HOUSTON – For five years, they reestablished a standard of excellence in Major League Baseball, making the World Series their near-annual playground yet earning well-earned scorn off the field and heartbreak on it.
Yet with one mighty swing from Yordan Alvarez, the Houston Astros – after scandal, organizational tumult, free-agent defections and a maddening series of near-misses – returned to the baseball summit Saturday night, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 4-1 in Game 6 of the World Series, earning their first championship since a now-sullied 2017 title.
That electronic sign-stealing scandal, revealed two years after the Astros beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games, threatened to frame every movement of the organization, and certainly its protagonists, in a disputed light. For some, that may always be the case.
But rather than chafe at their detractors, or wallow in guilt, the Astros simply went back to the work of building and sustaining excellence.
And in winning just the second championship in franchise history, they left no doubt.
“You can’t say it didn’t bother them,” Astros owner Jim Crane said of the sign-stealing scandal and the aftermath, “but they worked their way through it and played hard and you got a result tonight that’s pretty spectacular.”
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The Astros won 11 of 13 games this postseason,…
