Heading into Game 6 of the 2021 World Series, which may very well end up being the final resting place for this run of Astros dominance, Houston needed rookie pitcher Luis Garcia to be at his best.
Atlanta already had the pitching advantage coming into the game with lefty Max Fried on the mound and his knee-buckling curveball fully rested after starting Game 2.
Garcia, meanwhile, was on short rest, and while he had an impressive 2021 campaign, did not bring the track record of Fried. To win this game, he didn’t necessarily need to be great, but he needed to be good enough to let the pack of wolves in the Astros’ dugout get him a lead.
As the game unfolded and Fried sat down Astro after Astro, it was clear that Houston needed Garcia to be perfect. Perfect is not often a reality in baseball.
When Jorge Soler’s chain-snatching home run finally landed some 446 feet away, Garcia and his teammates were effectively dead. Not so much dead in the physical sense, but mentally, spiritually and emotionally, the Houston Astros of the last seven years went out the Minute Maid Park roof along with Soler’s deathly dinger.
Atlanta not only played the role of menacing rain cloud to Houston’s dreams of a parade, they also did the same to the Dodgers and Brewers in the earlier rounds. Atlanta beat those teams, which each outpaced them by at least seven wins in the regular season, the way a storm envelops unsuspecting walkers: first slowly and easy to dismiss, then all at once.
This Atlanta team is what happens when belief gets personified, when a team convinced it is the better one actually plays well enough, and long enough, for that to become the truth. That’s how they rebounded from losing their first game of the postseason to beat Brewers’ demons Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta in back-to-back games. It’s how they came back twice in the same game to beat Milwaukee and its unbeatable closer Josh Hader in Game 4, setting up a duel with the Dodgers.
In beating the mighty Dodgers and Astros’, shoving each of them against a 3-1 wall before finishing them, Atlanta forcibly removed any conversations about flukes or kismet or dumb luck.
Make no mistake. This was a team that, at least for a month, was both talented and focused enough to wrestle championship aspirations away from any 95, 105, or even 115-win team in their path.
Look at Soler, Dansby Swanson and Max Fried. For the next few days, streets all across the southeast will be peppered with conversations about Soler being a bad man in the best type of way. His three home runs in this World Series — the leadoff shot in the first at-bat of the series, the pinch-hit winner in Game 4 and the legacy-clinching bomb in Game 6 — are why the Atlanta front office believed in a guy who was hitting .192 in Kansas City when they traded for him. They don’t win this trophy without Soler, and Soler isn’t involved at all without some trust that a breakout was coming if given the proper circumstances.
The same is true of Swanson, the self-proclaimed Atlanta lifer who a previous regime traded for to be the light out of the darkness. Atlanta lost 95 games in 2015 and needed to clean house. That winter they identified Swanson, who Arizona was willing to give up on just six months after taking him first overall in the draft, as the cornerstone of an infield that would one day bring them to the mountaintop again.
Swanson’s hike was not immediate nor linear (he got demoted to Triple-A in 2017), but that made the view even prettier. For the kid from Marietta, Georgia, who was hand-picked to be his hometown team’s golden boy, a home run in the clincher and the toss across the infield for the final out is almost too good to be true.
Then there’s Fried, who did not look overwhelmed, nervous, or shaken by stage fright for one second on Tuesday. Fried attacked the strike zone like it did something personal to him, coming out on the other side with the longest outing of any Atlanta pitcher this postseason and a permanent champion prefix added to his name.
Like Swanson, Fried joined the Atlanta organization via trade when he was still a minor leaguer. The team turned the page on Justin Upton in 2014 and ushered in Fried with one fell swoop, pulling off a trade that will look better and better as Fried matures and Upton plays out the string. Atlanta believed in Fried’s ace potential when they acquired him in 2014, and seven years later they believed in his ability to shut down baseball’s tyrant for the last half decade.
In trusting Fried to handle the big stage — eschewing a Game 5 start at home on short rest, knowing they’d have him in their pocket for a heart-palpitating Game 6 on the road — Atlanta stayed the course that led them to a championship for the first time since 1995.
There was no panic, no sulking about losing shooting stars Ronald Acuña Jr. and Mike Soroka to injury (and No. 1 starter Charlie Morton during the World Series), and certainly no inkling of doubt in themselves. The 2021 World Series champions will be remembered for doing something that no one thought they could do until it was far too late, as the rest of the baseball world finally looked up, swallowed their pride, and admitted that Atlanta was a damn good team.
As the champagne showers engulf their clubhouse, the players and coaches who brought an entire region of fans on this rapturous ride are probably sharing a laugh about the idea that mostly everyone outside that room thought this would be too hard for them.
