HOUSTON — You can make tanking cool. You can draft right, trade right and sign the right free agents. You can run intellectual circles around your competitors.
Sometimes, though, no matter how much you do right, you just can’t outmaneuver the randomness of October.
In a blink Wednesday night at Minute Maid Park, the Astros fell from dynastic to dumbfounded. Howie Kendrick’s seventh-inning homer off the right-field foul pole catapulted the underdog Nationals to a stunning, 6-2 victory in World Series Game 7 and, therefore, their first championship in franchise history (including their first 36 years of existence as the Montreal Expos) and Washington’s first title since 1924, when the American League’s Senators ousted the New York Giants to win it all.
“Let’s be honest, there’s 28 other teams that would love to have our misery today,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said afterward. “We play to get here. We play to have an opportunity to win it all. And I just told our team, it’s hard to put into words and remember all the good that happened because right now we feel as bad as you can possibly feel.”
The Astros, who won their first Series in franchise history two years ago by outlasting the Dodgers in a Game 7 at Dodger Stadium — the road team has won Game 7 four straight times since 2014 — surely will spend their winter wondering how in the heck they couldn’t win just one of four contests here in their cozy retractable dome, where they posted an industry-leading 60-21 record during the regular season and clinched both the American League Division Series (over the Rays) and AL Championship Series (over the Yankees). Never before in a Series had the road team won the first six games, let alone all seven, so the Astros had to feel pretty good returning home after sweeping the weekend at Nationals Park to come back with a 3-2 advantage.
That’s October for you, though. Analytically, it’s small samples. Spiritually? Strange stuff happens. Strange stuff like these 93-win Nats, whose bullpen performed barely above replacement level during the season, getting the better of the 106-win Dodgers (in the National League Division Series) and these 107-win Astros in a single month.
“It’s baseball,” losing pitcher Will Harris said. “You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Harris relieved Zack Greinke, who pitched brilliantly through six innings, with one out, one on and a 2-1 lead in the top of the seventh. Hinch said that he thought Greinke, in his longest outing of the postseason, had done enough.
“Kendrick and [Asdrubal] Cabrera was where I had really focused on Will Harris at that point,” Hinch said. “Will has been tremendous for us. I knew I had [Roberto] Osuna, I knew I had Gerrit [Cole] if need be. Will coming in to spin the breaking ball, he got the swing and miss, then [Kendrick] hit a ball off the foul pole in the right field and off they go.”
Kendrick’s eternal shot off Harris’ cutter left his bat at 98 miles per hour, the 14th-hardest-hit ball of the night.
“I think I made a pretty good pitch,” Harris said. “He just made a championship play for a championship team.”
You could argue the Astros really lost the long game when they managed only two runs against a struggling yet gritty Max Scherzer through five innings despite numerous bullets off the bat. Asked what the Astros were thinking at that juncture, George Springer replied, “We’ve got to keep scoring. We understand that they’re going to score runs. It’s very, very hard to hold that offense down all game.”
It’s hard to win a World Series, more so two in three years.
In 1974, moviegoers heard the legendary line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” and immediately grasped and appreciated its gravity. Its helplessness.
When your friends rooting for the Astros lament all the little things that went wrong, that downsized their team from a superpower to a plain old power, you can just repurpose that line to console them: “Forget it. It’s October.”