The big story coming out of Game 3 is that Lance McCullers Jr. was tipping his pitches and Bryce Harper and the Phillies took full advantage by ripping five home runs off of the Astros starter to take a 2-1 series lead. The second-biggest story is how Dusty Baker could possibly leave McCullers out there to get his brains beaten in and not even give the Astros a sniff of a chance at coming back.
How that could happen in a World Series game is simply beyond comprehension. McCullers wasn’t locating well and the Phillies were on everything, which is very unlike a pitcher who has a career 3.47 ERA and has only allowed 57 home runs in 718.2 innings of work. People on Twitter picked up on McCullers tipping pitches, but the Astros, with all of today’s technology, didn’t notice? Didn’t see it? Didn’t think, “hey, maybe something’s wrong here?”. I cannot fathom how that happened. To make matters worse, his fastball velocity also took a big dive after the first inning.
Oh, but here’s the other thing that isn’t getting as much run – the Astros scored zero runs and managed only five hits. The Phillies didn’t have to use any of their primary relievers and Ranger Suarez got through five shutout innings and scattered some weak singles. After knocking around Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler, the Astros did nothing against a pitch-to-contact left-hander on their better side of the offensive split.
Nola gets another run at the Astros tonight and he’ll be opposed by Cristian Javier in a pivotal Game 4.