Game 2: Astros 7, Dodgers 6. 49 comments


Joy in Astrosland.

 

What a great advertisement for baseball.

With the NFL self-imploding from politics and arrogance and boredom and concussions and despicable players and greed and dwindling ratings, baseball shows once again why it’s the greatest sport.

The Dodgers couldn’t simply let the clock run out.

It’s called the law of average for a reason. Eventually it all averages out. The more you outsmart yourself with analytics, the more chances you give for the numbers to defy you. The more relievers you run out there, the higher the odds that one of them is going to have a bad night.

The Dodgers bullpen had been invincible. The Astros offense had been invisible. But this is baseball. So, naturally, things changed.

Game 2 looked like a carbon copy of Game 1, a 3-1 nail-biter with the runs being scored pretty much the exact same way at the exact same time.

Then in the eighth inning, an entirely new game broke out.

The Astros scored in the eighth to get within a run. Scored in the ninth to tie it. Twice in the tenth to take a two-run lead.

But the Dodgers won 104 games this season for a reason. They can hit. They battled back in the bottom of the tenth to tie it with two outs.

So the Astros came off the mat and scored two more in the top of the eleventh.

What do the Dodgers do? Answer with a home run in the bottom of the eleventh to make it a one-run deficit in a home run crazy game.

But the Astros hung on, won 7-6 in a game that looked like they were dead.

The series goes to Houston tied a game apiece. It’s what you expected so far from two evenly matched teams.

No matter who wins, baseball wins.