HOUSTON — OK, let’s deal with the Astros’ legacy. Because they force you to deal with it.
They didn’t shrink after punishment and embarrassment following their illegal sign stealing in 2017. They didn’t go away. Nope, they kept absorbing the boos, the criticism and the wonder about their achievements. Mostly they just kept returning to the postseason, the reformed criminal that proved able to succeed by playing it straight up.
If you want to eliminate the 2017 season and act as if the Astros’ first championship didn’t happen, that’s fine. They are still the team of this era. Still the standard. No team in recent years has been as consistently excellent.
And Saturday night — with a 4-1, Game 6 victory over the Phillies in which they were again good at everything, specifically at run prevention — the Astros won the 118th World Series.
“Dynasty is a big word,” said starter Lance McCullers, one of five current Astros remaining from the 2017 team. “Dynasty means you are defined by championships. For us, it cements our spot for this era of baseball. This organization has been able to do amazing things.”
Indeed. They have lost Carlos Correa, George Springer, Gerrit Cole and their architect, general manager Jeff Luhnow. But no matter what they’ve lost, they just keep winning. Their two best postseason starters Cristian Javier and Framber Valdez, their two best postseason relievers, Bryan Abreu and Ryan Pressly, and the player who arguably had the three biggest hits of their postseason run, Yordan Alvarez, all joined the Astros after 2017.
Shortstop Jeremy Peña, who looks like a boy band heartthrob and plays like a cross between Derek Jeter and Correa, the player he replaced in 2022, won the World Series MVP as a rookie.
“[The stain of 2017] will probably never go away,” Astros owner Jim Crane said. “But this proves we have a very good team.”
The Astros have six straight ALCS appearances and four pennants in that time. And now, they have a second title that comes with no echoes of trash cans, just an Astros team that is excellent at everything — notably stick-to-itiveness. Toughness. Relentlessness. Not to mention hitting, fielding, developing players and pitching. Lots and lots of pitching.
Justin Verlander, another 2017 holdover, is probably going to win his third AL Cy Young. But in these playoffs, the Astros’ co-aces were Javier, 23, and Valdez, 28. Think about what that means for this run continuing. On Saturday night, Valdez was special for the second time in the World Series, holding the Phillies to one run in six innings.
“When you are giving hugs [to the other 2017 holdovers] after you win another one, you feel a little bit like you have earned your place with this one,” McCullers said.
That goes for their manager too. Dusty Baker replaced A.J. Hinch, the 2017 championship manager, and brought calm and likeability to a group that needed both. And what Baker received in return was the removal of the missing piece of a superb quarter-century managing career.
He had been the manager with the most regular-season wins (2,093) without a championship. He had, before Saturday night, a 9-16 record in potential postseason series-clinching games. But in Game 6, his Astros clinched and Baker’s odyssey to becoming a World Series-winning manager was over.
He listened to a crowd of nearly 43,000 persistently return to, “We want Houston,” a mocking chant toward Yankees fans who had asked for it. The Yankees have never forgotten or forgiven the Astros for eliminating them in 2017. But as is the Astros’ DNA now, they just keep proving their worth, eliminating the Yankees in the 2019 ALCS and sweeping them this year for the AL pennant. They are better. Period.
Yet, for about half the game Saturday, the Phillies appeared as if they might force a Game 7. Zack Wheeler, with an extra day’s rest, regained his best fastball and shut out the Astros for five innings. Kyle Schwarber hit just the second lefty-on-lefty homer versus Valdez this season, a leadoff shot in the sixth that made it 1-0.
But aside from Game 3 when they led throughout to take a 2-1 series lead, the Phillies could not get ahead of the Astros. Of the other 45 innings played in this series, Houston led after all but one.
And that dominance continued in the bottom of the sixth Saturday. No. 9 hitter Martin Maldonado was hit by a pitch and Peña singled with one out. Phillies manager Rob Thomson decided to go for his own lefty-lefty stalwart, reliever Jose Alvarado, to face Alvarez. Alvarado also had allowed just one homer to a lefty this year. And Alvarez, since hitting a go-ahead homer for a second straight day in Game 2 of the ALDS versus the Mariners, had gone 5-for-42 without a homer.
At Minute Maid, the homers usually fly to left and right, McCullers called center a homer “graveyard.” But Alvarado crushed the ball 450 feet, sending it above the hedges in center. It was essentially a knockout punch, with the dominance of the Astros’ pen, which has been completely redone since 2017. Astros relievers yielded five runs in 54 ¹/₃ innings this postseason — during which their starters were terrific, their fielding exquisite and their hitting not as overpowering as in the past, but consistently clutch enough.
If you hate the Astros for what they did in 2017, they will never receive your pardon. As McCullers said, “A lot of people are not happy we won.”
But while the trash-can banging stopped, the winning never did. The development of stellar players, notably pitchers, hasn’t stopped. The winning of big games continued. They have won another championship now, one that screams about who they are — like it or not.
The team of this era.
