The Astros Beast vs. the NL East

An interesting pattern is developing, though I’m not sure we can attribute it to anything more than coincidence. At the end of the last three full-length seasons, the Astros have gone to the World Series to face an NL East team that wasn’t expected to make it that far.

There’s an easy explanation for the first part: Houston is just better than the other American League clubs, by what feels like a wide margin. Just ask the Yankees, who have lost to the Astros in three of the last six AL Championship Series, including the one that ended last night in a sweep.

“Right now, they’re better than us,” said righthander Luis Severino, who started Game 2 for New York, a 3–2 loss in Houston. “They do everything well. And the bottom line is we need to be better if we want to beat those guys.”

“It stings to say this, but congratulations to them,” said first baseman Anthony Rizzo. “What they’ve done for the last six, seven years of their run, and getting there after the whole controversy, continuing to get to the ALCS and push on the door for the World Series—is not easy. … What they’re doing has been incredible, and it just sucks for us.”

That the Yankees know the Astros are better than them says a heck of a lot about Houston over the last six years, because New York is really, really good, too. Since 2017, the year the Astros won the World Series and kicked off this run of four AL pennants in six seasons, only three teams have won at least 500 regular-season games: the Dodgers (562), the Astros (541) and the Yankees (518). Yes, the Astros illegally stole signs in ’17 and part of ’18, but they have remained the best team in the AL even after they were caught cheating. This doesn’t excuse their transgressions—if anything, it makes their sign stealing all the more , because they were good enough to win without cheating—but it is indicative of their organization’s excellence.

Moreover, only five of the players from that 2017 team (Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Yuli Gurriel, Justin Verlander and Lance McCullers Jr.) are still with the Astros today. Center fielder George Springer left as a free agent after the ’20 season, and shortstop Carlos Correa signed with the Twins this March. As Stephanie Apstein wrote last week in her column after their ALCS Game 1 win, “The details change. The results stay the same.”

Somehow, over the last three full seasons, the only teams that could stop Houston were the 2019 Nationals, a 93-win wild-card team, and last year’s Braves, whose 88 regular-season wins were the fewest among the 10 playoff teams. Both Washington and Atlanta caught fire at the right time and were probably better than their regular-season records suggest. Yet even now, despite knowing they beat the Astros in the World Series, it’s hard to say that either of them was better than Houston.

This, of course, brings us to the current NL-champion Phillies, who finished third in their division with an 87–75 record and would not have qualified for the postseason had it not added two teams, one from each league, this year. Like Washington in 2019, Philadelphia has a strong top of the rotation that is silencing opposing lineups. Like Atlanta in ’21, Philly has the fewest wins of any NL playoff team. And like both of the eventual World Series winners, the Phillies have a Hall of Fame–level talent who is having a career-defining postseason anchoring their lineup.

The Astros should win this thing. They are the better team. Then again, maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s something more to winning the World Series than just being the better team. Maybe we’ve found Houston’s kryptonite. Maybe the only opponents that can stop the Astros during their remarkable stretch of dominance are flawed NL East teams that few people saw coming.