It’s far enough into October to be October, even though October is still a few days away, which means it’s time to find out how many of you weirdos can be holding onto a grudge that isn’t yours. The 81-81 American League West champion Houston Astros are officially the worst team to ever make the playoffs in baseball after edging out two other teams that would have also been the worst teams to make the playoffs in baseball. Now you can all feel the fever again about the crimes against humanity committed by Carlos Beltran nine years ago.
The Astros have since transformed most of their team and their entire front office, but they remain that team for people who appreciate long memories and small offenses, or who just don’t like the Astros. Before 2017, no one really liked the Astros, if only because we had to cast a shadow for people to feel our thrill. Since then, they have been good enough to deserve their enmity. They have the second-best record in baseball over the past decade, both in the regular season and in the postseason, and despite that or because of it, a certain segment of the baseball-speaking population is gripping north from the seats, remembering when the Astros broke out to victory rhythms in their first championship season thanks to a lineup of friendly trash-talkers and sign-stealing players who apparently learned how to pass their steals to each other thanks to John Bradbury.
Ultimately, of course, it’s all about brand. The Astros have been considered polyrhythmic bandits since their McKinsey era, even though they only have one player remaining from the 2017 championship team; this player is Jose Altuve, so he is the smallest surviving member. But hey, at least half of our politics is made up of people trying to reignite the civil war, and the story is as toxic as you make it. So if you feel chapped underneath when the Astros appear in your field of vision, well, get some Benadryl and take a bite out of the coffee table. They are back.
Only this time, they’re 1) profoundly no good and 2) the most unfortunate underdogs. They were kissed by destiny with a series finale against West Sacramento, and the A’s proved as inactive for the Astros as they were for everyone else down the home stretch of the season. Perhaps that was Houston’s plan all along: approach the first three months of the season in Colin Simmons-inspired style, then rally just enough to not be swallowed up by the chasm of the AL West. Which of course they did, winning their last two crucial games by a total of 22-2. It’s a tribute more than anything else to the universal truth that when things go wrong, A’s will be A’s.
So they’re back, and because the MLB playoff format has every reason to be a guy running naked in a glow-in-the-dark fez down the frozen food aisle of your local Piggly Wiggly, the Astros will host the sixth-seeded Chicago White Sox starting Tuesday. The Sox are their own story, leading the AL Central for most of the season before vomiting down the stretch – they failed to sweep their last series against the Colorado Rockies, if you’re wondering how much vomit we’re talking about – and ultimately being caught up by the roster full of witness protection candidates known as the Cleveland Guardians. They finished at 84-78, three more wins than the team with home-court advantage in this series can claim.
But the White Sox also haven’t been caught cheating since 1919, which means everyone you know who remembers it is 115 years old and probably feels it every day. More to the point, the Sox were forgiven for their little gaffe, which suggests that if John Sayles makes a movie about the 2017 Astros soon, they too might one day be forgiven. Chris Cooper will give an excellent performance.
Meanwhile, the Astros are the second-most hated team in sports — the champions remain Team Manfred, who you’ll learn to hate again starting in December — and this series is a living emblem of everything people want to do about it, even if it has a chance of twisting spasmodically enough to suck you into its hellish vortex. These two Lummox collections on the loose combined to win six more games than they lost during the regular season; out of 324 games, this is the grossest and most pathological example of adherence to average we’ve encountered. It is, in that sense, the perfect series for this moment: a pair of six surviving and advancing in a world of figures thanks to circumstances that favor precisely this kind of mediocrity.
So go Astros. Or go to the White Sox. Never mind. If you can get over it, we can get over it too. Plus, all of these games will take place in the most insignificant afternoon slot available, so all you have to do to avoid it is watch Data line rebroadcast instead. Spoiler alert: the husband did it, unless the wife did it. Tune in if you want to see Keith Morrison look like the palms of Yordan Alvarez’s batting gloves, if that’s your idea of hot. Or just if you’d rather watch that than one of these teams getting that much closer to the World Series. No judgment either way.
Gn sports
