Maybe the Astros would have found ways to beat the Yankees yet again regardless. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if Aaron Judge could have tied Game 4 of the American League Championship Series with one intercontinental ballistic launch and sent it to extra innings.
The Astros won their third American League pennant at the Yankees' expense Sunday night in Yankee Stadium. They did it in 2017, 2019, and now this year. But if Game Four proves to be free agent-in-waiting Judge's final game as a Yankee, it couldn't have ended more ignominously for him and for them.
The engaging, still-young man who pushed Roger Maris aside as the AL's single-season home run champion, already 1-for-14 in the ALCS when he checked in against Astros reliever Ryan Pressly with two out in the bottom of the ninth, swung on a slider somewhat outside on 1-2.
The guy who can hit a ball of yarn past the Van Allen Belt grounded it right back to Pressly, who speared it one-handed coming off the mound toward first base. Pressly trotted a few steps further before underhanding it to Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel for game, set, sweep, and the Yankees heading home for the winter.
It continued the second-longest Yankee pennant drought since 1979-1994. It made the Leaning Tower of 161st Street resemble the giant who'd carried an entire town on his shoulders from one end of the hemisphere to the other only to collapse under its weight at long enough last.
"I could sit here and make excuses about if a ball falls this way, a ball drops that way or a pitch is made here and there," Judge lamented after Game 4 ended. "But what it comes down to is they just played better than us."
The Yankees spoiled themselves leaning on Judge as their in-house extraterrestrial. The Astros, say what you still will about them, didn't make that mistake. They didn't lean too heavily upon any single big man, either winning the second-most games in the regular season or sweeping their way to the coming World Series.
Leaning that heavily upon one big man merely held the Yankees' other issues aloft too high. Their bullpen was injured and inconsistent. They lost key secondary elements such as D.J. LeMahieu and Andrew Benintendi to injuries. Anthony Rizzo and Giancarlo Stanton weren't consistent second bananas to the Judge Show. If Harrison Bader proved a pleasant surprise at the October plate, it wasn't enough to overcome Judge and Stanton combining to go 6-for-32 the entire postseason.
Oh, the Astros had some heroics of their own, of course. Yordan Alvarez looked like Paul Bunyan earlier in the postseason, enough so that enough thought he alone might be the one to blast the Astros forward. But he was awful quiet in the ALCS. There lay the Astros' real secret weapon this time, though: if one guy falters, there are others too happy to pick up the slack.
Rookie Jeremy Peña said, "Sure, no problem-o." A kid whose regular-season on-base percentage fell well enough short of just .300 tied Game 4 in the top of the third, with two on aboard back-to-back inning-opening walks, when an ailing Yankee starting pitcher Nestor Cortes hung a cutter and Peña hung it down the left field line and over the fence fair past the foul pole.
"It's surreal," said Peña postgame, after he was named the ALCS's Most Valuable Player. "You dream about this stuff when you're a kid." Nobody among his teammates cared two pins that he was a rookie stealing the thunder.
"If you're in this clubhouse, you're one of us," said Lance McCullers, Jr., the Astros' Game 4 starting pitcher. "You don't need to earn your stripes with us. You don't need service time. If you're in this clubhouse and you're wearing this uniform, you're one of us. It doesn't matter if you're here for a day or you're here for seventeen years."
"It's been a blessing to play with this group," said third baseman Alex Bregman, who'd sent Peña home with what proved the insurance run in the seventh, after yet another fielding mishap that came to define the Yankees' postseason collapse the way their deflation from 15.5 games atop the AL East to a 10-18 August defined their regular-season descent from surreal to mere division champion.
Alvarez may not have provided strategic bombing in this ALCS, but after Yankee second baseman Gleyber Torres flipped what should have been a seventh inning-ending double play-starting toss past shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa, he re-tied the game at five each by swatting Peña home with an RBI single off Yankee reliever Jonathan Loaisaga.
Just like that, the Yankees handed the Astros the means to end the lead Bader handed his team in the bottom of the sixth, when the former Cardinal caught hold of Hector Neris's first two-out pitch to him and sent it into the left field seats.
When Gurriel clutched Pressly's underhand toss for the final series out, it handed baseball its first day with both pennants clinched since 1992. It handed the Astros yet another chance to give manager Dusty Baker yet another chance at the one thing that's eluded him in his long and mostly distinguished managing career — a lease to the Promised Land.
Baker took on the Astros after Astrogate cost them A.J. Hinch, whose failure to put the brakes on the Astro Intelligence Agency's illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing operation could have broken both the game and the organization in half when it was exposed after the Astros fell to the Nationals in the 2019 World Series.
He might be the sentimental favorite come Series time — individually. The Astros will be up against a Phillies team that electrified their city and maybe most of the country with their own pennant conquest at home Sunday afternoon. Baker may be America's manager, but the Phillies may be America's team this time. And Bryce Harper just may be America's man within America's team, if that's the case.
No Astro delivered quite the transcendent blow Sunday that Harper did in the bottom of the eighth in Philadelphia. Judge's record-breaking 62nd home run merely broke a hallowed AL and Yankee team record and guaranteed his coming free agency riches. Harper's deficit-overthrowing 2-run homer held up to mean the pennant, in a rainy game that looked as though the Phillies and the Padres did more mud wrestling than ball playing.
The pitchers couldn't grip properly or resist their landing feet sliding more than single inches on the muddy mound. The hitters changed batting gloves as often as they could. Batting helmets shone with rain water on top. New York wasn't exactly paradise but Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park was practically a swamp. And no fan dared leave until it was done.
Harper stunned the Padres first by taking a tumbling Robert Suarez changeup on which he might have swung otherwise, once upon a time. He anticipated Suarez bringing a fastball soon enough, hoping only to find an outfield gap into which to send one, enough to bring J.T. Realmuto home from first with a tying run.
He got and did better than he hoped. He got a cutter hovering over the outer half of the plate and swung. The ball traveled about three or four rows the other way into the left field seats. The city that once hosted a record label proudly calling its brand of soul music The Sound of Philadelphia now had a new sound: bedlam.
The Biblical admonition goes that the last shall be first. The Phillies entered the postseason aboard the new three wild card system with the weakest regular season record of any postseason entrant and the eleventh-best record in the Show.
They'd survived an early season slump prompting their front office to throw out the first manager of the year. They'd survived injuries, including the two-month loss of Harper who needed the rest of the regular season to get his groove back. Both the Phillies and the Padres hit a partial re-set button at mid-season and burrowed their ways to their wild cards.
The Padres slew the NL dragons out of New York and Los Angeles. The Phillies slew those out of St. Louis and Atlanta. Then the Phillies won the pennant by taking four of five from the Padres. They ground, pushed, thumped, slashed, and thundered their way to the Series.
They reminded you that, when dragonslayers meet each other, one of them gets fried.
They're going to go up against an Astro team that still isn't America's favorite team thanks to the continuing taint of Astrogate. Never mind that only three position players from those 2017-18 cheaters remain with the team. Never mind mind that one (Jose Altuve) actually rejected being part of it. I say again, sadly: the taint won't dissipate until the last member of the Astrogate teams no longer wears their uniform.
The Phillies haven't won a World Series ring since the final months of the second George W. Bush administration. The Astros still hunt their first un-stained World Series rings. If the Astros think the Phillies can be taken as readily as the Yankees, the Astros may be in for a Series that'll only feel as long as the Yankee winter now begun.
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