Maybe the Nationals can hang with the Astros after all

It could've gone either way. Baseball Savant had it as a strike. Home plate umpire Alan Porter didn't think so. It might've been high, or potentially a smidge off the plate. In any event, George Springer trotted to first base with a leadoff walk against Max Scherzer.

Moments later, after a Jose Altuve single, a wild pitch from Scherzer, a heady stolen base, and a double from Yuli Gurriel, the Houston Astros - the prohibitive World Series favorite and a 107-win behemoth - had taken a 2-0 lead in Game 1, with Gerrit Cole, their eminently unbeatable co-ace, on the mound. At that moment, in the bottom of the first inning, the Astros already seemed headed to an opening victory that would reinforce the impossibility of the Nationals' task and razor-thin margin for error.

It's not that anything particularly calamitous happened in that top of the first, but the Nats seemed poised to learn the hard way that any misstep or missed call would prove ruinous against these Astros, who already had a 72.1 win expectancy on Tuesday after taking that 2-0 lead, per FanGraphs.

In the end, though, Washington didn't fold.

Despite the early deficit and Scherzer's inability to throw strikes, the Nationals prevailed, spanking Cole around and staving off Houston's lineup long enough to secure a 5-4 win at Minute Maid Park. In doing so, they not only changed the complexion of this series, but also affirmed that they can hang with the big, bad Astros - even when things go awry.

The prevailing notion coming into this World Series, after all, was that the Nationals would need long outings from their triumvirate of elite starters - Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin - in order to have a chance. That's the formula that got them here. In their seven combined postseason starts leading up to the World Series, that trio failed to complete six innings only once. (It was Corbin, for the record, who was removed from his club's pennant-clinching victory over the St. Lous Cardinals after five innings with a 7-4 lead.)

On Tuesday, however, Scherzer failed to follow the script. Unable to command pitches with his usual precision, the three-time Cy Young Award winner labored through five shaky innings, allowing a pair of runs in the first, walking the leadoff hitter in the second, and then allowing multiple baserunners in both the third and fourth. By the end of the fifth, Scherzer had thrown 112 pitches. That effectively required Nationals manager Dave Martinez to get a dozen outs from his bullpen, a much-maligned crew with maybe three trustworthy arms, one of them being Corbin, who's pitched in relief more times than he's started this October.

That wouldn't have been such a problem in the grand scheme of things, necessarily, but for the fact that Washington was actually - and improbably - winning at the time.

Thanks to a pair of solo shots from Ryan Zimmerman and Juan Soto, the Nationals had erased their deficit by the fourth inning, and an outburst in the following frame - capped by a two-run double from, you guessed it, Soto - gave them a 5-2 edge that Scherzer preserved through the fifth. To pry Game 1 from the Astros, the Nationals would need four relatively clean innings out of Corbin and multiple members of a relief corps that blew the third-most saves in the majors this season while finishing with a worse ERA than every team except the woeful Baltimore Orioles. That's a dubious ask.

But they delivered.

Corbin, the first pitcher out of Washington's bullpen, allowed a one-out single in an otherwise flawless sixth. Tanner Rainey, the Nationals' hard-throwing but erratic right-hander, nearly imploded in the seventh, surrendering a leadoff homer to George Springer and then issuing consecutive one-out walks, but Daniel Hudson ably cleaned up the mess. And then, after Hudson worked his way into a mess of his own in the eighth, coughing up a one-out double that whittled his club's lead to 5-4, Sean Doolittle bailed him out before tossing a perfect ninth to seal an unlikely comeback victory and shift Washington's outlook from "major underdog" to "empirical favorite."

Throughout baseball's extensive history, after all, teams that have won the first game of a best-of-seven have gone 112-64, taking the series nearly 64% of the time. At worst, the Nationals will return home for Game 3 with the series tied, and presumably with more confidence than they had Tuesday morning.

For one, they know Cole - who hadn't pitched in a losing effort since July 12 - is mortal. That has to be reassuring, given that they'll almost certainly face him again in Game 5, if necessary. The Nationals should have more faith in their bullpen, too, following an instrumental bend-but-don't-break effort in the series opener. (Even the most indomitable bullpens, it should be noted, would struggle against this Astros lineup.) And, ultimately, they've dispelled the idea that they have to play perfect baseball - and get every single lucky bounce or favorable call - in order to topple Houston.

Their path to a championship is still fraught, to be sure, but an Astros championship no longer seems fait accompli. At the very least, the Nationals can hang.

Jonah Birenbaum is theScore's senior MLB writer. He steams a good ham. You can find him on Twitter @birenball.