Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

by Ben Reiter

“I literally love Justin Verlander,” José Altuve gushed to a national audience on Fox afterward, incubating a cottage industry of internet memes and T-shirts that bore the quote.

Bregman, though, didn’t give a shit that he was playing in his first postseason.

Altuve hadn’t even permitted himself to assume what had become a lock a month earlier: that after a regular season in which he had batted .346, with 24 home runs, 81 RBIs, and 32 steals, he would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award over a rival, the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, who stood 14 inches taller than Altuve and outweighed him by 117 pounds.