Let’s face facts. We can hardly wait until the awful, terrible, horrible 2020 year ends. And probably three weeks ago, we thought that we could hardly wait until the 2020 baseball season would be over. We were wondering if the team that played embarrassingly bad down the stretch would further embarrass us in the best of three-game Wild Card playoff against the Twins.
On Wednesday, Astro fans were facing the fact that their team had overperformed to beat the Twins and the A’s, and had not quite performed as well as the Rays in falling into a seemingly hopeless 0-3 pit in the ALCS. The man who had been the 2017 AL MVP and had walked off the ALCS in 2019, Jose Altuve had suddenly lost the ability to throw accurately to a base. The Astros had outhit the Rays, but the Rays had squeaked out 3 wins with timely hitting, decent pitching and unworldly defense.
It is funny how the lack of expectations coming into the post-season for the Astros has slowly turned into a small pile of expectations after they emerged victorious from the first two rounds.
In 2019, the Tampa Bay Rays came closer to eliminating the Astros in the ALDS than the Yankees did in the ALCS. The Rays pushed the Astros to a win or go home fifth game, while the Astros, thanks to Jose Altuve, sent the Yanks home in the sixth game of their best in 7 series.
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Like most things in the year 2020, cheering for the Houston Astros has been a muted and distant experience. With no one in attendance, the shortened season, the modified rules and the shadow of COVID hanging over baseball and our lives the baseball experience was a blurry version of the norm.
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Excuse the brevity of this post, but your faithful writer is about to head out to the Hill Country to see family we have not seen in months.
While the Astros were waiting for the Oakland A’s and the Chicago White Sox to play their third game of the Wild Card round, some interesting storylines were being tossed out there.
A good friend of the blog, Becky checked in with a cogent comment yesterday after the Astros eliminated the Minnesota Twins in a two-game sweep.
