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World Series: Braves shut out Astros in Game 6 to win title

The Atlanta Braves celebrate after winning the World Series title with a 7-0 victory over the Houston Astros in Game 6 on Tuesday night in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
The Atlanta Braves celebrate after winning the World Series title with a 7-0 victory over the Houston Astros in Game 6 on Tuesday night in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
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The Atlanta Braves’ Jorge Soler hits a three-run home run against the Houston Astros during the third inning in Game Six of the World Series at Minute Maid Park on November 02, 2021 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
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By BEN WALKER AP Baseball Writer

HOUSTON — Most of the season, it just seemed this wasn’t their year.

They dropped their first four games, and soon injuries piled up. They lost their most dynamic player before the All-Star break. They were stuck below .500 in August.

Yet out of nowhere, suddenly, these Atlanta Braves transformed themselves and took off.

Jorge Soler, Freddie Freeman and the Braves breezed to their first World Series championship since 1995, hammering the Houston Astros, 7-0, Tuesday night in Game 6. Former Harvard-Westlake star Max Fried threw six dominant innings in a signature pitching performance to close it out.

“We hit every pothole, every bump you could possibly hit this year,” said Freeman, who starred at El Modena High in Orange. “Injuries, every single kind of thing that could happen, that could go wrong went wrong, and we overcame every single one of those things.”

How proud Hank Aaron would have been.

Even so, Atlanta’s troubles never fully went away.

General Manager Alex Anthopoulos, the architect of the Braves’ midseason turnaround, missed this crowning achievement after testing positive for COVID-19. He was back home for the clincher.

Soler, a July acquisition who tested positive for the coronavirus in the playoffs, backed Fried early with a monster three-run shot for his third homer against the Astros.

Freeman hit an RBI double and then punctuated the romp with a solo home run in the seventh that made it 7-0.

By then, it was a total team effort. Ailing star Ronald Acuña Jr., the dynamo of Atlanta’s future, bounded from the dugout to join the celebration for Freeman, the longtime face of the franchise.

When Yuli Gurriel grounded out to end it, Freeman caught the throw at first base, put the ball in his pocket, and the party was on for Manager Brian Snitker’s club.

A full hour after the game, hundreds of Braves fans packed behind the team’s third base dugout kept doing the chop and chant, causing loud echoes to bounce around the ballpark.

About 700 miles away at suburban Truist Park, thousands of fans poured into the Braves’ home to holler.

A mere afterthought in the summer heat among the land of the San Francisco Giants, Chicago White Sox and Dodgers, but magnificent in the Fall Classic.

“This is the toughest team I’ve ever been a part of,” said shortstop Dansby Swanson, who also homered.

Soler tapped his heart twice before beginning his home run trot after connecting off rookie Luis Garcia in the third inning, sending the ball flying completely out of Minute Maid Park and clinching the Series MVP award.

By the end, nothing could stop them. Not a broken leg sustained by starter Charlie Morton in the World Series opener. Not a big blown lead in Game 5.

Steadied by 66-year-old Snitker, an organization man for four decades, the underdog Braves won the franchise’s fourth title.

“They never gave up on themselves,” he said on a postgame victory platform. “We lost a lot of pieces over the course of the summer and it was just the next man up.”

Consider it a tribute to the greatest Braves player of them all. Aaron died on Jan. 22 at 86, still pulling for his old team, and The Hammer’s legacy was stamped all over this Series.

“Nobody ever wanted to let Hank down,” Snitker said. “That’s just the way it was, we didn’t want to let him down. He charged us with a responsibility to make these guys better and we weren’t going to let him down.”

And note the Braves outhomered the top-scoring team in the majors by 11-2.

For 72-year-old Houston manager Dusty Baker, a disappointment. But for many fans still rooting against the Astros in the wake of their 2017 sign-stealing scandal, some satisfaction.

“Yeah, it’s tough, but you know something? You’ve got to keep on trucking, and that gives you even more incentive next year,” Baker said.

“It’s tough to take now, but this too shall pass. I mean, it really hurts, but it’s over,” he added.

Major credit for the Braves, too, goes to Anthopoulos. Undaunted by Acuña’s knee injury, he pulled off a flurry of July trades that brought the Fab Four to the outfield – NL Championship Series MVP Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson and Soler.

“Thanks to God for the opportunity to be on this team,” Soler said through a translator.

But even in the Analytics Era, guided by a GM fully versed in new-age ways, the path these Braves took wouldn’t add up in any computer. Especially with how things looked in midseason.

“At that time, we were searching,” third baseman Austin Riley said before Game 6. “I think there’s no question about that.”

Minus Acuña, Atlanta wasn’t over .500 for a single day until the first week in August. The Braves finished 88-73 for the 12th-best record in the majors and fewest victories among playoff teams; their win total was the lowest for a World Series champion since St. Louis’ 83 in 2006.

Plus, the agonizing history of sports in Atlanta, a city where no team had won a title in the four major pro sports besides 1995.

The Braves couldn’t convert a 3-1 series advantage over the Dodgers in the NL Championship Series last year. The Hawks fell short in the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals last season. And then there was the big one, the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead to the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

But these Braves, not this time.

“Boy, we’re in November right now and we’ve been doing this since February. We’ve had so many ups and downs this year. For us to be world champions, that is awesome to hear,” Freeman said.

Favored in spring training to win their fourth consecutive NL East title, the Braves lost Acuña to a torn knee in July. Earlier, 2020 Triple Crown contender Marcell Ozuna was injured and later placed on leave while Major League Baseball investigated him under its domestic violence policy. Projected ace Mike Soroka never made it back from an Achilles injury.

Going into the playoffs, their bullpen was a crazy patchwork.

They had a guy who made his big league debut in October, a lefty who was pitching in 2019 for the Texas AirHogs in a now-defunct independent league (Mission Viejo High product Tyler Matzek) and a righty who was stacking boxes at an appliance warehouse a decade ago. Toss in a rookie who was off the roster a week ago as he watched Game 1 at a hotel in suburban Atlanta.

For sure, plenty of fans around the country were rooting hard against Jose Altuve and the Houston crew. Many continue to heckle them as the “Cheatin’ Astros” for an illegal sign-stealing scheme on the way to their 2017 title, and those feelings might last forever.

Certainly a lot of people were cheering for Baker. A World Series winner as a player and a highly respected figure on and off the field, he wasn’t able to check the final box on his resume as a championship skipper.

The Braves’ crowns have been spread out over more than a century.

The 1995 Atlanta champs featured five future Hall of Famers – rookie Chipper Jones, aces Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz, and Manager Bobby Cox. Those rings were the lone pieces of hardware that resulted from 14 consecutive division titles.

The 1957 Milwaukee Braves were led by Aaron in his only NL MVP season. The Hall of Famer’s jersey No. 44 was painted in large numbers on the outfield grass at Truist Park, and Baker and Snitker often mentioned how much he’d meant to them.

There were the 1914 Boston Braves, too, dubbed the “Miracle Braves” back in the day. In last place on the Fourth of July, they surged to win the pennant, then upset a heavily favored team – the Philadelphia A’s – to earn their nickname.

Sound familiar?

FROM SUMMER CASTOFF TO MVP

A spare piece no more, Soler drove a pitch over the train tracks, out of Minute Maid Park and deep into the heart of Texas. He dropped his bat, tapped his chest twice and jabbed a hand toward the Braves’ dugout, yelling “I’m here!”

Three months earlier, he was a .192 hitter on a fourth-place team.

Two weeks ago, he was sidelined by COVID-19.

Now, he was a World Series star, finishing off the Astros for the Braves’ drought-ending World Series title.

A bit player during the Chicago Cubs’ drought-smashing victory over Cleveland five years ago, Soler was voted MVP of Atlanta’s six-game Series win over the Astros.

“We’ve known what he can do for so long,” Freeman said in the interview room as Soler waited to walk up to the podium. “Two years ago, he’s hitting 50 homers. It’s actually pretty incredible what he did in the World Series, getting COVID in the NLCS and missing 10 days and then coming back and not missing a beat.”

Soler hit .300 with three home runs and six RBIs. Numbers tell only part of the story.

Each home run was a moment in time, a round-trip trio that will be replayed over and over when Soler is introduced for the rest of his life.

He started off the 117th World Series with something that had not occurred in the first 678 games of baseball’s championship – a home run by the very first batter. After taking two balls from Framber Valdez, he turned on a 93.7 mph heater at the letters and drove it 382 feet, about four rows deep into the Crawford seats behind the 19-foot high left-field scoreboard.

Then, after Swanson hit a tying home run in the seventh inning of Game 4 on Saturday in Atlanta, Soler pinch-hit against Cristian Javier and got just enough of a hanging slider. The ball sailed over the glove of a charging Yordan Álvarez as he crashed into Truist Park’s 6-foot chain link left field fence and landed in the Astros’ bullpen for a 3-2 lead that stood up, giving the Braves 3-1 series lead.

Soler saved his best for last.

With the score 0-0 in the third inning Tuesday night, Atlanta put two on with two outs against Luis Garcia. Soler worked the count full.

There was double-barreled action in the Astros bullpen. Freeman watched intently from halfway between the on-deck circle and the plate.

Soler fouled off a slider, slapping the ball harshly behind third base, and then a fastball, even farther foul.

“I was sitting on the offspeed, and I was thinking to myself, if he throws me an offspeed pitch, I can connect and drive the ball,” Soler said through a translator. “If he throws me a fastball, I’m just going to try to stay alive during this at-bat.”

As catcher Martín Maldonado splayed his right leg wide toward the first base dugout to set his glove down low, Javier threw an 83.4 mph cutter and the ball spun right over the middle of the plate, belt high.

Soler didn’t see the ball clear the stadium.

“Immediately after I hit it, I turned around just to look at our dugout and start celebrating,” he said.

Garcia didn’t turn to look, either. Like Charlie Brown, he knew.

“You know it happens, right? It happens. That’s it,” Garcia said. “I mean, it’s OK. It just happens.”

Soler’s three Series home runs matched the most for the Braves, equaling Hank Aaron in 1957, Lonnie Smith in 1991 and Ryan Klesko in 1995.

Soler had a Cuban flag draped around him during the celebration, the second World Series MVP from the island nation after the Marlins’ Livan Hernandez in 1997.

After defecting from Cuba in 2011, Soler agreed to a $30 million, nine-year contract with the Cubs. He was just 2 for 5 with a walk in the 2016 Series and was dealt to Kansas City the following September for reliever Wade Davis.

Soler led American League batters with 48 home runs in 2019 – and also with 178 strikeouts. With Atlanta seeking replacements for its depleted outfield, the out-of-contention Royals dealt the 29-year-old on July 30 for minor league right-hander Kaley Kalich.

“It was challenging at first. I felt a little out of my comfort zone. I didn’t really know people,” Soler said. “It was kind of tough to go to a new place and start making those acquaintances and everything. Within a week, I felt right at home. Everyone in that clubhouse welcomed me in, and it felt instantly, after a little while, just like a family.”

Soler revived with the Braves, hitting .269 with 14 homers and 33 RBIs. He didn’t drive in any runs in the NL playoffs, missing five games because of a positive COVID-19 test.

He was among the fabulous four players acquired by general manager Alex Anthopoulos ahead of the July 30 trade deadline. Eddie Rosario, Joc Pederson and Adam Duvall also played key roles.

“You can go and get players, and you can throw him in a clubhouse, and sometimes that piece just don’t fit into that puzzle,” Freeman said. “They came into our clubhouse, and they fit perfectly.”

And now World Series rings will fit snugly, too.

ANTHOPOULOS IS MISSED

Anthopoulos said he tested positive for the virus Saturday, so he stayed back in the Atlanta area during the Braves’ Game 6 win.

“We were not going to take any chances,” he said.

Anthopoulos said he and his wife are fully vaccinated and no one in his family had any virus-related symptoms. He said he woke up his 9-year-old son in the ninth inning and they got to watch the end of the game as a family.

“My kids are fine, my wife is fine. We just had our own little World Series party at home,” he said.

Anthopoulos had a huge hand in the championship.

“I hate that he’s not here,” Snitker said after the game. “He’s such a big part of this.”

The 44-year-old Anthopoulos has been the Braves’ general manager since November 2017.

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