Luis Garcia was one pitch from being out of the third inning. He’d started Game 6 on short rest, the Astros having run low on pitchers. It was that sort of World Series. The Braves’ starters in Games 4 and 5 were Dylan Lee and Tucker Davidson, Charlie Morton having been lost to a broken leg back in Game 1. Somehow the Braves split those games.
Now it was Garcia on three days’ rest versus Max Fried on five, which figured to be: advantage, Braves. They were still in clinch mode, but they’d been that way in Cobb County two nights earlier. They’d taken a 4-0 lead on Adam Duvall’s grand slam. They lost 9-5. Thus did the Fall Classic return to Houston, the city where in February 2017 another Atlanta-based team contrived to blow a lead.
Game 6 hadn’t begun well for the visitors. In the bottom of the first, Fried nearly became the second Braves’ pitcher in eight days to break a leg in Minute Maid Park, Michael Brantley having stepped on Fried’s ankle as he tried to cover first. Somehow he continued. Somehow he extricated himself from a two-on-nobody-out pickle.
It was 0-0 through two innings. Ozzie Albies singled to open the third. Eddie Rosario drew a two-out walk. Up stepped Soler, who’d been the fourth of four outfielders acquired by the Braves in July and whose home runs gave the Braves lasting leads in World Series Games 1 and 4. Note: Soler missed most of the NLCS against the Dodgers with COVID.
Garcia struck out Soler in the first, an at-bat that lasted six pitches. It began with Soler fouling off two four-seamers. It ended with him whiffing on a cutter. In the third, the count again ran full. A hit would put the Braves ahead. A walk would load the bases for Freddie Freeman.
The Astros knew well what Soler could do. He’d led off Game 1 with a homer off a Framber Valdez sinker. As a pinch-hitter in the seventh inning of Game 4, he’d followed Dansby Swanson’s tying home run with a go-ahead blast off a Cristian Javier slider. Now it was Game 6, an elimination game for Houston, and Soler ran the count to 3-1. He took a slider – the first he’d seen from Garcia – for Strike 2.
Sitting in the press box, a guy leaned forward. Something was about to happen. Garcia tried a second slider. Soler fouled it off. Then a fastball. Fouled off. And here we all – you, me and Soler – were wondering: Would Garcia come back with the cutter?
The eighth pitch of that at-bat was Garcia’s last of 2021. It was a cutter, as Soler knew it would be. Ball met bat. Ball soared over the left-field fence, over the cute little train track, over the rainbow. The Braves led 3-0. They would win 7-0. A team that didn’t climb above .500 to stay until August would, on the night of Nov. 2, become world champs.
Soler would make two more plate appearances as a Brave. He walked and grounded out. Then he’d be handed the trophy that goes to the World Series MVP. Then he’d leave.
He’d been a rental. With Rosario still under contract and Ronald Acuna due back from his first ACL tear, the Braves no longer had available space. Soler signed with Miami in March 2022. In February, he signed a three-year deal with San Francisco. As of 11:55 p.m. Monday, he was again a Brave.
If Soler does nothing else of note for this club – at 32, he’s capable of a few somethings – his place on the podium of greatest homers hit by an Atlanta Brave is secure. There’s Hank Aaron’s 715th. There’s David Justice’s off Jim Poole in the sixth inning of Game 6 on Oct. 28, 1995. There’s Soler’s. That’s it.
The Braves will win another World Series, but they’ll never win another quite like that. The fourth of four new outfielders squared up a cutter and sent the third of his three World Series homers flying into history. What a blast. What a night.
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