You can exhale now.
Your wait is over.
On a cool, perfect October evening, the Astros unburdened themselves of 44 seasons of close calls and disappointment. They are no longer the team that couldn’t finish the deal. That team is no more. In one final test of their poise and perseverance, the other guy blinked.
Twenty-game winner Roy Oswalt pitched seven solid innings and the Astros collected 11 hits to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals 5-1 Wednesday night in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series.
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This morning, your Astros–yes, your Astros–are the National League champions. Roll that last sentence around your head. Say it aloud.
Craig Biggio, who understands better than anyone, cried. Others are so young and so new that they simply couldn’t feel everything Biggio was feeling.
“We believed in our team all year,” Biggio said. “We believe in everyone in that clubhouse. We never gave up. We went through a lot this year. Maybe going through the tough times allowed us to do what we were able to do.”
They weren’t there for those other years. They didn’t care about the close calls. They didn’t care about 1980 or 1998. They didn’t care about all those years Atlanta routinely sent the Astros home.
Maybe that’s why these Astros succeeded. Because they didn’t know about those other years. And because they didn’t care.
The Astros played this game the same way they played a lot of this season. They did it the hard way. They pecked out two runs in the third. One scored on a suicide squeeze. They got a Jason Lane home run in the fourth. They got another in the sixth and another in the seventh.
Their defeat in Game 5 had been so ghastly that some questioned if the Astros could bounce back. Baseball’s roadside is littered with teams that collapsed after suffering that kind of loss.
The Astros had joked about it on the flight to St. Louis. They’d seemed unbothered.
In the end, they were unbothered. From the beginning, the Astros believed they could win the NLCS because of their pitching. In the end, that’s what won for them.
Garner handed the ball to Chad Qualls for a scoreless eighth and then used Dan Wheeler in the ninth. In doing so, he gave closer Brad Lidge a night off. Lidge had given up that monstrous game-winning home run to Albert Pujols in Game 5. He warmed up in the ninth and would have come in if Wheeler had gotten in trouble.
“Had it been a one- or two-run game, Brad would have been in there,” Garner said.
Garner emphasized Lidge will be his closer again in the World Series. Yes, the Astros will play a World Series game.