It was 11:14 on the last night of baseball season, the last spasm of summer, and Brian McCann swung at one last nasty offering from Luke Gregerson. Gregerson had made Carlos Beltran and Alex Rodriguez look foolish in swinging at strike three; McCann wasn’t going to let him.
The ball was in Carlos Correa’s glove, and then it was in Marwin Gonzalez’s glove, and the first mournful chords of “New York, New York” were bleeding out of the PA system while joyful Astros poured out of the visiting dugout and the visiting bullpen. No ninth-inning rally. No 11 o’clock lightning.