Being and Becoming: Houston, the World Series, and Game 7

It’s incredible to even come close.

Cleveland’s Rajai Davis came close against Chicago a year ago, tying the decisive contest late with a desperate laser whose chin barely cleared the bar in left. So did Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays, who won it all by touching ‘em all in ’93 with a ninth-inning blast off Philadelphia’s Mitch Williams—but that was in game six. Gene Larkin, Edgar Renteria, Luis Gonzalez: All brought home the Fall Classic’s winning run in game seven over the last 26 years, but all did so with singles.

Only Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski, who played when there was no YouTube to immortalize his moment, has cracked a season-ending long ball in the year’s final possible game. Baseball is a sequence of improbabilities—over two decades, the odds were against even Ted Williams reaching base—and so most of its results come from a boring chaos.

That’s what made games two and five of this sublime seven-game set between the Astros and Dodgers inimitable and unforgettable. This sport can be a deliberate and stressful experience: If basketball teams trade points like texts, baseball teams trade runs like telegrams. There’s enough time to bite to your cuticles. It should be impossible for such drawn-out drama to sustain such tension, and yet Houston’s home run-saturated 7-6 and 13-12 victories of the last week did it twice in one World Series. There was precedent for there to be a third, given how great and even both these teams were. If any Fall Classic could conclude with a theatrical final act, it’d be this one, a few miles from Tinseltown.

When the Astros bolted to a 5-0 lead in the second inning Wednesday night, it could have been mistaken for a setup. The aliens invaded; the metropoles were leveled; our heroes then would spend the next two hours crawling from the rubble and mounting their comeback. This didn’t need to transpire quickly: When Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw entered in relief on short rest and labored through fastballs an mph or two off his normal velocity, it was all a matter of holding steady. When pinch-hitter Andre Ethier grounded an RBI single into right for the Dodgers’ first run in the sixth, it was an unpretentious first step to overcoming severe odds. There were two on and one out after the longtime Los Angeles outfielder made it to first, and the home club had been getting on base all night—it had stranded 8 runners through 16 outs. Houston’s bullpen was suspect, and the pitcher tapped to begin the inning, Charlie Morton, had allowed three of his first four foes to reach. The top of the Dodger order was next up: spark plug Chris Taylor, soon-to-be annual MVP candidate Corey Seager, all-world and clutch hitter Justin Turner. C’mon. You could see where this was going. Have Bill Pullman deliver his speech and get on with it already.

But baseball is only half a beatitude, patient but unkind. Taylor struck out swinging. Seager bounced one to short. Inning over. The drama continues and the inflection point is deferred.

Great World Series memories don’t need to be etched in game seven. In 2011, the Cardinals beat the Rangers in what was the zaniest October game ever, even if it wasn’t quite the best. It was game six. A night later, St. Louis threw away Texas 6-2 in a disposable encounter.

In 1988, a limping Kirk Gibson swung his bat like a Jimmy Connors backhand for one of baseball’s iconic round-trippers—in game one of a Series the Dodgers would win 4-1 over Oakland.

Don Larsen’s perfect game came in game five of the ’56 Fall Classic—a pivotal showdown with his Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers tied at two wins a piece. Brooklyn responded with a 1-0, 10-inning victory in game six to even it up. (The walk-off hit was struck by a guy named Jackie Robinson.)

In the final game, New York wasted the Dodgers 9-0. And that fact didn’t detract at all from the Series’ place in the historical record.

Baseball is arrhythmic and asymmetrical. Its best moments occur at unpredictable points, free of a shot clock. Or even time itself. It’s why the temptation to watch carried into the seventh inning Wednesday, when Turner, rookie slugger Cody Bellinger, and Yasiel Puig were positioned to narrow their side’s 5-1 deficit. When they failed, Joc Pederson—who had become living cannon fire the last few days—and the rest of the lineup surely would chip into the lead. They didn’t.

After Ethier knocked home his teammate in the sixth, Los Angeles didn’t put another man on board. Morton found his command and something else: brief dominance. This night belonged to his teammate, World Series MVP George Springer, who ended the season with a new truck. It belonged to his teammate Carlos Correa, who ended the season with a new fiancé.

All of which belonged to the footnotes in the chapter about baseball in 2017, whose best passages were shared by Houston, anyway.