Three hours before a game 25 years and a thousand heartaches in the making, and with fresh news that his first baseman is out with a knee injury, Astros manager Dusty Baker relaxes in his office to the plaintive wails of the Texas blues, courtesy of Big Mama Thornton. Like Baker, Big Mama came to Houston to find unprecedented success.
This was to be the third time Baker sat in his managerial office with a chance to win the World Series that night. The other two, both in 2002, ended in disaster. In Game 6, his Giants blew a 5–0 lead to the Angels seven outs away from the title, making for the worst-ever collapse in a potential clincher. The next night, in Game 7, his team took a 1–0 lead and lost, 4–1. In all, Baker had 24 previous seasons as a manager, and all of them ended out of contention or with a playoff loss.
Big Mama wailing from his Bluetooth speaker, however, has nothing to do with his baseball blues and everything to do with the breadth of interest from baseball’s preeminent polymath. The scorecard of Baker’s musical choices before each game of the World Series looked like this, in order: Muddy Waters, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Migos, Tupac and Big Mama Thornton.
Hours later, the Astros and their hip 73-year-old manager would be world champions, in great part because the team is as sophisticated as its manager. “Right guy at the right time,” is how second baseman Jose Altuve called the fit.
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Houston won Game 6, 4–1, because it is expert at identifying and nurturing such talent. Yordan Alvarez, heisted from the Dodgers in 2016 before he had even played an affiliated professional game, smashed what proved to be a game-winning home run that traveled so far the radar engineers at the Johnson Space Center were said to have reported an anomalous object streaking across the cosmos. Jeremy Peña, picked after 101 other players in the ’18 draft, rapped out two more hits to win the World Series MVP. Framber Valdez, signed for a $10,000 pittance at the ancient international free-agent age of 21, gave six taut innings for his second win of the series. Ryan Pressly, a 2018 trade steal from the Twins because Houston loved his spin rates, capped his scoreless postseason with the save.
The Astros are the baseball version of a Baker Spotify playlist. They are eclectic. They do so many things well. The offense is resourceful. Martín Maldonado, for instance, started the winning rally with the express purpose of getting hit by a pitch—and he did. The defense was superb all series; it allowed one unearned run, of no significance. Chas McCormick, a 21st-round pick out of the Millersville Marauders of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, made a fence-climbing beauty of a grab in Game 5 that ranks with those by Kirby Puckett, Tommie Agree and Joe Rudi in memorably important World Series catches.
Most of all, the Astros won the World Series because this was the greatest strikeout staff in the history of the Fall Classic. They struck out 71 batters, a record even without the series going the distance. They averaged 11.8 strikeouts per nine innings, which left their defense each night needing only 15 other outs to secure. One-third of Philadelphia batters struck out.
“I think it’s just team baseball,” is how third baseman Alex Bregman describes Houston’s winning year after year. “Different guys pick each other up. Sometimes we pitch. Sometimes it’s the offense. Sometimes it’s the defense.”
Then he smiles and admits, “But most of the time, it’s pitching and defense.”
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Before the happy ending, before Big Mama Thornton was done putting her original soul into “Hound Dog,” Baker knew finishing off the Phillies would be a challenge.
“The fish never fights as hard as he does at the end,” Baker says. “When he sees the boat, that’s when he will fight you the most. He spits the hook and he’s gone. Poof!”
He might have been talking about the 2002 Angels, or the 16 teams in his 25 possible postseason clinchers that got away. Baker needed to land the big fish. But so did Jim Crane, the Astros owner who needed someone not just to manage his team in 2020 after he fired A.J. Hinch in the wake of the team’s sign-stealing scandal, but also to manage the choppy waters around it. Crane could not change the taint associated with the ’17 team—that’s here to stay—but he needed a championship that moved the franchise forward. He flew Baker to Houston for a lunch meeting.
“We talked for like two and a half hours, and it seemed like we talked 10 minutes,” Crane says. “We had a lot in common. I got very comfortable with him. I knew he knew baseball. I knew he wanted to come back. I made the decision pretty much as soon as I walked out of the restaurant.”
The next day Crane called him.
“You’re the man,” he told Baker. “Let’s go.”
Explains Crane, “I had a list of names. I really didn’t take a lot of influence from anybody. I just started going down the list. We needed a guy with a lot of experience, a lot of poise, who had been through a lot of things. And he handled it extremely well.”
Baker and Crane got exactly what they wanted: a championship, gained as thoroughly and convincingly as championships get.
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It seems hard to remember now, but the Astros once were in trouble in the World Series. They lost two of the first three games, once in Game 1 when ace Justin Verlander lost a 5–0 lead and again in Game 3 when Lance McCullers Jr. gave up a record five home runs.
What happened after that was one of the most remarkable displays of pitching power and precision ever witnessed in a World Series, at least against a lineup with the DH. Over the next three games, Houston outscored Philadelphia 12–3 while holding the Phillies to a .101 batting average (9-for-89) and striking out 38 batters.
It began with a no-hitter started by six innings from 25-year-old righthander Cristian Javier, who threw with such cold-blooded poise as a minor leaguer he was nicknamed El Reptil. Javier throws fastballs as if skimming river rocks across still waters.
Javier was signed at 18, also for veritable sofa-cushion money, $10,000. The Astros saw athleticism in his delivery and natural ride on his fastball from an oddly effective, slingshot-style delivery. So inherently devilish is Javier’s heater that he threw 70 four-seamers in Game 4, the most in any World Series game since 2008, when such tracking data became available.
Verlander grinded through five innings in Game 5 for his first career World Series win. Valdez was dominant in Game 6 with nine strikeouts.
“I think it goes back to our pitching development,” McCullers says. “Our guys in the minor leagues are just fabulous. I think that’s becoming lost in today’s game. I think developing pitchers and developing pitches still matter, and it starts from the bottom up.”
Says Maldonado, “I’ve never seen a staff like this one, the way we can strike guys out. At the same time, I give a lot of credit to the analytical people; the pitching coach, Justin Miller; even Dusty and the coaching staff. I would say they prepared all year for us to pitch like this in the postseason.”
The game in recent years has become one that pivots on home runs. With deep bullpens, tailored shifts and more spinning pitches, home runs, not hits and rallies, have become the coin of the realm. The best way to a victory has become to out-homer your opponent.
Such an offensive mindset remains, but the Astros layered their own truth atop it: The path to victory also is paved with getting more strikeouts than your batters strike out. The Astros won the World Series strikeout war, 71–57. For the year, including the postseason, Houston held a +387 edge in strikeouts over opponents in 175 games.
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Kyle Schwarber had barely finished his trot around the bases after smashing a Valdez sinker for a sixth-inning home run and a 1–0 Philadelphia lead in Game 6 when an idea came to Maldonado, the Astros’ wise catcher, a pitching-whisperer sort.
“Right after Schwarber hit the homer, I decided to do it,” Maldonado says. “I said to myself, ‘Leading off, I’ve got to get on base.’”
That’s when Maldonado hatched an idea to get hit by a pitch from Zack Wheeler, the Philadelphia starter who was throwing 98 mph aspirin tablets with so much movement the Astros managed only one of their first 15 outs to reach the outfield.
“He was running that two-seamer in all game,” Maldonado says. “He broke like eight bats.”
Maldonado is one of the finest, craftiest backstops in the game. He must be to get 3,313 plate appearances while hitting .209. It is the worst batting average in baseball history for anyone who came to the plate so much. But as smart as Maldonado is behind the plate, he proved equally sharp in the batter’s box. Instead of taking his usual spot toward the middle of the box, Maldonado nestled up to the chalk line next to the plate, practically daring Wheeler to hit him with that sinker.
Asked whether he did so to try to get hit, Maldonado replies, “Yes. I wasn’t going to swing unless I had two strikes. I did it before. I did it in the Yankees [ALCS] series and I did it in the World Series last year.
“I said to myself, ‘As long as I stay in the box and I don’t dive into it, he’s got a chance to hit me.’ Because he has so much movement on it.”
Wheeler started Maldonado with a 96-mph sinker that barely missed him.
“The first one almost hit me and I said, ‘I’ve got to stay here. Don’t move,’” Maldonado says.
Wheeler next threw a sinker at 97, this one over the plate for a strike. The next pitch, another sinker at 97, ran toward the same inside spot where the first one did. This time Maldonado held his ground and happily took the pitch off the back of his left elbow. The Phillies were so apoplectic, figuring Maldonado never tried to get out of the way, that they asked for a replay review. Video proof only confirmed the brilliance of Maldonado’s plan: He had stood so close to the plate that he didn’t have to dive into the pitch or throw out his arm to be struck by it. It was the shot heard round Houston that will echo forever in World Series lore. It goes right next to the hit by pitch of Cleon Jones in the Mets’ 1969 clincher, one not called by umpire Lou DiMuro until Mets manager Gil Hodges showed DiMuro the shoe polish on the ball as a result of the pitch hitting Jones’s foot. Donn Clendenon followed with a home run.
“I’ve got to get on base for the guys behind me,” Maldonado says. “I know Altuve is going to put the ball in play, Jeremy’s been hot and Yordan is our best hitter.”
Altuve replaced Maldonado when he bounced into a force play. That brought up Peña, with Alvarez behind him. Phillies manager Rob Thomson vowed before the series he would match up lefty José Alvarado on Alvarez every meaningful chance he could. He made up his mind to replace Wheeler with Alvarez, but first Wheeler had to deal with Peña, the former University of Maine Black Bear by way of his first nine years in the Dominican Republic and the next decade in Rhode Island. Peña singled.
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Peña is the son of Gerónimo Peña, a former big league second baseman who played seven years without reaching the postseason.
“My dad taught me you did not need anyone else to practice baseball,” Peña says. “So I would throw a rubber ball against a wall and catch the crazy bounces over and over again. Sometimes my dad would stand behind me and throw the ball against the wall, and I would have to catch the bounce. And he would throw it in a way to make it take all kinds of crazy bounces. He would make a game out of it. If I got three outs then I could hit. If I made an error I would have to run.”
Peña developed such soft hands that way that he won a Gold Glove this season as a rookie, the start of a trophy trifecta that includes the ALCS MVP and the World Series MVP. He plays with the sort of easy confidence and baseball IQ that is not uncommon for the sons of major leaguers. He proved such elan in the eighth inning of Game 5 when he was hitting against Seranthony Domínguez with Altuve on first base. Just as Domínguez threw a 1–1 pitch, Peña saw out of the corner of his eye Altuve take off running to try to steal. Second baseman Jean Segura broke toward the bag to cover the steal attempt.
Peña, a right-handed hitter, saw all that activity while a 97-mph sinker bore in on his hands and decided to hit the ball toward the vacated hole on the right side. Incredibly, he succeeded.
“Amazing,” Altuve says. “He saw me running and aimed to hit the ball in the hole. He’s such a smart player. I could do that when we had George Springer running and I was behind him. But I was younger then. I can’t do that now.”
From third base after that hit, Altuve scored on a grounder, which proved to be the winning run.
In Games 4, 5 and 6, a Peña hit preceded Thomson’s fetching Alvarado. Wheeler was surprised to see his manager remove him after he had yielded a hit batter and two grounders, one of which skidded through the infield. He had thrown just 70 pitches.
Told that Wheeler was upset about the hook, Thomson says, “I'm sure he was. Yeah, I'm sure he was. I mean, he still had his good stuff. I just thought that that was a key moment in the game, and that was a momentum swing that I thought Alvarado had a chance to strike him out.”
It was the fourth time in six games Thomson wanted Alvarado on Alvarez. Familiarity was now in play, as it was late in recent series for relievers such as Andrew Miller in 2016, Brandon Morrow in ’17, Will Harris in ’19 and Nick Anderson in ’20.
Alvarez destroyed a sinker clocked at 98.9 mph. The ball soared over the giant batter’s eye background in center field. It was said to have traveled 450 feet. In recorded data available since 2008, only two World Series homers were hit off faster pitches: George Springer off Tanner Rainey in ’19 Game 1 (99.2) and Max Muncy off Tyler Glasnow in ’20 World Series Game 5 (99).
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody hit one up there,” Bregman says. “I don’t know. That’s one of the farthest balls I’ve ever seen hit in this ballpark. I would need to hit it twice to make it go that far.”
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On the advice of scout Charlie Gonzalez, the Astros tried to sign Alvarez as an international free agent in 2016 out of Cuba. But he took a $2 million bonus from the Dodgers. A few months later, the Dodgers were looking for a middle reliever at the trade deadline. They liked Josh Fields of the Astros. Houston considered it. Based on advice from Gonzalez, the team sent a text asking for “Y. Alvarez” in return.
The Dodgers quickly replied that such a price was out of the question. They said they had invested too much money in signing Alvarez—$32 million, half of which was a fee for exceeding their international free agent cap.
Thirty-two million? The Astros quickly figured out the miscommunication.
“No,” they said, “we’re asking about Yordan Alvarez, not Yadier.”
Less bothered by the ask, the Dodgers agreed to the deal. Alvarez never played in an affiliated game for the Dodgers before they traded him. Alvarez, playing at their Dominican Academy, was stunned. He didn’t even know such a trade so quickly after signing was possible.
Since then, Yordan Alvarez has hit 98 homers in his first 368 games, fifth most all time through that many games. Yadier Alvarez, 26, still hasn’t reached the major leagues. This year he posted a 6.20 ERA in Triple A.
Alvarez’s home run turned a 1–0 deficit into a 3–1 lead. Christian Vázquez increased it by another run with an RBI single. Vázquez, the DH, was hitting in the lineup spot usually filled by Yuli Gurriel, the injured first baseman. The lead seemed to be 40–1, the way the Houston bullpen pitched in the series. Héctor Neris, Bryan Abreu and Pressly pitched one inning each as Baker kept pushing the right buttons—admittedly, with many to push.
Baker tells the story about a lesson he learned from Bo Schembechler, the old Michigan football coach. He asked Schembechler how he knew whom he could trust to play well and who he could not. “I look ’em in the eye,” Bo told him. “That’s how you know.”
Baker never forgot the lesson. He is a master at reading body language. He saw, for instance, the easy way Peña carried himself in spring training—and knew about the family pedigree—and never worried the kid would fall on his face as the replacement for Carlos Correa, whom the Astros let leave for Minnesota as a free agent. Sometimes such Baker intuition can bump against the more data-driven advice of the Astros’ analytics department.
Speaking of reliever Ryne Stanek, for instance, Baker says, “I like Stanek more than the numbers do. Sometimes you have to go with what you see.”
The Astros won the 2017 title with the help of stealing signs off a live video feed and relaying them to the batter with a system of banging on a trash can. Crane fired manager Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow after MLB in ’20 imposed a one-year ban on them and bench coach Alex Cora, who by then was managing the Red Sox. Last month, Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove, who pitched on that ’17 Astros team and won a game in that World Series, said, “I still don’t feel great about wearing that ring around or telling people that I was a World Series champion on that team. I want one that feels earned and that was a true championship.”
It was a powerful admission. This was not the media, fans or opponents referring to that 2017 title as less than genuine. This was someone from the very team. It’s an awkward topic for most of the ’17 Astros and always will be. McCullers is one of five players to win with the Astros in ’17 and ’22. The others are Altuve, Bregman, Gurriel and Verlander.
“We don’t really talk about it,” McCullers says, “but when you’re giving those hugs, after you win another one, when I’m hugging guys like Altuve and Bregman and Yuli and JV, you feel a little bit of ... just .. like we earned our place in history.
“Listen, I still have so many great memories of those guys and that year and that run. It was very special for me and still is. I understand the negative attention to it and why people feel the way they do. The runs feel different. We lost quite a few before tonight and we had the scandal thing hanging over us. So I understand why Joe [Musgrove] would feel that way and say that. Joe’s an amazing teammate. He’s a great guy, and we earned this one and there’s nothing anybody can do to take it away.”
More obliquely, Crane, when asked about the need for a second title that is fully valued, says, “They were able to block it out and just play. It means a lot to them. To me, it’s history, and we won another one and we’re moving on.”
The two titles may not be a matching pair, but together they make a strong argument that the Astros have created a modern dynasty in a multitiered playoff world. They are the only team in divisional history (since 1969) to reach the ALCS in six straight years while paying off two of those seasons with World Series titles. In this six-year run they also have four 100-win seasons and the most wins in the American League.
“I don’t like using the term ‘dynasty,’” Bregman says, “but we’ve got a lot of guys that are returning, so I think the window is still open.”
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Like the 1951 Giants, who used a telescope to steal signs, the 2017 Astros won’t see their taint fade. It is, as Crane unwittingly acknowledged, part of history. But what this title does is give the Astros an even prouder history, and Baker was the perfect choice to help make it happen. At 73, he is not just the oldest manager to win the World Series, but a baseball ambassador and a font of goodwill.
Baker’s baseball life is an epic one, literally beginning one day in 1967 when he met Henry Aaron. Baker’s father, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., insisted his son accept a basketball scholarship from Santa Clara, where he also might have played in the same football backfield as Dan Pastorini. But upon being drafted by the Braves, Dusty made a trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles with his mother while the Braves played there. Aaron told Dusty’s mom, Christine, he would watch over her son if he signed. He signed. His father didn’t speak to him for three years. So began his 55 years in baseball as the game’s Forrest Gump.
Baker was on hand for Aaron’s 715th home run (he was on deck), the first high five (with Dodgers teammate Glenn Burke), Reggie Jackson’s three homers in a World Series game, Fernandomania, the World Series earthquake of 1989, the single season home run record, the largest blown lead in a World Series clincher, the Bartman Game and two of the three no-hitters in postseason history.
The Nationals fired him in 2017 after two seasons in which he won 95 and 97 games. The Phillies called in ’19 after they fired Gabe Kapler, but they hired Joe Girardi instead.
“Maybe God has a better plan for you,” his son, Darren, told him.
A week later, the Astros called. It turns out they needed each other. The Astros needed his grace and integrity. Baker needed their ready-made talent for one last run at the title. “This is my last hurrah,” Baker said upon being hired.
“Dusty has been unbelievable since Day 1,” Bregman says. “He’s been an unbelievable manager and an unbelievable human being on a personal level with every single one of us. He loves the game of baseball. He’s dedicated his life to this game. He deserves it.”
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It is difficult to tell who needed this World Series title more, the franchise or Baker. What matters is how it was achieved. The Astros won 106 games in the regular season, 16 games clear of second-place Seattle. They allowed the fewest runs in the AL and scored the third most. They rolled through the postseason at 11–2. They joined the 1998 Yankees as the only teams in the wild-card era to win 106 or more games in the regular season and win the World Series while losing as few as two postseason games.
The point they made was an emphatic one. The Astros and Baker have their title. No question about it.
