Nationals win first World Series title, storming back on Astros in Game 7, 6-2
With one more comeback win, at the end of a comeback season for the ages, the Nationals were World Series champions. A 6-2 victory over the Houston Astros in Game 7 on Wednesday night sealed it, delivering the first baseball title for the nation’s capital since Walter Johnson’s Senators won their only one in 1924.
Having existed for the better part of five months as a decided underdog — their chances of winning the World Series on May 24, when they were 19-31, were 1.5 percent — the Nationals had come to live for the daily fight for their lives. And now, the fight was over.
Seventh-inning home runs by Anthony Rendon and Howie Kendrick, the former an MVP-caliber third baseman possibly playing his last game in a Nationals uniform, the latter a 36-year-old veteran in the deepest autumn of his career, turned a slim deficit into a slim lead for the Nationals. A tacked-on run in the eighth and two more in the ninth provided some breathing room.
The final out, delivered by reliever Daniel Hudson, settled into catcher Yan Gomes’s glove at 10:50 p.m. Central time, touching off the mad dash to the center of the diamond. A hushed crowd of 43,326 watched the visitors celebrate as the Astros slouched off the field.
And so ended the longest season in Washington baseball history — one that began on a chilly Thursday in late March, cratered in late May, caught fire in the summer months, tested hearts in September and careened through October like a wobble-wheeled wagon set free at the top of a steep hill. This Nationals season was a wild, screaming, impossibly long ride, one that carried them all the way to the doorstep of November.
Take a step back and consider what these Nationals accomplished: They notched all four of their wins in this series on the road, in the building where the Astros had the majors’ best home record in 2019, and became the first team since the 2016 Chicago Cubs to take the World Series by winning Games 6 and 7 on the road. They outhit an Astros offense that ranked among the most potent in history. They hung losses on the Astros’ twin aces — Gerrit Cole in Game 1, Justin Verlander in Games 2 and 6 — and outlasted yet another Houston ace, Zack Greinke, on Wednesday night.
“To win four games on the road in the World Series,” said first baseman Ryan Zimmerman, the longest-tenured National, “it’s almost fitting for us.”
On a makeshift stage moments after the final out, pitcher Stephen Strasburg, the overpowering victor of Games 2 and 6, was presented with the World Series MVP trophy. The Lerner family, which has owned the team since 2006, stood alongside General Manager Mike Rizzo and Manager Dave Martinez and lifted the Commissioner’s Trophy. Players hugged and waved to their families below. Pitcher Max Scherzer stood off to the side and cried openly.
“I’m speechless,” principal owner Mark Lerner said. “I’ve dreamed of this my entire life.”
There had never been an October like this in the nation’s capital, one so full of baseball and life. The last time a Washington team played in the World Series, the original Senators in 1933, it ended Oct. 7. But in the current, expanded playoff format, with 10 teams and four rounds, this October stretched on for week upon glorious week — an exhilarating ride that took them from Nationals Park on the first night of the month to Minute Maid Park the night before Halloween.
Those two bookend games, the win-or-go-home wild-card game that launched the Nationals’ October and the Game 7 on Wednesday night that ended it, had one thing in common: They were both started by Scherzer.
Three nights earlier, the Nationals’ ace could barely get himself out of bed and couldn’t raise his pitching arm, because of a severe bout of neck spasms that would force the team to scratch him from his Game 5 start at Nationals Park on Sunday. Getting him ready to pitch Wednesday night required a cortisone shot, ample rest and perhaps divine intervention.
Getting him past the Astros’ lineup, the best in baseball this season, would not be as easy.
Scherzer lived in near-constant danger throughout his five innings, allowing only a pair of runs but pitching with traffic on the base paths throughout. One of the great strikeout pitchers of his era, he didn’t record his first in Game 7 until his 17th batter of the night. It was Scherzer’s great fortune that the vast majority of the Astros’ line drives and deep smashes landed in the gloves of his teammates.
That Martinez had failed to get a reliever warmed up as a clearly diminished Scherzer was allowing the Astros’ second run to score in the fifth seemed to be either an egregious mistake or a staggering show of faith in his ace. By the time the fifth ended, the Astros led 2-0 but already had stranded nine base runners.
In other words, after a month of exquisite play and narrow escapes, Game 7 had carried the Nationals to a familiar place. They had spent so much of the past five months playing from behind — from the long slog of digging out of May’s 19-31 hole to the win-or-go-home games of early and mid-October — that it almost brought a perverse sense of comfort. They were at their best, they liked to say, when their backs were to the wall.
Wednesday night marked their fifth elimination game of the month, where a loss would end the season, following one at Nationals Park in the wild-card game, two against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series and Tuesday night’s Game 6 win over the Astros. They had trailed in all of them, storming back each time to win. Their reputation as the sport’s ultimate fighters was well earned.
The seventh inning homers by Rendon and Kendrick — the former a no-doubt blast into the stands in left, the latter a bending, twisting, opposite field drive that clanged off the right field foul pole — were merely confirmation. Suddenly, the Nationals’ 2-0 deficit was a 3-2 lead, and they were nine outs from winning the World Series.
By Wednesday night, the Nationals were running on a cocktail of fumes, painkillers, Red Bulls and dwindling supplies of adrenaline. Each player was reduced to his component parts and what each had left in it — how many pitches, how many innings, how many competitive at-bats.
After all the speculation about how the Nationals might piece together the necessary 27 outs for victory, it was as tidy of an affair as they could have dreamed. Scherzer went five, giving way to left-hander Patrick Corbin, their Game 4 starter, now pitching on short rest, who handled the next three innings without incident. And finally, Hudson entered for the ninth and set down the Astros.
“I kept counting down the outs in my head,” shortstop Trea Turner said. “Nine more outs. Eight …”
Throughout this month, the Nationals left their fans a trove of memory-book moments: Soto’s eighth-inning, three-run single off Milwaukee Brewers relief ace Josh Hader to lift the Nationals to victory in the NL wild-card game, the back-to-back homers from Rendon and Soto off Dodgers icon Clayton Kershaw in the eighth inning to tie Game 5 of the division series and Howie Kendrick’s grand slam two innings later off Joe Kelly to push the Nationals ahead.
The World Series alone featured two excellent starts from Strasburg, the World Series MVP, three homers from Soto and Scherzer’s heroic effort just to get himself to the mound for Game 7.
The Astros may have been baseball’s best team in the regular season — a 107-win juggernaut out of the top-heavy American League, with an offense that ranks among the best in history and a rotation headed by a trio of aces — but they were outplayed across seven games by the Nationals, humble wild-card winners out of the National League.
To the very end, the Nationals played with a joy and camaraderie that is impossible to fake. They were an Internet meme come to life, with their dugout dance parties, “Baby Shark” singalongs, pink sunglasses, Soto Shuffles, champagne-soaked renditions of Latin pop hit “Calma” and their ubiquitous catchphrase: “Stay in the fight.”
The fight lasted as long as it possibly could, through the final date on the baseball calendar. Washington had waited 95 years for another World Series champion. But the wait is over. The next time anyone sees this team, it will be at the championship parade down Constitution Avenue on Saturday.