Manfred offers new life to team he tried to bury
It is unfair to say the below .500 Astros do not deserve to be in the playoffs.
Major League Baseball decided to allow 16 teams into the 2020 postseason after a heavily abbreviated 60-game regular season. Accepting those facts as facts — we’re saving the fake news for Tuesday’s presidential debate — the 29-31 Astros officially deserve to be in the playoffs.
But this is also an undisputed fact: Jim Crane, Dusty Baker, James Click, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, George Springer, Zack Greinke and Co. owe MLB commissioner Rob Manfred a heartfelt “Thank You” card.
Seriously, where would the 2020 Astros be without Manfred?
He began it all on Jan. 13
by seemingly ruining the Astros’ year, attaching a flimsy asterisk to the franchise’s only World Series championship, placing the ballclub in the bitter national crosshairs, and basically getting ex-manager A. J. Hinch and former general manager Jeff Luhnow fired.
Eight incredibly long months later, the Astros are in the playoffs because of Manfred. Amazing, right? Baseball badly wanted the Astros to go away in 2020. And because silly ol’ Manfred insisted that MLB needed to wrap the sport’s once-hallowed playoffs in cheap, throwaway plastic this season, the below .500 Astros have Manfred to thank for still being alive in 2020 — and still having a shot at winning another World Series.
Jimmy Butler and Dwight Howard facing each other in the upcoming NBA Finals cuts deep if you’re the Rockets’ front office.
DeAndre Hopkins leading the NFL in receptions and receiving yards while the Texans are a forgettable 0-3 again cuts deeper — if you believe the McNairs are really paying attention to what’s going on on Kirby Drive.
But Manfred effectively pushing the post-sign stealing scandal Astros into MLB’s first postseason after Astros players were granted immunity, the organization was somewhat hammered, and the Boston Red Sox got off with a flick on the wrist? Modern irony at its finest. I wrote a couple pieces during the summer, when the sports world was still being silenced by the coronavirus pandemic, about how awful MLB’s 16-team playoff proposal was.
The 2020 Astros were still legitimate World Series contenders then. And no one was predicting that the tied-for-15th best club in the big leagues would barely be clinging to the American League’s No. 6 seed as October approached.
Heck, even the No. 6 spot comes courtesy of Manfred and MLB.
Realistically, Baker’s Astros are the worst AL team to make the playoffs and the only club in the AL to finish below .500 and still qualify for the postseason. But since MLB decided to publicly reward each division’s second-place finisher, the Astros avoided the No. 1 seed Tampa Bay Rays and always eerie Tropicana Field in the wild-card round and now just need to win two games against Marwin Gonzalez’s Minnesota Twins to advance to the AL Division Series.
MLB’s billionaires and million
aires selfishly fought for months as the normal 162-game season was whittled away. Then Manfred and MLB went for the extra playoff money and casually tossed history in the trash can.
Only four teams made the playoffs in ancient times (1993). Last season, Arizona, Philadelphia, the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs failed to make the five-team National League playoffs, despite all four clubs being .500 or above after 162 games.
Yet more than half of the league made it this season after baseball struggled to get to 60 games inside near-empty stadiums.
On second thought … make it a “Thank You” card for Manfred, a dozen roses and a very nice bottle of champagne.
I won’t give a well-known greeting-card company free advertising in this column. I will, however, highlight a few potential cards that quickly stood out on the company’s website.
“You deserve a big thanks!” with a cute hedgehog hanging out inside a teacup on the cover and “Because a little niceness goes a long way” printed in gold on the inside.
Another contender: “Because of good-hearted people like you, this world is a nicer place.”
Last but definitely not least: “In the cereal bowl of life, you are the marshmallows. That's how sweet you are.” Awwwww.
Greinke must prove his Game 1 worth against Minnesota’s Kenta Maeda, who was a much better pitcher than the Astros’ new ace this season and posted an MLBbest 0.75 WHIP.
There’s a shot that Lance McCullers Jr. doesn’t even take the mound in the playoffs and the Astros’ 2020 season is suddenly over by 4 p.m. Wednesday.
But if these Astros have any real magic left in them, they will survive and advance one more time.
If the Astros make the ALDS, they can return to the AL Championship Series if their bats catch fire.
If they make the ALCS, they should be hot enough to return to the World Series for the third time in four years.
And if we’re praising the Astros’ resilience in late October in Arlington?
Houston’s MLB team must send good ol’ Manfred a case of the really expensive sparkling stuff.
Without baseball’s friendly commish, the 2020 Astros would already be over.