As it stands at the moment, the last spot in the AL playoff field will either go to the Detroit Tigers, who let a great season get away from them in a way that I completely empathize with them, or the Houston Astros. Both teams are working on getting through today with a win. The Astros rode Framber Valdez to a win over Oakland, and the Tigers are finally lighting the fire under their rear ends to strike back against the Guardians. Both teams are at 85 wins, both teams have a Cy Young candidate, and both teams had a fairly unlucky trade deadline.
You can probably guess who I'm rooting for to snag that last spot. I'll give you a hint, it's not the Astros.
I feel like we're gonna be 10 or 20 years down the line, and the Astros will have been a losing team for a while with no future and no promise, and I'm still gonna root for them to lose. It's the same as the Patriots now. I don't want the Pats to get good again because for a good 20 years they were good, and in a way that directly antagonized my interests. That is the Astros as well. It's not that they were good constantly, it's that they were hot constantly and valued that over being good. The Astros have had some phenomenal teams over the past 10 years, and the two that won the Series' might not have even been the best ones. 2018 and 2019 were probably the fullest portrait of what this team was capable of, the Gerrit Cole years. After that, people started leaving and they tried to convince people they were still that good, and...I mean, they got one more ring out of it. Last year they were embarrassed by a team that got hotter than they ever could, and it was a worthy dethroning.
This year...I've tried looking at this Astros team for a direction, or a unified idea, or anything, and it hasn't been there. A lot was hanging on Jake Meyers, and there was a big hole when he got hurt, but...Jake Meyers paled in comparison to the sort of people he's replaced. He's not George Springer, he's not Kyle Tucker, both are more valuable to their current teams than Meyers is to Houston. He's a .292 hitter, but in 104 games he's got 24 RBIs. He's very good defensively, he's very good on the basepaths, but he's not an offensive killer. And in a season where Alvarez is falling apart, Paredes is gone for half the year and Altuve is past his prime, you need at least someone who you can fall back on, and Meyers is not that guy.
The heroes for the Astros this year have been Jake Meyers, Mauricio Dubon, Jason Alexander, Bryan Abreu, and ultimately Jeremy Pena, Framber Valdez and Hunter Brown. The depth is gone. There's depth pieces stepping into lead roles. Christian Walker, like Jose Abreu before him, was plugged into 1st to maintain the power numbers and it hasn't been pretty. Jesus Sanchez has been a disaster defensively. Cam Smith is having a fine rookie year but is hitting .239. The future is still stuttering on call-ups, and Zach Cole and Brice Mathews don't have it yet.
Honestly, missing the playoffs would be the best thing to happen to the Astros, because for once this year they stop lying to themselves. They're not that team anymore. They don't have it. Maybe then they'd actually address some of their issues instead of trying to catch the wave and ride that. You can't catch any waves if your surfboard's caved in.
Coming Tomorrow- A perennial threat from a team gearing up to shock the world again this fall.
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