SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 D3
baseball
FROM NEWS SERVICESM ax Scherzer was scheduled to
speak to the media via Zoom soon
after the Los Angeles Dodgers
landed at Hartsfield-Jackson At-
lanta International Airport on Fri-
day night. News conferences are
customary for starting pitchers
the day before scheduled playoff
outings, and Scherzer had been
slated to start Game 6 of the Na-
tional League Championship Se-
ries against the Atlanta Braves on
Saturday.
But Scherzer didn’t address re-
po rters. The team touched down
at around 8:15 p.m. a nd canceled
the session minutes later because
Scherzer isn’t going to start Satur-
day after all, according to two peo-
ple with knowledge of the situa-
tion.
Scherzer, 37, hasn’t pitched
since Game 2 on Sunday when he
threw 79 pitches over just 4^1 / 3 in-
nings in a Dodgers loss. After the
game, Scherzer said his “arm was
dead.” Two days earlier, the right-
hander threw 13 pitches to close
out Game 5 of the NL Division
Series against the San Francisco
Giants.
“I could tell when I was warm-
ing up that it was still tired,” Scher-
zer said.
The Dodgers maintained he
would recover to start Saturday.
Manager Dave Roberts reiterated
the plan after the G ame 5 win
Thursday but acknowledged
Scherzer’s stamina level was a
mystery.
“I don’t know until we get
there,” Roberts s aid. “I really don’t.
He’s doing his work and prepar-
ing. Obviously, he’s been on the
stage.... Whatever he can give us,
we’re going to have guys around
him to help us win a ballgame.”
With Scherzer not set to start,
the Dodgers, already without
Clayton Kershaw for the postsea-
son, could have Walker Buehler
starting on short rest for the sec-
ond time in the postseason. No. 3
starter Julio Urías pitched five in-
nings in Game 4 on Wednesday.
The other option is another
bullpen game with To ny Gonsolin
or David Price assuming the bulk
of the innings. Gonsolin didn’t
pitch Thursday after logging two
innings in Game 4 on Wednesday.
Price was added to the roster Fri-
day to replace the injured Joe Kel-
ly. The veteran left-hander hasn’t
pitched since the Dodgers’ penul-
timate regular season game Oct. 2.
— Los Angeles T imesl RANGERS: Texas on Thurs-
day participated in an MLB-spon-
sored social media initiative
against bullying of LGBTQ teens
without actually acknowledging
the specific group Spirit Day was
designed to support.
The club’s decision and contin-
ued official stance of not acknowl-
edging the community publicly
left t he Rangers as a flash point on
sports Twitter for a day, frustrat-
ing some of the team’s fans in t he
LGBTQ community.
The day, observed t he third
Thursday of October for the past
decade, was s tarted by Canadian
teen Brittany McMillan as a re-
sponse to a rash of bullying-relat-
ed suicides of LBGTQ teens in- McMillan wanted Spirit Day
“to make one p erson feel a little bit
better about his or herself and to
feel safe enough in their own skin
to be proud of who they are.”
Since the commemoration be-
gan, it has gained much wider
acceptance, with people wearing
purple to show support.
On Twitter on Thursday, all
30 MLB teams made some kind of
anti-bullying statement with a
purple l ogo. In s ome fashion, 28 of
30 teams explicitly mentioned the
LGBTQ community.
The Rangers, Atlanta Braves
and Arizona Diamondbacks did
not mention standing with the
LBGTQ community in their offi-
cial tweets. Atlanta did link to an
educational page about the event.
Arizona retweeted its c haritable
foundation’s tweet citing bullying
against the LGBTQ community.
The Rangers’ tweet read, “Join
us in taking a stand against bully-
ing and in support of inclusion.
#SpiritDay.”
When it became a hot-button
topic on Twitter, the Rangers sent
out a team statement that said:
“Spirit Day is set aside for MLB
clubs t o take a stand against bully-
ing — something the Rangers do
in a number of ways throughout
the year, most notably as one of
about a dozen teams to partner
with MLB to implement t he Shred
Hate program. We also have long
emphasized anti-bullying messag-
ing at our Texas Rangers MLB
Youth Academy.”
It missed the point, said Rafael
McDonnell of Dallas’s Resource
Center, which works to empower
the L GBTQ community.
“It’s frustrating, and it contin-
ues to be frustrating,” McDonnell
said Friday.
— Dallas Morning News
NOTESReport: Scherzer won’t startGame 6 of NLCS for Dodgersthe 2017 World Series and again in
the regular season of 2018.
But they made it to another
World Series in 2019, where they
lost to the Washington Nationals
— who made some veiled (and
not-so-veiled) accusations of
more nefarious stuff on the part of
the Astros, none of it proved —
and are back there again this
month, for the third time in five
years. By this point, MLB’s crack-
down on electronic espionage in
the game in the wake of the Astros
scandal can only lead to the con-
clusion the Astros have done it
clean this time.
Some of the names have re-
mained the same throughout this
five-year run of dominance: in-
fielders Bregman, Correa, Altuve
and Gurriel played their
67th postseason game together
Friday night, a record for any four
teammates. Their ties to 20 17
have made them the prime tar-
gets of fans’ vitriol on the road,
and it will probably be no differ-
ent when they go to Atlanta or
Chavez Ravine next week.
But plenty of other faces have
changed, most notably in the dug-
out, where the 72-year-old Baker
— whose presence these past two
years has increased the fran-
ch ise’s likability and credibility
factors by exponential degrees —
just became the ninth manager in
history to win a pennant in both
leagues, having previously guided
the 2002 San Francisco Giants to
the World Series. But Baker’s Gi-
ants lost to the Anaheim Angels in
seven games, leaving a world
championship as the only hole on
an otherwise sterling and Hall-of-
Fame-worthy resume.
Somewhere, folks will be pull-
ing for Baker to lose again, be-
cause it would mean the Astros
losing again. They are baseball’s
greatest villains. Between now
and the first pitch of the World
Series, they will answer the ques-
tions all over again.
But on Friday night, deep in the
heart of Te xas, that was the fur-
thest thing from their minds.
[email protected]ed only three outs in his Game 2
start, which he exited in the sec-
ond inning with what the Astros
said was a knee injury. In the days
following that aborted start, As-
tros pitching coach Brent Strom
made a tweak to Garcia’s delivery,
ostensibly for the purpose of put-
ting less strain on his compro-
mised knee. But the involved par-
ties were all hush-hush about the
nature of the tweak.
Whatever the reason, Garcia’s
fastball Friday night was by far his
best of the year, sitting a few ticks
above his 93.3 mph season aver-
age and occasionally touching
98 mph, a level he never reached
in 28 regular season starts.
With his unique windup — the
first move of which is a rocking
motion with his arms, as if he
were cradling a baby — Garcia
breezed through his first five in-
nings, his only base runners
reaching on a walk and a strike-
out/wild pitch.
It says something about the
state of baseball in 2021 that the
prevailing question at that point
wasn’t whether Garcia could
throw the third postseason no-
hitter in history, but whether the
Astros would allow him to face
the Red Sox’s order for a third
time. As he threw his first pitches
of the sixth — working on a no-hit-
ter — Houston’s bullpen was al-
ready in action.
And after Hernandez, with two
outs in the sixth, bashed a 3-2
fastball off the wall in left-center
for a triple — Boston’s first hit of
the night — Manager Dusty B aker
wasted no time climbing the dug-
out stairs and strolling to the
mound to yank him. Garcia saun-
tered off the mound to a rousing
standing ovation.
As Houston’s bullpen went to
work cobbling together those fi-
nal 10 outs, it was time to recali-
brate and reassess this Astros era.
Yes, they were found to have
cheated — by stealing opponents’
signs with a center field camera
and transmitting the information
to the hitters by banging on trash
cans — throughout their run toStill, there is no getting past the
fact the Red Sox, after entering
the eighth inning of Game 4 with
a one-run lead, were outscored by
a margin of 22-1 over those final
20 innings.
Garcia, a 24-year-old rookie
who carried a 24.55 ERA this
postseason into Friday’s start,
looked like a completely different
pitcher than the one who collect-stealing Game 1, 5-4. Then came
the blowouts, with the Red Sox
winning Games 2 and 3 by a
combined score of 21-8, only to see
Astros clobber them in the next
two by a combined 18-3. Though
Friday night’s win wound up be-
ing by five runs, that undersells
the taut nature of a game in which
the Red Sox brought the go-ahead
run to the plate in the seventh.out threat in the seventh with a
strike-out/throw-out double play,
with Maldonado firing a laser to
second to nab Alex Verdugo try-
ing to steal. At that point, the Red
Sox were a staggering 0 for their
last 19 with runners in scoring
position.
It was a series of wild swings of
momentum, beginning with the
Astros erasing a 3-1 deficit andthe ALCS. They c ouldn’t r ead your
angry tweets, owing to the cham-
pagne in their eyes. They don’t
have time to engage in your cheat-
ing talk, because they have an-
other World Series for which to
prepare.
After closer Ryan Pressly se-
cured the final out on a flyball to
left, he threw himself into the
bearlike hug of catcher Martin
Maldonado, while a sea of white
jerseys converged from all direc-
tions toward the mound, where
the Astros formed a teeming,
bouncing huddle of elation. In-
fielders Alex Bregman, Carlos
Correa, José Altuve and Yuli Gur-
riel, the four remaining holdovers
from 2017, shared their own mini-
huddle before joining the larger
one.
In a game that could have
swung one way or the other in
almost every inning, series MVP
Yordan Álvarez, the Astros’ desig-
nated hitter, was the game-chang-
er, figuring prominently in each
of the Astros’ first two runs. In t he
first, he ripped an RBI double off
Red Sox starter Nathan Eovaldi —
the drive to right-center nearly
run down by Boston center fielder
Kiké Hernandez, only to see it
clank off the heel of his glove.
And leading off the sixth, he
tripled to right, scoring two bat-
ters later on Kyle Tucker’s sharp
double play grounder to first. Red
Sox first baseman Kyle Schwarber
may have had time to throw out
Álvarez at the plate, but he chose
the safer play of tagging the base
runner and stepping on the bag
for the double play.
An opposite-field, three-run
homer from Astros right fielder
Kyle Tucker in the eighth account-
ed for the final runs.
But it was the Astros’ pitching
that did the heavy lifting Friday,
holding down the Red Sox’s
vaunted offense for the third
straight game. Starter Luis Garcia
carried a no-hitter in the sixth.
Relief ace Kendall Graveman end-
ed Boston’s first-and-third, one-
ALCS FROM D1
Astros oust Red Sox in six games, book trip to World Series
KEVIN M. COX/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Shortstop Carlos Correa and Houston clinched their third AL pennant in five years Friday night.BY CHELSEA JANESlos angeles — When Alex An-
thopoulos and his Atlanta Braves
were evaluating free agents be-
fore the 2020 season, Eddie Rosa-
rio’s name came up. Their bench
coach, Walt Weiss, had a lot of
friends in the organization that
had just non-tendered him, the
Minnesota Twins. He called
around. Everybody said the same
thing.
A few months later, after Rosa-
rio spent the first half of the
season with Cleveland, he pinged
Atlanta’s radar again as it hunted
for outfielders to help make up for
the loss of Ronald Acuña Jr., who
suffered a torn ACL in July. Weiss
called a few people in Cleveland.
They all said the same thing, too:
“This guy wants to be in the box
with the game on the line.”
“For all of them to say that.. .”
Weiss said. “It was crazy. I’ve
never had everybody say that
about a player. And they all said
that about him.”
The intel was good. When this
postseason began, Rosario trans-
formed. He is hitting .471 with a
1.249 on-base-plus-slugging per-
centage in October. He h as done it
against teams with two of this
year’s deepest and most domi-
nant pitching staffs, the Milwau-
kee Brewers and the Los Angeles
Dodgers. His hit in Game 2 of the
National League Championship
Series gave Atlanta a walk-off win
over Los Angeles. He nearly hit
for the cycle in Game 4. Even in
Atlanta’s loss in Game 5, Rosario
found a way to double against the
untouchable stuff of reliever
Blake Treinen.
“Eddie’s been great for a long
time now, and when you get that
kind of hotness, it’s a good feeling.
I was on second base for the last
home run [in Game 4], and he
swung under a 1-0 splitter,” said
Atlanta first baseman Freddie
Freeman, indicating just how
well Rosario seemed to see the
ball, that he could not only antici-
pate the movement of a splitter
but adjust so completely as to
have overcompensated. “It’s very
hard to swing under a splitter,
and he did it. Then he didn’t
swing under the next one.”
Freeman and others said they
weren’t exactly sure what the
Braves, who face the Dodgers in
Game 6 on Saturday, were getting
when they added Rosario in ex-
change for Pablo Sandoval at the
deadline. They knew he was a
good player but didn’t know
much else because Rosario had
spent all of his big league career
in the American League.
And they didn’t get a quick
introduction. Rosario was on the
injured list with an abdominal
strain, the latest setback in what
had been a disappointing first
season with Cleveland: He was
hitting .254 with a .685 OPS, a
number that would have been the
ninth-lowest among qualified
major league hitters if the trend
had continued.
It didn’t. Atlanta activated Ro-
sario in late August. He posted a
.903 OPS from that day until the
end of the season and even hit for
the cycle on five pitches Sept. 19.
He didn’t hesitate when asked
about the reason for the shift.
“The weather,” he said, to plen-
ty of laughter from reporters,
though he wasn’t joking. “The
first two months is 40 degrees all
the time in Cleveland. And June is
— I’m hitting better. When it’s h ot,
I feel better.”
But as Weiss’s intel indicated,
Rosario seems to feel even better
in October, even with the fresh
chill. The 30-year-old’s first-ever
postseason at-bat was at Yankee
Stadium in the 2017 American
League wild-card game. He hom-
ered. He owns a 1.059 OPS in
16 career postseason games — or ahigher OPS than regular season
leader Bryce Harper’s 1.044.
“I think I sort of define myself
and identify myself with these big
moments. I think that’s how I
characterize it when someone
just comes up in these clutch
moments,” Rosario said through
an interpreter. “A nd I think that’s
just sort of — my f ocus is not to try
to do too much and just do what I
can.”
Rosario wasn’t acquired to do
all this. He was one of four out-
fielders Anthopoulos acquired
this past summer in the hopes
that the combination would help
make up enough of Acuña’s pro-
duction to keep the Braves afloat.
At times, he was even the odd
man out of that quartet because
Adam Duvall and Joc Pederson
provided plenty of punch against
right-handed pitching and Jorge
Soler was offering pop out of the
leadoff spot.
But when Soler tested positive
for the coronavirus before the
NLCS began, Manager Brian Snit-
ker slid Rosario into the leadoff
spot, hoping he would take.
“It was either he or Joc, and I
kind of thought I would rather
have Joc, at the time, just hittingdown in the middle with the
opportunity to drive runs in,”
Snitker said earlier this series.
Pederson did that and has come
up with multiple big hits with
men on base from his spot in the
middle of the order.
Rosario did more. He has
emerged as a postseason star who
seems likely to be playing his way
into a free agent deal that would
have seemed unthinkable just
months ago.
Minnesota non-tendered him
this winter rather than pay him
an estimated $12 million in arbi-
tration. Cleveland traded him in
what was basically a salary dump
midseason. And yet he is on the
verge of carrying the Braves to
their first World Series in more
than 20 years.
“I came here, and I wanted to
show my name, showcase my
talents and prove to the people
the kind of ballplayer that I am,”
Rosario said through an inter-
preter. “I feel like I had success in
Minnesota and I struggled a little
bit in Cleveland, so when I came
over here, I definitely wanted to
make sure that I showcased my
talents appropriately.”
[email protected]I n October, Rosario t urned into monster for Braves
RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES
“I think I sort of define myself and identify myself with these big moments,” Eddie Rosario said.