason career.

The good news is that he did indeed steal that base. The bad news is, nobody in America is going to recall that, because the everlasting memory of this play is going to be the sight of Red Sox catcher Christian Vazquez’s throw sailing not toward second base but toward the man who was umpiring second base.

Had West not been standing where he was standing, that throw would have sailed into center field. But once the baseball started tailing his way, West seemed to decide immediately that he had no shot to avoid it. So he basically backed up and wore it, just below his right shoulder.

Asked if he had any clue at the time that he’d just been part of West’s latest 15 seconds of fame, Marisnick shook his head.

“I had no idea,” he said. “My first reaction was, it went to the outfield. So I looked and I didn’t see the ball. So I looked around and I heard everybody booing. Then I saw (Xander) Bogaerts (at shortstop), and I said, `What happened there?’ And he said, `It hit Joe.’”

Marisnick felt so deprived by not having witnessed the splendor of that plunking in person that, once he exited the game, he headed for the clubhouse to cue up the video machines.

“Yeah, I came up and watched it,” he confessed. “And I went, `Oh. All right.’ First time I’ve seen that.”

You can go to hundreds, even thousands of baseball games. There’s an excellent chance you’ll never again see an umpire hit by a throw on a stolen-base attempt. But as Astros manager A.J. Hinch made sure to point out, it was just last year, during the World Series, that another umpire, Laz Diaz, got hit in the chest by what would have been an errant Astros pickoff throw.

So at least that, Hinch said, “was `advantage us.’ I’m not sure how that (Joe West) play was going to play out.”

Mitt-gate!

It was the middle of the sixth inning. Astros catcher Martin Maldonado had just made the final out in the top of the sixth. So he headed back to the dugout and began to do all the stuff catchers do as they get ready to go back out and catch.

Shin guards? Check. Catcher’s mask? Check. They were right where he’d left them. But then he noticed. Something was missing — something kind of important, matter of fact.

“I went down there to get ready to go out (for the inning) and I didn’t find my glove,” Maldonado said. “So when I asked where my glove was, they said the umpire was looking at it.”

That would be correct. Between innings, at the request of the Red Sox, the crew chief, who would be West again, had come over to the Houston dugout and asked for Maldonado’s glove — so it could be checked for, um … we can’t say for sure.

Red Sox manager Alex Cora wasn’t asked about this after the game. The umpires weren’t made available for comment. Maldonado said nobody ever explained anything to him. And when Hinch was asked what happened, his recap went like this:

“Joe came over and asked about his mitt. We gave him his mitt. And he went on his way.”

We can safely presume that Maldonado’s mitt was being examined for the possible presence of pine tar or some other dastardly foreign substance, which he would have been allegedly applying before throwing the ball back to Verlander. But after a brief inspection, West abandoned the inquisition. And the game resumed, as if nothing had happened.

Maldonado said it was the first time he’d ever had his mitt inspected in his eight years in the big leagues. So he was surprised, he said.

“But I don’t have nothing on my glove,” he said. “So it don’t matter.”

Whereupon he walked away from the interview, which apparently wasn’t his favorite Q-and-A of the postseason. But what the heck. It’s early.

Bye-bye, Alex

It was the bottom of the fifth inning, and the Red Sox had finally roared back to life. They’d been dominated by Justin Verlander for four innings, hadn’t gotten a hit since Mookie Betts’ single as the first batter of the game and were in grave danger of being Verlandered.

But then stuff started happening. A Steve Pearce single forced Verlander to pitch out of the stretch for the first time in over an hour. Verlander lost his delivery. The Red Sox went walk-walk-walk, followed by a run-scoring wild pitch. This score was suddenly tied, 2-2. And as Verlander stared at Andrew Benintendi from 60 feet away, he was probably one hitter away from heading for the showers.

The count went to 3-2. Everyone in Fenway Park was standing. Verlander smoothed the dirt around the rubber one time, two times, three times. Then he fired a 98-mph smokeball in the general vicinity of the outside corner. And when home-plate ump James Hoye decided it was an inning-ending strike three, Fenway was not what you’d call the happiest place on earth.

And the least happy occupant of this unhappy place was Red Sox manager Alex Cora. Who charged out for a conversation with Hoye that went so well, it earned Cora the rest of the evening off.

“He called it a strike. Andrew didn’t agree. I didn’t agree,” Cora said afterward. “You can’t argue balls and strikes. And I did. It’s kind of like embarrassing that it happens in the playoffs.”

They call that “an ejection.” So now, for perspective, let’s recap Cora’s complete ejection record in 14 major-league seasons as a player: (Crickets.)

Right. He was never ejected as a player. Not once. He did get tossed once last year, when he was working as the Astros’ bench coach. And he did get the thumb once this season, in August, as a manager. But it’s quite a claim to fame to get ejected more times in one postseason as a manager than you did in nearly 1,300 games as a player.

Well, if it makes Alex Cora feel any chippier, his troops were with him all the way on this.

Asked if Cora’s players were surprised to see their manager get the boot, third baseman Eduardo Nuñez said: “We are — because Alex is not like that all the time. But he was right. He was right. We saw the replay and the ball was out (of the strike zone).”

“He’s always going to fight for our guys and what he feels is right,” said center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr. “He obviously had something he wanted to say, so he said it.”

Yep. Sure did. At least it was a lot warmer in Cora’s office, where he watched the final four innings, than it was on the field, as temperatures plummeted toward the 40s. But the manager admitted that even though he was convinced he was right, he wasn’t proud of this moment.

“That wasn’t cool, watching the game in the clubhouse,” Cora said. “I got a job to do, (to) manage the team in the dugout. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, and you’ve got to defend your players.”

The hitless wonders

You probably didn’t realize it. But you’ve never seen a postseason game quite like this one. For four hours, many people ran around the bases. What made that kind of unusual, though, is that a little thing called “hits” had almost nothing to do with that.

The Red Sox, for instance, allowed 19 baserunners in this game — but only five hits. And the two teams combined for 25 baserunners — but only eight hits.

So doesn’t that seem practically impossible? It should — because it’s never been done. Not in a postseason game, anyway. According to Stats LLC, this game tied quite the exalted record:

Most total baserunners in a postseason game with fewer than 10 hits!

The only other October game that produced this many runners and under 10 hits: Would you believe Game 5 of the 1947 World Series, when the Yankees and Dodgers combined for 25 runners but only nine hits?

But you should also note that nine is more than eight. So this was, in fact, the fewest hits ever in a postseason game with this many baserunners. Hey, it wasn’t exactly Don Larsen’s perfect game. But history is history.

More madness

A few more wacky highlights:

— The Red Sox walked 10 hitters in this game and hit three more. Want to guess how many teams in postseason history have ever done that? The answer, according to The Athletic’s Stats and Info guru, Katie Sharp, is none. Of course. And only one team has done that in any game in the last five regular seasons combined!

— It wasn’t true that Red Sox pitching coach Dana LeVangie spent more time on the mound in this game than Chris Sale — but it felt like it. The Red Sox had so many mound visits (five), they came within one of doing something no team did all season: using up all six of their allotted mound visits in a nine-inning game. In fact, according to Stats LLC, just one team in the entire regular season made five visits to the mound in any nine-inning game. That was the Pirates, in a July 6 game against the Phillies.

— In the sixth inning, Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly was visibly irked when Bregman called time just as he was about to deliver a pitch. So it seemed non-coincidental when Kelly drilled Bregman with the next pitch — at 100 mph. Bregman would later come around to score the go-ahead run on a Carlos Correa single and appeared to stare at Kelly after crossing the plate. But Bregman denied all afterward, saying he was looking at Correa proudly because he’d just knocked in such a huge run.

“I wasn’t mad at Kelly at all,” Bregman claimed. “I know I looked back at the mound, but that’s just because I was shocked that 100 miles an hour hit me – and it kind of hurt.”

— How the heck did this game ever last 4 hours and 3 minutes — when there was a total of four hits in the first eight innings? Well, there was other stuff going on, as we might have mentioned. But this game also might have set a postseason record for most hitters stepping out of the box, most pitchers stepping off the rubber, most confusion over signs, most instances of teams changing signs and other miscellaneous intrigues.

“Yeah, well, you’ve got two managers, and they were on the same team last year,” Marisnick said. “So obviously, you see some different things going on throughout the game, and I think that kind of adds to the excitement of the series. You’ve got two of the best teams in baseball going at it. It’s a lot of fun.”

Right. Remember that magic word, kids: F-U-N. And you know what’s even better than regular old fun? Four hours and three minutes of postseason fun.

“That game was like seven hours long, wasn’t it?” quipped Astros reliever Lance McCullers Jr. “I know looked up at one point and it was 11 o’clock. And I said, `How is it 11 already?’ I forgot it started at 8.

“I just hope,” McCullers said, with a chuckle, “Bregman is happy he got to play in prime time.”

 

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9515

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I’m not buying all of the confidence on the Astros’ fans side.

 

It was exactly 53 weeks ago that Price shut them down in game 3. I would be surprised to see Price get in to the 6th or 7th with a reasonable pitch count and only 1 or 2 runs allowed

 

A little nervous Cole gets exposed a bit tonight too.

 

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