Back-to-back titles becoming more rare
More playoff series, top-heavy leagues have made it harder
The Astros, boyishly exuberant and undeniably charming in their style of play a year ago, discovered the grandeur of wining the World Series. They inspired catch phrases about “literally” loving each other. They floated through a showering of confetti from the sky and beer cans from office building windows. They made spectators and prognosticators believe they were so good they could do all of it again.
They had to learn the hard way how difficult it is to keep the magic going.
The Astros dropped four consecutive games to get eliminated from the American League Championship Series, ending a season in which they had more wins, pitching talent and roster depth than at any other point in their history, and scarring them with a truth about modern baseball that they only could opine about with half-humble clichés until Thursday night’s final whupping from the Red Sox: It is exceeding improbable that a World Series winner can repeat.
After manager A.J. Hinch publicly congratulated Boston, his first words summed up Houston’s agony: “It sucks.”
No repeating since 2000
This year marks 20 seasons since the last repeat champion — the 1998-2000 New York Yankees — a chasm Hinch had acknowledged before this Astros season and could not avoid confronting at its conclusion.
“It’s hard,” he said at a Minute Maid Park press conference, while the Red Sox posed for photos and lit cigars in the visitor’s clubhouse. “It’s just really hard in this league to win because other teams change their entire operation in order to try to catch you or try to beat you. Or you’ve got to have so much health in this game and you’ve got to perform at your highest level against the best teams at the most intense times.”
Hinch went back farther with his perspective. He harkened to the challenge his club faced before opening day.
“And a lot of things can derail you, from the very beginning of expectations in the spring to going through a season that will never have the adrenalin or the intensity that the previous World Series championship provided,” he said. “But at the same time, what I learned about our team is we weren’t affected by that.”
The Astros prepared as best they could for the unexpected. General manager Jeff Luhnow knew that repeating the same steps, relying on the same players or having the same mindset would not lead to the same outcome — which only narrowly went the Astros way on the final day of the 2017 season in Game 7 of the World Series.
As a former executive with the 2006 World Series champion Cardinals, Luhnow learned the perils of regression.
He realized importance of injecting new blood into the mix because, as he had said, it is “dangerous” to expect the majority of a winning roster would replicate its performance.
Concentration at the top
So less than two months after securing Houston’s first baseball title in 56 years, Luhnow acquired Gerrit Cole to be a secondary ace to Justin Verlander, and seven months later revamped the back end of the bullpen with trades for Ryan Pressly and Roberto Osuna.
Luhnow had assembled the best rotation in 30 years, strengthened the team’s only weakness and invited criticism for taking on Osuna during the suspended reliever’s ongoing domestic violence case because even a thoroughly talented defending championship team in first-place in its division will attempt everything necessary to improve its chances of repeating. And it was not enough. “We were beat up, like a lot of teams are this time of year,” Hinch said.
Even if Luhnow could forecast underperformance, he could not expect or compensate for the injuries that befell Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, George Springer and other players less forthright about playing hurt.
The odds of any team winning shrank significantly when the Wild Card era began in 1995 and added a play-in game in 2012. More competition has made the sport more exciting and less predictable. The leagues are topheavy with contenders who recently have acquired impact players more easily in trades and free agency because of the many stripped-down bottom-dwellers patiently awaiting top draft picks to develop.
In some ways this is how the 2017 Astros, founded on a young core and bolstered by All-Star veterans, rose.
In more ways it is how the Red Sox, who won a franchise-record 108 games, surpassed the Astros this season.
Expectations unchanged
Houston appeared stronger and more talented than Boston heading into the ALCS, but that, like all the measures taken to ensure a favorable shot at repeating, wound up not mattering either.
“They beat us,” Hinch said. “When you get two evenly matched teams up against each other, there’s going to be swings in momentum and big at-bats and a little bit of luck, a little bit of bad luck. And they outplayed us. They did a really good job of having an excellent game plan and going and executing it and they were extremely tough.”
For the disappointment lingering in Houston after the ALCS, the series also emphasized an admirable achievement for a franchise that only had known what it felt like to lose. A maelstrom of competing factors likely will thwart a champion from repeating, but it will not change their expectations.
“We feel like we set the bar exactly where it should be around here,” Hinch said. “The World Series is the only thing that was going to make this team feel like we accomplished much.
“Franchise record wins and (a) division championship, things that just aren’t common. It’s not normal. It’s not easy.
“So to run the gauntlet in one year is an incredible accomplishment. To do it again is — it feels like even harder.”
It is harder.
And now the Astros know how it feels.