It is October-y enough to be October, even though October is still days away, which means it's time to find out how many of you weirdos can hold a grudge that isn't yours to hold. The Houston Astros, American League West champions at 81-81, are officially the worst team ever to make baseball's postseason after edging out two other teams that also would have been the worst teams ever to make baseball's postseason. Now you can all get all fever blistered all over again about Carlos Beltran's crimes against humanity nine years ago.
The Astros have turned over most of their roster and all of their front office since then, but they remain That Team for people who prize long memories and petty crimes, or just don't like the Astros. Before 2017, nobody really disliked the Astros, if only because you have to cast a shadow to make people feel your chill. They've been good enough since to have earned their enmity. They have the second best record in baseball over the last decade in both the regular and postseasons, and either despite that or because of it a certain segment of the baseball-speaking population seizes up northward from the seater remembering when the Astros beat out victory rhythms in their first championship season thanks to an array of friendly garbage cans and some sign-stealing players who apparently learned how to convey their thievery to each other from John Bradbury.
In the end, of course, it's all branding. The Astros have been marked as polyrhythmic brigands since their McKinsey Era, even though they only have one player left from the 2017 championship team; that one player is Jose Altuve, so it's the smallest surviving member at that. But hey, at least half of our politics is people trying to re-litigate the Civil War, and history is as toxic as you want to make it. So if you feel chapping down below when the Astros appear in your line of vision, well, get some Benadryl and bite down on the coffee table. They're back.
Only this time, they are 1) deeply not good and 2) the most haplessly canine of underdogs. They were French kissed by fate with a closing series against West Sacramento, and the A's proved as supine for the Astros as they have for everyone else during the season's back stretch. Maybe that was Houston's plan all along—address the first three months of the season in a Colin Simmons-inspired style, then rally just enough not to be subsumed by the AL West sinkhole. Which of course they did, winning their crucial final two games by an aggregate of 22-2. This is a tribute more than anything else to the universal truth that when push comes to tush, A's are gonna A.
So they're back, and because MLB's playoff format has all the reason of a guy running naked in a glow-in-the-dark fez through the frozen foods aisle at your local Piggly Wiggly, the Astros will be hosting the sixth-seeded Chicago White Sox starting Tuesday. The Sox are their own tale, leading the AL Central for most of the season before vomiting beltward down the stretch—they failed to sweep their last series against the Colorado Rockies, if you're wondering how much vomit we're talking—and finally being caught by the roster full of witness protection candidates known as the Cleveland Guardians. They finished at 84-78, which is three more wins than the team with the home-field advantage in this series can claim.
But also the White Sox haven't been caught cheating since 1919, which means anyone you know who remembers it is 115-years-old, and probably smells every day of it. More to the point, the Sox have been forgiven for their little gaffe, which suggests that if John Sayles makes a movie about the 2017 Astros any time soon, they too might someday be forgiven. Chris Cooper will give an excellent performance.
Until that moment, the Astros are the second most detested team in the sport—the champs there remains Team Manfred, whom you will learn to hate anew starting in December—and this series is a living emblem of everything that people want to fix about it, even though it has a chance to writhe spasmodically enough to suck you into its hellish vortex. These two collections of free-range lummox combined to win six games more than they lost during the regular season; over 324 games that's the grossest and most pathological example of adhering to the mean we've encountered. It is, in that sense, the perfect series for this moment—a pair of sixes surviving and advancing in a world of face cards thanks to circumstances that favor just that kind of mediocrity.
So go Astros. Or go White Sox. Whatever. If you can get over it, we can get over it, too. Besides, all these games will be in the most insignificant afternoon slot available, so all you have to do to avoid it is watch Dateline reruns instead. Spoiler alert: the husband did it, unless the wife did it. Tune in if you want to see Keith Morrison looking 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 heaving themselves that much closer to the World Series. No judgment either way .
