1. Alex Gordon Homers in Game 1 off Jeurys Familia
Met closer Jeurys Familia entered the ninth inning of Game 1 not having allowed a single run in the entire playoffs to that point, yielding only two hits and two walks in 9 2/3 innings of work, earning five saves in as many opportunities.
Against his first batter, Salvador Perez, Familia got the Royals’ catcher to ground out weakly to shortstop, and was set to face off against Alex Gordon, who was 0-for-2 with a walk to that point. In facing Kansas City’s eighth and ninth hitters, Familia and the Mets were two outs away from their first World Series win in fifteen years, their first road win in the Series in twenty-nine years.
Alas, Gordon, a three-time All-Star, had other plans.
With the game now tied 4-4, the persistent, nagging, resilient Royals would lie in wait, as they do so well, for five more innings to score, which they later would on an Eric Hosmer sacrifice fly to seal a 5-4 victory, ending the game for the Royals in favored territory: sixteen of the past eighteen World Series victors, including the last five straight heading into the 2015 Series, had gone on to win a title.
In the cold hard light of morning, one thing seems clear: Alex Gordon’s home run in Game 1 was really, really, really big.
— Rany Jazayerli (@jazayerli) October 31, 2015
As chance would have it, the Royals wound up being the seventeenth team to go on to win the Series after taking Game 1, all because they rattled a once invincible Familia, who has all offseason to contemplate how his performance—two blown saves and a failure to hold a lead in Game 4—essentially cost his team a championship.
