How do you stop a team of destiny, one that has been through so much and believes in itself so intently that it is beginning to feel invincible?
It seemed a valid question just a few days back – how could the Philadelphia Phillies possibly be prevented from surging to a World Series title? – because you’d better believe that’s the path they thought they were on at 2-1 up, when momentum was flowing, until everything changed.
It changed because the Houston Astros changed it, flipping baseball’s autumn winds over two nights and with a thousand small cuts that might have destroyed the soul of a less worthy opponent.
Astros are one win away
Ben Verlander and Alex Curry recap a tense Game 5 as the Astros edged the Phillies 3-2 to move one game away from a World Series title.
Bryce Harper and his band of Philly fighters aren’t done yet, but the Astros head home for Saturday’s Game 6 (8:03 p.m. ET on FOX and FOX Sports App) having rewritten the script of the series. As long as there isn’t another drastic reimagination of the plotline over the weekend, the title will be theirs, a first since 2017, but amid a dominant run of six straight ALCS visits.
How do you turn things around like that?
There are many ways to conjure a fightback, of course, especially over a series of this length. But if you want to do it in a way designed to squeeze the fight from your rival, to pile on the punches, to pick at their belief, to make them hurt and to persuade them it is you that is the inevitable one, here’s how.
You do it by taking a veteran destined for Cooperstown and using the anomaly of his miserable World Series record to fuel him, not to hamstring him. Justin Verlander wasn’t unhittable on Thursday, but he was remorseless and resolute, pitching his way out of trouble, again and again, helped in no small part by a wicked slider that became his crutch.
You do it by taking a rookie – Jeremy Pena doesn’t play like one, but he is – and creating an environment where full fearlessness can manifest. Where he can feel unencumbered enough to swing and connect and send one out of the park in the Fall Classic and just shrug afterwards because, why not, doesn’t it always go like this?
“We set the tone from the jump”
Jeremy Peña talks with Ken Rosenthal about becoming the first rookie shortstop to hit a home run in the World Series.
You do it by crushing the soul of a hitting group, like what happened in Game 4 on Wednesday, and Houston did it in this instance with a start for the ages from Cristian Javier, a hurler with a next-level sense of mystery about him now. They’ll talk about the Astros combined no-hitter to level things at 2-2 for a long time, but it is Javier’s supposedly “invisible” fastball that is the current talk of baseball.
How else do you do it? By reacting to the inherent tension of any Game 5 and jumping on it early, like super early, like first pitch of the night early, which is when Jose Altuve sent one off the right field fence for a triple.
And you do it later, when the Phillies needed such a swat of their own and delivered one through J.T. Realmuto, but you snatch it away with cruel brilliance of center fielder Chas McCormick – a native of West Chester, Pa. – making an absurd grab to ensure Houston’s lead would not be erased.
“When I was looking at the fans, it kind of brought me back to when I was 10 years old, when the Phillies lost in the 2009 World Series,” McCormick told reporters. “It was weird. It felt like a dream when I was laying there looking at those fans.”
“I thought he hit it out”
Astros center fielder Chas McCormick talks to Ken Rosenthal about his spectacular catch in the bottom of the ninth inning.
The Phillies have no room for error left now, not that there has been much error anyway. They’ve done little wrong, but when things start falling into place for the Astros there is no more dangerous force in baseball.
“Just keep fighting, just be yourselves and keep playing hard, because that’s what we do,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson told reporters. “The approach is the same, just come out the next day and go get them. We are going to fight to the end, for sure.”
They will need to, and even then it might not be enough. It is Houston that has the invincible look to them now, fueled by a group of players hitting peak form at just the right time.
FOXBet rates the Astros a -154 favorite to clinch in six games, and if it goes down that way, yet another season of Major League Baseball will be in the books.
It has been a breathless one, with divisional leads and collapses, outrageous win tallies, Aaron Judge slugging his way into eternity. It was all special, but ultimately the prize they all play for was tilted in the favor of Houston by a two-day surge when everything went their way, because they made it so.
They will take some stopping now.
