PHILADELPHIA — In the 32 days since he last had a hit, Trey Mancini has had a lot of time to visualize how he might contribute to his team’s World Series run. Maybe he would start at designated hitter and sting a line drive into the gap. Maybe he would enter as a pinch hitter and loft a ball over the wall. Maybe he would beat out an infield single. Anything, really, to feel like he had made an impact on an Astros team that traded for him expecting one.
Instead, as he stood beaming in the Houston clubhouse after a 3–2 win in Game 5 of the World Series to deliver the Astros within one victory of a championship, he listened to his teammates laud him for a glove he had not even planned to don, a glove that preserved a lead, ended an inning and snuffed out the Phillies’ best chance at a rally.
“That was an unbelievable play,” said third baseman Alex Bregman as he named Mancini the player of the game amid raucous cheering. “To come in off the bench and do it—it changed the game.”
“Thank you for bearing with me,” Mancini told them. “I wasn’t exactly expecting to do it with the glove, but I’m glad to come through in some way.”
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Half an hour earlier, he’d been almost ready to throw something. With two on and two out in the top of the eighth inning of Game 5 of the World Series, the series knotted at two games apiece, Houston leading the Phillies by two, manager Dusty Baker sent Mancini up to pinch hit for first baseman Yuli Gurriel, who’d tweaked his right knee getting caught in a rundown in the seventh. Mancini did what he has done all postseason: He missed two pitches he could have handled and swung at one he couldn’t.
“He’s probably in between pitches a little bit,” hitting coach Troy Snitker explained: a little late on fastballs, a little early on offspeed stuff. Just never quite in the right place at the right time.
They can diagnose the problem, but they have not yet been able to fix it. Maybe in the offseason Mancini will revamp his swing. In the meantime, he mostly just keeps trying and keeps feeling bad. In the two months after the Orioles sent him to the Astros at the deadline, Mancini had a .622 OPS. In the postseason, that number is .100. Mancini, his voice almost cracking, said, “I got traded here to be an impact hitter, and I haven’t been that up to this point. I’m sorry that I haven’t been.”
Mancini, 30, was never a top prospect, but he became the face of a moribund franchise not long after Baltimore called him up in 2016. His teams scuffled to six straight losing seasons and sent him to Houston amid a rebuild. Most harrowing, he was diagnosed with colon cancer on his 28th birthday; he is in remission. He does not trivialize the illness by relating it to baseball, but he does say it has given him perspective.
So where he might once have taken out his frustration on the bat racks on Thursday, he instead tried to forget it as he took the field for the bottom of the eighth, playing first base for the first time since Oct. 5. He played only 31 games this year at first base, 10 of them with the Astros. He did not even take ground balls at the position in Philadelphia, so sure was he that he would not spend time there. But Baker and bench coach Joe Espada decided they trusted him there over their other bench option, Aledmys Díaz.
Righty Rafael Montero walked two of the first three men he faced, then allowed a single to Jean Segura to plate a run and bring the game within one. Closer Ryan Pressly struck out Brandon Marsh on three pitches to bring up left-handed left fielder Kyle Schwarber, one of the Phillies’ most fearsome hitters.
Schwarber faced an infield shift during 90.5% of his plate appearances this year, typically with the first baseman a few steps off the baseline and just barely on the dirt, the second baseman in shallow right field, the shortstop between first and second base and the third baseman barely on the third-base side of second. And indeed, that’s where the Astros set up on Thursday night. Mancini held Segura on first but gave him two steps off the bag. Pressly’s first pitch was a slider inside, which Schwarber pulled foul. The next pitch was a curveball in the dirt for ball one. Schwarber swung through a curveball for strike two. Catcher Martín Maldonado called for a slider.
In the dugout, Espada got Mancini’s attention and motioned for him to move two steps closer to the bag. They needed to prevent a double—Segura is fast enough to score from first and give the Phillies the lead—and they knew Schwarber would try to pull a ball for a home run. “I saw the spin on Pressly,” Espada said, “So I’m like, ‘Dude, just stay on that line.’”
Schwarber drilled a rocket, straight at the baseline. Mancini leaned to his right, snared it and, toppling over, stomped his left foot on the base for the out. He looked more like a catcher or a hockey goalie than a first baseman, the textbook approach on a ball like that. If he’d been two steps off the bag, he would not have caught it. “The ball was hit that hard,” Espada said. Instead, inning over. Rally over. Espada smothered him with a hug once he returned to the dugout.
“I had nothing going through my head,” Mancini said. “I just tackled it, basically.” He added that given the stakes, this had to have been the best play of his career. “I don’t know how many highlight reel plays I have on defense,” he said, laughing. “Probably not too many.”
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Four innings earlier, shortstop Jeremy Peña had become the first rookie shortstop to hit a home run in the World Series and given the team the lead. In the ninth, center fielder Chas McCormick would make an incredible play of his own, a leaping, wall-scaling catch to turn a J.T. Realmuto double into an out. But in the end, the Astros decided the player of the game was Mancini, for finally being in the right place at the right time.
