Major League Baseball’s 116th World Series championship series begins Tuesday in Houston, Texas, when the hometown Astros will face off against the Washington Nationals.
Houston will send 19-game regular season winner Gerrit Cole to the mound for Game 1, while three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer gets the start for Washington.
The Astros reached their second World Series in three seasons last Saturday when they beat the New York Yankees 6-4 to win the American League Championship Series, thanks to a dramatic ninth-inning home run by star second baseman Jose Altuve. The Astros won the World Series back in 2017, outlasting the Los Angeles Dodgers 4 games to 3 in the best-of-seven series.
The Nationals are the fairy tale story of this year’s Series — after beginning the season at 19-31, the Nationals reached the playoffs as a wild card (a team that fails to win their division despite having a winning record). They proceeded to beat the Milwaukee Brewers and the Dodgers in the first two rounds before sweeping the highly favored St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games to win the National League Championship Series, thanks to dominant pitching from starters Anibal Sanchez, Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin.
The Nationals are in the World Series for the first time in their 50-year history, beginning play as the Montreal Expos before moving to Washington in 2005.
The last time a World Series was played in the U.S. capital city was in 1933, when the Washington Senators lost to the New York Giants. That team — also dubbed the Nationals — was the second of three separate Senators franchises that played in Washington between 1891 and 1971, and the most successful, having won the Series in 1924.
But that team fell on hard times over the next three decades, before moving to Minneapolis in 1960 and becoming the Minnesota Twins. The third Senators franchise began play a year later, and remained in Washington until 1971, when they became the Texas Rangers.