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CLEVELAND – This is how it ends against the Houston Astros, your ball disappears slowly, discreetly. Here, on a Monday afternoon, the red t-shirts, caps, streamers and face paint had gone to rush hour in the green of the big abs, abandoned seats and exits sad.
You play your songs and hold your breath, you hit your drum and, and it ends the same way, with the Astros a little better, if not much better. With long shadows and your season over. The lassitude that just played with his heart and conclude that it would not be enough or here, in the case of the Cleveland Indians, not close enough.
The Astros have once won 101 games, then little by little, breath after breath, their first World Series championship. Then, at a time when it may be too much to ask to do it again, because it is difficult to achieve the career success that will be remembered and start from scratch, because the path is too difficult and luck – he there's always luck – too fleeting, the Astros have won 103 games and, early in the evening, they dismantled the hopeful Indians in three games.
Who is next?
So they left their canoe, not in a hysterical party, but in compound satisfaction. In addition to three games in four days, they had dominated the Indians 21-6, 0.37-0.14, 8-2, they had committed zero errors, had done their thing, spotted their fastball, hit their cut men, caught their walks. I just play the game, almost flawless.
George Springer (4) and his Houston Astros teammates celebrate the victory after defeating the Cleveland Indians in the third game of a division series of the American League of Baseball on Monday, Oct. 8, 2018 in Cleveland. (AP)
And then they drank beer, as predicted by the gods.
Monday's final score, in the time slot of the joint venture early in the afternoon, was 11 to 3 for Astros. George Springer, who has made the comeback three times since a month and a half since he's thumb wounded, has done it three times in the series, twice on Monday, both on the first shots, because, as he explained, And Marwin Gonzalez launched the most beautiful two-sleeve double on the other side you'll see, that he corrected: "I do not know not so it was a superb shot. It was a bad move. And it does not matter. And Carlos Correa, hitherto without a touch in the series, smoked a fast 3-0 ball for a reverse home race, which was more than a good shot, but more than three more races, as that the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees are coming, the Astros are going to need Carlos Correa.
"Not so much the swing," manager A.J. Hinch said: "But the confidence needed to perform a 3-0 swing."
A painful, sticky back has turned Correa into a guy who beats seventh and survives most days or tries. The simplest solution on a pitch of 3-0 is to wait for the ball four, to pass the sleeve to the other player, who is probably and for the moment a little more capable. So, Hinch was encouraged by the fact that Correa is not there yet, that he is not in a defensive place, and instead has attacked a piece of land that should certainly have been attacked. Which is a reasonable metaphor for the Astros, who have not yet been accused of living from an endless parade of victory, who have not once asked where that extra ounce of energy was gone and which seemed on the contrary, have improved.
That's where we rely on Alex Bregman, who had two more hits on Monday and finished the batting series with .56. He is the third-year player who improvises and who already embodies the fight in the Astros – he and Jose Altuve and Springer and, indeed, many of them. Soaked in what had been thrown and sprinkled in his clubhouse for an hour, Bregman explained how to hit, how the mechanisms and mechanisms came and went, how the basic successes were pursued with such determination, and summed up in the process what A championship season should also feel like.
"You paddle out," said Bregman, "go up on a wave and go up as long as you can. Then, as soon as you have no more, you go back. You go outside and find a new wave.
It's his relentlessness. How it must be. How 101 wins and a World Series title sweeping a city turns into 103 wins and a decent chance for another, how there is little or no fallout, how if anything you've discovered at the moment? inside of you that you can keep and handle. A series of divisions does not conquer the world, not when these big boys are still fighting in the Bronx, but that's what's in front of them. Just for a little, it turned out.
"At the beginning of the season, I was curious," said Hinch about what his team would feel, season after season. "But not after the first day of spring training. … Obviously, there are many things that must happen to win in this league. Health. Luck. You have to catch some teams at the right time. You must win a lot of games.
"As you can see, our guys are very hungry to move on."
And then, it's better than the alternative. The Indians lost nine elimination playoff games 23 years ago. He is probably getting older. They were a game to win a world series themselves it was not so long ago. Rather than this moment, this loss being the beginning of something huge, the Indians were twice released in the first round. It weighs heavily.
Alex Bregman of the Houston Astros looks at his RBI single in the ninth in the third game of a Cleveland Indians American baseball league series on Monday, Oct. 8, 2018 in Cleveland. (AP)
"Oh, yes, Indians," said a Cleveland cab driver Sunday night, as he had just remembered that they were still playing.
The streets of downtown Cleveland were almost empty, people being out of breath with darkness.
The football team has two wins and October is barely a week away. And a tie. The truth about the Astros and what it meant for the Indians was settling down.
"Hey," said the taxi driver, "all their throwers are injured," because that's what 0-2, 0-2 feels towards the defending World Series champions, 0-2 while you have already passed Kluber and Carrasco, 0-2 and the attack has six hits in 60 decisive shots, which does not even seem possible before, by the end, by 0-3, it's 13 hits (3 for extra goals) on 90 strokes scored.
For example, 24 hours after the Browns placed nearly 68,000 people in the FirstEnergy Stadium, the Indians placed nearly 38,000 people in Progressive Field, then the Astros excluded 38,000 people from Progressive Field. One at a time. Until everything is green again. And then dark.
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