This has been one of our odder World Series. Because the Nationals won Game 6 and knotted the Series, we have a Game 7 on Wednesday, which is the highest of high holy baseball days. Yet it feels more strange than apt. Save for the first game, a 5-4 win for the Nationals, the Series has largely been bleached clean of suspense, with an average margin of victory of 5.1 runs.

The Nationals won the first two games on the Astros’ home turf, then the Astros returned the favor, taking three straight from the Nationals in Washington.

Then there’s the fact that much of the series has been played in the shadow of overlapping controversies. Early on, there was the Houston Astros assistant general manager, Brandon Taubman, who chose the occasion of the Astros’ pennant-winning victory over the Yankees to pull a cigar out of his mouth and bellow foul idiocies at three female reporters about the charms of the team’s closer, Roberto Osuna, who had beaten his girlfriend about in Canada. A Sports Illustrated reporter wrote an accurate account of his crudity, and the Astros’ response became a study in crisis P.R. gone whack. They released a snotty and thoroughly inaccurate claim that Sports Illustrated had peddled false news. Several iterations of walk-back occurred before Astros management was left sitting in a puddle of abject apology.

Then they fired Taubman.

In Game 5 in Washington, attention was diverted away from the field again. President Trump turned up and took a cold shower of boos which his memory has not yet alchemized into thunderous applause and two models popped up behind home plate, pulled up their shirts and bared their breasts as Houston’s Gerrit Cole peered in at his catcher for a sign. If it’s not clear that Cole noticed, it’s clear that many fans did.

That set the stage for Game 6, which was a taut affair for six innings. There were home runs and sweet fielding plays and spectacular pitching by Stephen Strasburg, who varied speed and location and was masterful. It’s worth recalling that baseball tough guys got exercised back in 2012, when he returned from elbow surgery and the Nationals shut him down before the playoffs rather than insist he push his surgically repaired elbow.

“You’re pampering this kid,” they moaned. Strasburg has become one of baseball’s best postseason pitchers, 6-2 with a 1.46 E.R.A. in nine games, tossing 71 strikeouts in 55⅓ innings. Contrast that with the sad tale of Matt Harvey, who was persuaded to pitch way beyond agreed innings limits in the Mets’ 2015 playoff push and has never been the same.

I apologize. I’m talking baseball when I could be talking baseball delay. The did-Trea-Turner-interfere-or-not debate dragged on, and you wondered if in the replay center panicked M.L.B. sorts were ready to flip a coin.