Jeff PassanESPN
HOUSTON -- Here, there are no chants. Just cheers. Here, the Houston Astros are not pariahs. Just heroes. Here, the rest of America's opinion registers as white noise. Just as the ubiquitous T-shirts around the city say: H-Town vs. Everyone.
And now, thanks to Houston's 9-5 come-from-behind Game 5 victory, it is here that the 117th World Series will resume at 8:09 p.m. ET Tuesday. The Astros salvaged their season Sunday, saving themselves from the indignity of watching the Atlanta Braves celebrate a championship at home, and they did so with the vestiges of their last championship team leading the way.
A week ago, that would have registered as no surprise, seeing as Yuli Gurriel, Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman are who they are. Over the first four games of the World Series, though, that quartet had gone a combined 10-for-59 with five runs and six RBIs. In Game 5, they went 8-for-19, scored six times and drove in four. They looked, for the first time all series, like the Astros of old, the ones who had reached five consecutive American League Championship Series.
For those outside this metropolitan area, it's difficult to look at these Astros and not see those past incarnations -- particularly the one that cheated during its championship season in 2017. No matter how much the players say they regret their sign-stealing scheme, no matter how many references they make to what they did being wrong, it's like trying to take a pencil eraser to history scribbled in Sharpie. The past is written. The ink damns.
Every time Altuve and Correa and Bregman stepped to the plate at Atlanta's Truist Park, the crowd greeted them with a rhythmic, two-syllable refrain: "Cheater, cheater, cheater." Altuve sees the present-day Astros through a different lens. Inescapable as the past may be, he wants to believe the Astros' present can stand on its own, that these players, this team, can forge a fresh identity, or at least one that stands unsullied alongside that already authored. For this group, he prefers another seven-letter descriptor.
"Fighter," he told ESPN after Game 5. "Sometimes when you fight, you're going to find yourself all beat up. But then you've got to fight tomorrow. So you're like, 'Oh my god, I've got to fight again.' It doesn't matter if we're all beat up. We're going to keep fighting."
This refrain shows up again and again in the Astros' public comments. It is part of the therapy they use to condition themselves against the deluge of negativity that overwhelms any stadium not named Minute Maid Park. Just because the Astros know they brought it on themselves with the use of their trash-can-banging scheme doesn't lessen the effect it has on their players. Particularly for someone like Altuve, widely regarded around baseball as one of the game's nicest guys, it's impossible to embrace the role of heel, to relish being the villain. And while some may see the Astros' use of others' loathing as backward -- the reaction to your misdeed becoming a source of fuel is rather twisted -- what's the alternative?
Nobody could be a magnet for detestation as long as the Astros have been and escape from it unscathed. The natural reaction is to gravitate toward those who truly understand -- H-Town vs. Everyone, and in truth not even all of H-Town. Just the four who have lived it, and all four have lived it in different ways. It hardened them, sure, but it likewise forced them to learn things about themselves they didn't know existed.
"I'm not going to lie to you," Altuve said. "Sometimes you feel like you're going to panic. It's normal. Sometimes you're going to feel nervous or even scared about something. But I think the key is to know how to control things. And I think that's what we know. Sometimes people are like, 'You can't feel nervous. You can't feel scared.' Yes, you can. We're human beings. But the thing is because we've been through so many things together, it feels like, OK, we've got to find a way. And somehow, we find the way. We make it happen."
Familiarity breeds comfort, and no group in baseball history is more familiar on a playoff field than Houston's core four. Game 6 will market their 73rd postseason game together, beating the record of 68 shared by Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez with the New York Yankees. That all four Astros play the infield is even more extraordinary. Previously, the record for playoff games together by four infielders was 40, by the Steve Garvey-Davey Lopes-Bill Russell-Ron Cey Los Angeles Dodgers.
This could mark the Astros nucleus' final hurrah. While Altuve and Bregman remain under contract through 2024 and Houston holds an option on Gurriel for next year it's certain to exercise, Correa is a free agent, and as a 27-year-old, slick-gloved, power-hitting shortstop, he'll have no lack of suitors trying to pry him from the team that drafted him No. 1 overall in 2012 and a decade later counts him among the franchise greats.
"It's a special group, man," Correa said. "I love those guys so much. We get to work so many times together -- spring training, where every single day taking infield together. The regular season, we go out there and put in the work. We've grown together. We've gotten better together. We expect perfection out of each other. That's the way we push each other to just be better every single year. It's just going to be special."
Special would mean a win Tuesday and another Wednesday. A win in Game 6 with Luis Garcia going on short rest against a superior starter in Max Fried and another in Game 7 with a starter named TBD against Ian Anderson, who over eight career postseason starts boasts an ERA of 1.26. Two wins that would make the Astros just the seventh team in baseball history to escape a three-games-to-one deficit and capture a championship. Two wins in a stadium where, when the 2019 World Series arrived with Houston up three games to two, the Astros blew their advantage over Washington and lost both games.
"I don't feel like going home is any guarantee," Altuve said. "We've got to go out there and fight. It's not like, OK, we go home, we got them. No. We're playing a really, really good team. Those guys take really good at-bats, they know how to pitch, they can do everything. And we got to go out there and fight."
There it is again. Fight. It's the Houston Astros' rallying cry, the epitome of H-Town vs. Everyone, and they know it's far easier to fight as a group than it is as an individual.
"If it doesn't work out, we can say we fought to the end," Correa said. "If it works out -- that's going to make for a good story."
Read Again Brow https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmVzcG4uY29tL21sYi9pbnNpZGVyL3N0b3J5L18vaWQvMzI1Mjc2Njcvd29ybGQtc2VyaWVzLTIwMjEtaG91c3Rvbi1hc3Ryb3MtY29yZS1yZWFkeS1vbmUtbGFzdC1zdGFuZNIBfGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmVzcG4uY29tL21sYi9pbnNpZGVyL3N0b3J5L18vaWQvMzI1Mjc2Njcvd29ybGQtc2VyaWVzLTIwMjEtaG91c3Rvbi1hc3Ryb3MtY29yZS1yZWFkeS1vbmUtbGFzdC1zdGFuZD9wbGF0Zm9ybT1hbXA?oc=5Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "World Series 2021: The Houston Astros' core is ready for one last stand - ESPN"
Post a Comment