While the Houston Astros , famously scheduled to “arrive” this year, mailed in too many non-competitive at-bats against the well-prepared, cold-eyed New York pitching staff, the young, homegrown hitters of the Yankees outfoxed one of the great surgical pitchers of the game, Dallas Keuchel .

They got here—the majors, the playoffs and the brink of the World Series “ahead of schedule”—because they have learned an advanced approach and keen plate discipline to complement generational kind of power.

If you check all the players in history to see who hit the most home runs in their first 182 regular season games (Sanchez’s total of games; Judge isn’t quite there yet), you will find that this Yankees team has two of the top five home run hitters at such a start to their careers: Judge, with 56 homers, trails only Rudy York, and by one, and Sanchez, with 53, is fifth, just behind Mark McGwire and Ryan Braun.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon likes to say the toughest thing to get a young hitter to do is move his back foot in the box; most of them fall on the habit of routine.

In the fifth inning, for instance, when they had two runners and one out and chance to climb back into contention in the game, their 1-2 hitters, George Springer and Josh Reddick, took awful at-bats.