2017 American League Championship Series, Game 5: Yankees vs. Astros, Wednesday 10/18, 4 p.m. CT

The Yankees have done what we had hoped the Cubs would do — tie up their championship series by winning the first two games they played at home in the set.

Now they have a chance to get to within one win of the World Series by winning Game 5.

It’s kind of de rigueur among baseball fans to hate the Yankees if you’re not specifically one of their fans.

But this Yankees team has so many likeable players that it’s hard to hate them. I’m not specifically rooting for them, don’t get me wrong. But they’re certainly a fun group to watch play baseball.

Masahiro Tanaka vs. Dallas Keuchel

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

This is a pitching rematch of Game 1. Both pitchers threw well; Dallas Keuchel (seven shutout innings, 10 strikeouts) pitched a bit better than Masahiro Tanaka (six innings, two runs), and thus the Astros won.

During the regular season Tanaka was a much better pitcher at Yankee Stadium (3.22 ERA, 15 starts) than on the road (6.48 ERA, 15 starts). Keuchel was pretty good away from Houston (3.53 ERA, 12 starts), but that was still more than a run higher than his home ERA (2.26, 11 starts).

I know some of you think that home/road splits don’t matter. You could be right. Or this might be an important factor. We’ll find out today.

Here is the complete MLB.com Mediacenter for today.

MLB.com Gameday (classic mode)

(Note: Going forward, I am going to link to the “classic” Gameday here because MLB.com broke the links I used to use to get to their “new” Gameday. If you click on this link, you can then click on “New Gameday” at the bottom of the page to get to the updated version. Note that the “classic” Gameday won’t load until just before game time.)

Baseball-reference.com game preview

SB Nation game preview

Please visit our SB Nation Yankees site Pinstripe Alley and Astros site The Crawfish Boxes. If you do go there to interact with Yankees or Astros fans, please be respectful, abide by their individual site rules and serve as a good representation of Cub fans in general and BCB in particular.

This is the only thread for today’s game. Enjoy, and discuss amongst yourselves.