Yordan Alvarez’s three-run shot in the sixth inning powered Houston’s 4-1 victory in Game 6 over the Phillies.
HOUSTON — The center-field fence at Minute Maid Park sits 409 feet away from home plate. The green batter’s eye that resides behind it stands 40 feet tall. Players don’t ever hit baseballs beyond it.
And yet Saturday night, with the game in doubt and a title on the line, Yordan Alvarez did.
His sixth-inning home run, against the left-handed reliever brought in exclusively to retire him, traveled 450 feet to straightaway center field, clearing the towering batter’s eye, scoring three runs, sending his jubilant teammates streaming onto the field and propelling the Houston Astros to a 4-1, title-clinching victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 6.
The Astros, one of the most dominant teams of this era, are World Series champions for the first time since 2017, a season tainted by scandal. Jeremy Pena, the rookie shortstop who strung together three consecutive multi-hit games, was named World Series MVP, the same award he won in the American League Championship Series.
A strong case could have also been made for Framber Valdez, who shut down the Phillies in Game 2 and contributed six stellar innings in Game 6. The Phillies’ only run off Valdez came on a sixth-inning leadoff home run by Kyle Schwarber. Moments later, Alvarez delivered the decisive blow, a notable theme of this postseason.
Zack Wheeler dominated the Astros through the first five innings, erasing any concerns about lingering arm fatigue. But with two on and one out in the bottom of the sixth, Phillies manager Rob Thomson turned the game over to Jose Alvarado, eyeing the left-on-left matchup with Alvarez due up.
Alvarez, 25, had gone homerless in his last 10 postseason games and had accumulated only five hits in his last 42 at-bats. Then he turned on a 2-1 sinker out over the plate and demolished it, producing the second-longest World Series home run of the Statcast era (surpassed only by Freddie Freeman’s home run in Game 5 of last year’s World Series). It was Alvarez’s third home run this postseason, all of which came while the Astros were trailing and gave them the lead. No other player had ever hit two of those in an entire postseason career.
