Boston Red Sox end any hopes of repeat champion

The Boston Red Sox defeat Houston 4-1  to wrap up the American League pennant and end the defending champs’ hopes of a repeat.

Major League Baseball’s best team by regular season record is back in the World Series.

The Boston Red Sox, 108-game winners on the way to running away with the AL East title, eliminated the defending champion Houston Astros in five games with a 4-1 victory Thursday night at Minute Maid Park.

David Price, winless in his 11 previous post-season starts, held the Astros to three just three baserunners over six innings, finally dispatching the suggestion that he is not a good post-season pitcher. He struck out nine and did not walk a batter.

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Boston will be making its fourth trip to the World Series since 2004, when the Red Sox famously broke the World Series jinx that had haunted them since 1918. They won again in 2007, and a third time in 2013.

The Astros who defeated the Los Angeles in seven games last year to win the franchise’s first World Series championship, learned a lesson that has come painfully to every defending champion since 2001: repeating is tough. No team has done it since the New York Yankees won in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

The win completed the visitors’ three-game sweep of the ALCS games played in Houston. Boston won 8-2 on Tuesday and 8-6 Wednesday.

For a few innings, it looked like the outcome might hinge on an umpire’s ball and strike call. With one out in the Red Sox third, Houston starter Justin Verlander got two quick strikes on J.D. Martinez, then threw a slider that settled just above the knees and just inside the outside edge of the strike zone; a virtually perfect strike. That’s what Statcast thought, anyway. Plate umpire Chris Guccione thought otherwise, invoking the 0-2 “automatic ball” rule. Reprieved, Martinez hit the next pitch, a hanger, off the wall behind the Crawford boxes.

That somewhat tainted home run stood up as the only mar in another wise brilliant pitching duel between Verlander and Price until the sixth, when Rafael Devers sent another Verlander pitch into the Crawfords, this time with Mitch Moreland and Ian Kinsler on base ahead of him.

Marwin Gonzalez provided Houston’s only run with a seventh inning home run off Matt Barnes, who took over for Price.

By virtue of their regular season record, the Red Sox will host the first game of the World Series next Tuesday against either the Los Angeles Dodgers or Milwaukee Brewers. The Dodgers currently lead that series 3-2 with game 6 scheduled for Friday evening in Milwaukee.

It also continues a triumphal post-season road odyssey that has seen the Red Sox sweep all five games, including two in New York during the American League Division Series. They have out-scored their opponents 40-11 in those five road games.

Boston’s World Series trip will mark the third consecutive season that the team with baseball’s best regular-season record has reached the Fall Classic. The Los Angeles Dodgers held that distinction in 2017, the Chicago Cubs in 2016. To find the last time the team with baseball’s best record reached the World Series in three consecutive seasons you have to go back more than a full generation, to 1988-89-90. In each of those seasons the Oakland Athletics posted the season’s best record.