In the first game of the ALCS, Yordan Alvarez struck out three times; Jordan Montgomery got him on each of those. He had a plan to contain Alvarez, you see, a glorious plan. Jeff Passan profiled it over at ESPN. Pitching Twitter, a group I mostly count myself as a part of, was in rapture. Throw to the perfect locations! Yordan can’t stand this one simple trick! Could even the fiercest batters be tamed if pitchers could only come up with a good plan?

This plan, by the way, was a great one. Alvarez isn’t bad at any part of hitting, but his eye at the plate is his least-outstanding tool. And while he’s a fearsome power hitter, he’s not equally fearsome regardless of where the ball is pitched. Here’s a chart of his career ISO (on balls in play) based on where he makes contact:

On high-and-tight pitches, he doesn’t fare well, at least compared to the rest of his work. The deep blue section low and away is less important — he usually comes up empty when he swings at those — but either high and tight or low and away look like safe harbor for opposing pitchers. Montgomery pitched to maximize these two weaknesses. He worked his batting eye with curveballs below the zone and used his sinker almost exclusively on the inner edge of the plate:

The Rangers did it! They came up with the antidote to one of the two most fearsome lefty hitters in the game (Bryce Harper is equally unstoppable in the playoffs), and they showed off their plan in front of the world. Surely, then, the edge laid with Texas in this series.

Yeah, about that. In the five subsequent games, Alvarez is hitting .526/.565/.842. A lot of singles have gone into that line — he’s running a .615 BABIP over that stretch — but they don’t feel like lucky singles. He’s clobbering the ball: nine of the 15 balls he’s put in play over that stretch were hit over 100 mph. He’s putting it on a line: nine of the 15 he’s put in play have either been line drives or low fly balls, the kind that leave the park when you hit them hard.

So what happened. Did Alvarez see the strategy that Texas was deploying against him, head back into the lab, and emerge with a new plan to turn a historical weakness into a strength? Not exactly. Here’s a chart of where those hits have come:

That looks downright ordinary. Four-seamers high, sinkers low, a smattering of secondaries in the strike zone? That high-and-tight cutter was a phenomenal piece of hitting, and the low-and-away slider was otherworldly, but for the most part he’s just taking hittable pitches and launching them. What, did the Rangers forget about their plan?

I wouldn’t exactly say that. You can see the bare bones of it if you dig through all the pitches he’s seen in these latest five games. Here are the sinkers, all thrown by Montgomery and Martín Pérez:

Pretty good! There’s almost nothing in the middle of the zone, and the biggest clusters are in tough spots for opposing hitters. Truthfully, I don’t think many major leaguers locate sinkers this well or better with any consistency. The locations haven’t been the problem; Alvarez just turned around all the ones that caught too much of the plate. I’m being literal here: he’s put three of these sinkers into play, and all three were hit 105 mph or harder for singles. Yikes.

What about curveballs, the other part of Montgomery’s Game 1 plan? The Rangers have used a ton of curves against Alvarez, working the outside of the plate consistently:

These are located well. Few were left over the heart of the plate. Plenty were in enticing chase locations. Just one problem: Alvarez stopped swinging and missing. He’s swung at six curves; he’s made contact with five. You might get him for a called strike, but throwing a slow pitch for a strike is a dangerous game against him; one wrong guess, and a fan gets a souvenir.

It gets even worse than that for Texas pitchers. The inside sinker/chase curveball plan is supposed to be the good plan against Alvarez, and neither has been working particularly well. Not every pitcher even has those pitches, though, and certainly not every pitcher is a lefty capable of attacking him with a sinker.

Other pitches have worked terrifyingly poorly. He’s seen eight sliders in this five-game stretch. Four were on or around the plate; he swung at all four and hit two 110 mph or harder. Four were off the plate; he took all four. Want to throw him a changeup or splitter? Maybe reconsider. He’s swung at four of them and missed only one. Sure, he made an out on the one ball he hit in play, but it was a 110-mph demolishment that flew 400 feet and barely stayed in the park. It’s not a matter of his being passive, either; he’s only allowed a single called strike to pass by, and that pitch wasn’t even in the zone.

Fastballs? Yeah, sure, let’s come after the terrifying power hitter with fastballs. Early in his career, Alvarez struggled with four-seamers above the top of the zone, and he still Takes Big Hacks there, so he can be beaten from time to time. Of his eight swings and misses since his rough Game 1 performance, five have come against four-seamers. But you know what happens when a guy his size takes big hacks? Eventually, he connects:

What am I saying with this article? Pitching is hard, I guess. Every hitter has a hole in their swing or approach. They can’t cover everything all the time. Execute the right plan on the right day, and you can get them out. But sometimes you pull off your plan, and the opposing hitter just takes your tough breaking ball. Sometimes you throw a perfect sinker, and he fouls it off. Sometimes you miss by an inch, then duck as a line drive whistles by.

The plan? I still think it was exquisite. When you’re faced with a tough opposing hitter, you shouldn’t just shrug and frown; you should try to figure something out, which is exactly what the Rangers did. Maybe he needed a day to adjust to it. Maybe Montgomery is the only one capable of executing it, though Alvarez went 2-for-3 against him the next time they squared off. Maybe Alvarez will succumb to a variation on it in tonight’s deciding game. Or, perhaps most likely of all: maybe he was just sick, and now that he’s feeling a little bit better, he’s back on top of some things he’d let slip at work. Stars: they’re just like us, so long as you think bashing colossal home runs is the same as whatever it is you do at your job.