Astros story has moved beyond trash cans, and other thoughts as the 2022 World Series begins
This version of the Astros resembles a title-winning Red Sox team as they've given Boston a template for sustained success.
COMMENTARY
However you feel about the Houston Astros and their transgressions, one thing is undeniable: The Philadelphia Phillies started it.
And they actually used a buzzer.
In 1899, the Phillies were behind the first well-known attempt to use technology to steal signs. It involved a backup catcher sitting in the center field clubhouse at the Baker Bowl, a wire running hundreds of feet to the third-base coach’s box, to a block of wood affixed with a buzzer, buried just beneath the dirt on which someone would stand to get the signal.
Go ahead, look it up. (Some report the scheme as exposed in 1900, though it was reportedly long rumored throughout the game.) And while you might rightly point out that all its main characters were dead by the time the Astros took the field as the Colt .45s in 1962, I will remind you they got caught with them again in 2010.
And of the standard we are operating under.
“It’s tarnished for life,” Joe Kelly, former Red Sox reliever and celebrated Astros mocker, said on the ‘Baseball Isn’t Boring’ podcast this week. “The Astros are the team that is the old saying of the internet never forgets. Ten, 15, 20 years, I think people are still going to be upset if the Astros are in the playoffs. . . . So it’s just one of those things that you just have to live with.”
I jest. After all, it’s a time for the absurd, the World Series is finally set to begin Friday night on Oct. 28, a date on which the season was already to bed for decades. Heck, the Red Sox finished their 2007 sweep 15 years ago tonight, a day later than they’d finished their curse-breaking sweep in 2004.
We can talk about the games, but it’s hard to preview them without returning to the obvious: Houston has been clearly better over the marathon. The similarities to 2007 are visible. The Red Sox had the best record in baseball that year and drew Colorado, which seemed no match on paper if not for the wave of momentum they rode to their first Series. Twenty-one wins in 22 games, and unbeaten through the NL playoffs, made an easy underdog to root for outside New England.
Then, they sat for nine days while Boston battled Cleveland. They trailed two pitches into the Series, and while the final three games were closer than you remember — two one-run games, and the other a one-run game in the eighth — it was still a decisive sweep.
Still, the sort of run Philadelphia’s put together can talk a person into anything, and as Tyler Kepner puts it in ‘The Grandest Stage,’ his recently released love note to the World Series, “A best-of-seven series overflows with peculiarity, upending any theory you can conjure.”
Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler aren’t that far off from Justin Verlander (0-6 with a 5.68 ERA in seven Series starts) and Framber Valdez. Houston’s bullpen is deeper, but Philadelphia’s has done enough to get them here. (Same with Philly’s defense, which has unexpectedly not been a liability in the playoffs.) Philadelphia’s lineup is stacked and hot, though not as grinding as Houston’s, and it’s playing with house money in a way the Astros won’t for years to come.
My heart says Philadelphia, even if it means the doom of our financial system. But that’s because of them and their fans.
Not a lingering trash can.
I suspect I’m not alone in still being a twinge bitter than the Astros were not dealt with more harshly for their sign-stealing system, though four high draft picks and (ultimately) their field and general managers is no slap on the wrist. But it’s worth considering, at least for a moment, that was five years ago.
The days of covfefe and dotard! Of fidget spinners! Of 28-3!
And the Houston Astros roster contained exactly five of the 26 players that were still on it during the ALCS sweep of the Yankees.
Who are they? Two are pitchers, Game 1 starter Justin Verlander and Lance McCullers, who started the clincher in New York. A third, Jose Altuve, rather pointedly did not participate in the scheme. (Multiple sources have written Altuve would react angrily if someone banged the can during his at-bats, as he thought it made his job harder.)
That leaves Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel. Participants in and beneficiaries of the scandal. Still fully worthy of any scorn you want to dish out.
I mention this not so much to proclaim it’s time to move on; do whatever you want. It’s context at a time when Jeremy Peña, from the University of Maine via Providence, is establishing his bonafides on the big stage just as so many young Sox did in 2007. When Dusty Baker is again in the World Series, a throwback in every way at 73 (who, if you remember, was rumored to possibly be on the way out if the Astros were quickly eliminated this month).
Those Astros, as the Globe’s Alex Speier adeptly pointed out earlier this month, are the model the Red Sox are shooting for. Six straight trips to the ALCS, with a big payroll allowing them to maintain continuity with some stars, but also a deep farm system allowing them to sometimes walk away and remain an annual contender.
Its starting nine is almost exclusively homegrown. (I’m including Yordan Alvarez, acquired from the Dodgers before his first minor-league game.) Same with the rotation outside Verlander.
Is it a dynasty? This next series seems like it’ll do a lot to decide whether we remember it as that.
“We’ve obviously been one of the best franchises in the history of the game since this run we’ve been on,” Verlander told reporters Thursday.
A season that sprouted amid acrimony produced brilliance and excellence and surprise, same as all the others, in spite of those running the sport. The new playoff system sent one league’s best team to the championship, and one league’s last-bunch-in.
They’ll play inside in 70-degree Houston weather, outside in 50-degree Philadelphia weather, and crown a champion in November. Like I said, a time for the absurd.
And also for the best this sport has to offer.
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