The Houston Astros won the World Series, the biggest achievement in baseball each year, for the first time in their team’s history.
They beat the Los Angeles Dodgers four games to three.
The Astros won the seventh game of the World Series 5 to 1 over the Dodgers on Nov. 1.
It was a hard-fought battle. The two teams were evenly matched. The fact that the World Series even went to seven games means that neither team ran away with the championship.
The Astros won game seven early. They got five points in the first two innings, putting them ahead of the Dodgers right from the start.
To win the World Series, a team has to win four games out of seven. It’s possible for one team to win it after just four games, if they were to win every game. But this year, it was such a back-and-forth that it went right to the final game.
The Astros weren’t always destined for such greatness. Just a few years ago, in 2014, they they lost more than 100 games. (This year, Houston won 101 games–the first time since 1998 that they had won more than 100 games in a season, according to Wikipedia.)
After Hurricane Harvey, which devastated much of the Houston’s home state of Texas, the Astros wore a patch on their uniforms that said “Houston Strong.”
The Dodgers battled back from their own losses to even make it to the World Series. For instance, late in their 2017 season, they lost 11 games in a row. Many people thought it was all over for them this year. But they turned it around and managed to beat last year’s World Series winners, the Chicago Cubs to make it to the World Series.
Related Link
There is an extraordinary article in the New Yorker about this year’s World Series, that is well worth reading: Long Wait, Great Win by Roger Angell.
Here is last year’s TKN article on the 2016 World Series: https://teachingkidsnews.com/2016/11/06/cubs-win-first-world-series-108-years/
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Kathleen Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
The first sentence of the article states, “The Houston Astros won the World Series, the biggest achievement in baseball each year, for the first time in their team’s history.” Not only did the Astros win the World Series, they did it for the first time in their history.
The first time an achievement happens is always significant. Why do you think this is the case? Describe one of your ‘firsts’ that is significant to you?
Reading Prompt: Extending Understanding
In June 2014, Sports Illustrated (a sports magazine) featured a cover story that declared that the Astros would win the World Series 3 years later in 2017. When they made this prediction, the Astros were the worst team in baseball the previous season, and they were in last place. Readers thought they were crazy… but they ended up being right!
When have you had a ‘gut feeling’ about something and it turned out to be right?
Junior
Extend understanding of texts by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to other familiar texts, and to the world around them (OME, Reading: 1.6).
Intermediate
Extend understanding of texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts, by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to other familiar texts, and to the world around them (OME, Reading: 1.6).
Language Feature: Writing Numbers
This article contains a lot of numbers, including dates, baseball scores and number of games. These numbers are written either as words or as numbers. Take a look at all of the numbers in this article and try to figure out why some are written as words and others are written as numbers. What are there rules regarding how to write numbers?
