PHILADELPHIA — The Houston Astros have recorded 135 outs this World Series. In the span of 24 pitches Thursday night, the four most pivotal were thrown by the same man.
That man is Ryan Pressly, the Houston Astros’ spin-rate dynamo and the team’s longest-tenured reliever. His mission is to befuddle hitters with his hellacious curveball, and through the first five games against Philadelphia, no player has enhanced his team’s chances of becoming champions more than Pressly.
His performance in Houston’s 3-2 victory in Game 5, aided by some dazzling defense in his five-out save, evoked so many others across Pressly’s postseason career with the Astros, who are 22-3 when he pitches — often in high-leverage situations — since 2020.
As he had in six of his previous eight outings this postseason, Pressly entered Thursday’s game in the eighth or ninth inning with the score tied or the Astros leading by two or fewer runs. In each instance, he kept the game locked or preserved the lead. He has stranded all four inherited runners, including the two who greeted him in the eighth in Game 5.
With one out, runners on first and third and Houston leading by 3-2, Pressly, a right-hander, struck out Brandon Marsh on three pitches, all sliders, then escaped when Trey Mancini smothered Kyle Schwarber’s grounder at first. According to Baseball Reference, that strikeout was not only the most pivotal out of this World Series but also of the last six — a span of 1,976 outs. It added 9.2 percentage points of championship win probability.
Over the course of the Series, Pressly has increased the Astros’ probability of defeating the Phillies by 32.5 percentage points, according to Baseball Reference; third baseman Alex Bregman has added the next-most, 11 points, with shortstop Jeremy Peña right behind him, at 9.9.
“Just because it’s a little bit louder and there’s more lights and there’s more cameras and it’s on the biggest stage, it don’t matter — it’s the same game,” Pressly said after Game 5. “The plate’s still 60 feet 6 inches away, still got to make quality pitches. When you do that, when you slow your heartbeat down, you’re going to have success.”
Pressly leads Houston in appearances since 2018, when the Astros, enamored by the spin rate that created such ferocious movement on his breaking pitches, plucked him from Minnesota at the trade deadline. His charge was to throw more sliders and curveballs and fewer fastballs.
In 2022, with his curveball traveling a league-best 3,272 revolutions per minute, he threw the highest percentage of breaking pitches — 64 percent — of his career. In a bullpen featuring only one left-hander, Pressly’s curveball and slider help him neutralize left-handed hitters. During the regular season, left-handed batters had a lower on-base plus slugging percentage against him (.513) than right-handed hitters did.
“The guys that look at us and evaluate us, they see things that they’re able to tell us and make us better, and that’s what this organization does,” Pressly said after Game 4. “They find the things that we’re really good at, and they try to expand on it and make us better at the things that we’re really good at.”
The World Series Most Valuable Player Award tends to go to the best hitter on the victorious team, as it has in 15 of the last 18 postseasons, unless a starting pitcher — Madison Bumgarner in 2014, Cole Hamels in 2008 — flashes such durability and dominance that he subverts the paradigm.
For a reliever to merit strong consideration, though, he must outperform everyone else — and by an absurd margin — on a cumulative basis, and in the most pressurized of situations. No closer has won since Mariano Rivera in 1999, back before managers refrained from deploying elite relievers at a game’s inflection point.
But if the Astros defeat the Phillies one of the next two nights in Houston, perhaps that streak will end.
Tyler Kepner contributed reporting.