HOU ARE SCARING ME!
Astros look like biggest threat to Yanks’ (and Mets’) title hopes
We have arrived at the traditional July 4 juncture of the baseball season and besides the Yankees being off to their best start in history and the potential for 4-5 epically bad teams, one other thing has become patently clear: Houston, you’re creating a problem.
As the Yankees were running roughshod through one of softest schedules in baseball, including series against two teams, the A’s and Royals on target to lose 100 games, and two others, the Tigers and Cubs, not far behind them, it evoked grand dreams of the first World Series at Yankee Stadium since 2009. Similarly, the Mets, off to third fastest start in their history, have their fans thinking World Series as well for the first time in a while. Hell, maybe even a Subway Series with the Yankees! How cool would that be?
And then, beginning on June 21 and extending to the end of the month, they both ran smack dab into Dusty Baker’s unheralded but quite formidable Houston Astros and went a combined 2-7. Although the Yankees remain on track for their greatest regular season ever, better than 1998 or 1927, it would seem the Astros — who went 3-2 against them in those first five meetings, including one win in which they no-hit them and are right behind them in leading the majors in ERA — are going to have a big say about who’s going to the World Series this year. After watching those compelling five games, most fans probably agreed the Yankees and Astros might just as well skip the rest of the season and report directly to the ALCS. For one thing that is also painfully clear is that the Yankees and Astros are in a class by themselves and the gulf between them and so many other teams is embarrassingly enormous.
Which brings about another problem: The age-old baseball dilemma — competitive balance — which, thanks mostly to tanking (Nationals, A’s, Reds and Cubs) is worse than ever this year. Presently, you have four teams — the Yankees, Astros, Dodgers and Mets on pace for 100 wins and four others, the Blue Jays,
Brewers, Padres and Braves, with winning percentages of .570 or better. After that you have a bunch of teams — Twins, Guardians, Cardinals, Giants and Red Sox — with decent records that will mostly all win spots in the expanded 12team postseason but don’t appear to have near the pedigree of potential World Series teams.
And then you have the Tigers, A’s, Royals, Nationals, Cubs and Reds, all of which are monumentally awful and an embarrassment to baseball. In the first three months, the Yankees went a collective 14-1 against the Tigers, Royals, A’s and Cubs and thanks to the friendly schedule maker draw three home games against the equally dreadful Reds in two weeks.
Just how bad are these teams? The Tigers have seven players in their starting lineup batting under .230, three of them under .200 while their 12 home runs in June were equaled by the Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber alone. The A’s also have seven starters batting under .230 and three under .200. (To be sure, batting is down all over in baseball, the league average of .237 the lowest since 1968, the year of the pitcher.) The Royals, beset with major injuries to two of their best players, Salvador Perez and Adalberto Mondesi, and ready to trade their leading hitter, Andrew Benintendi, are 27th in the majors in runs, 29th in homers and 28th in ERA with not a single starter under 4.00. Over in the National League, the Reds
and Nationals are 29th and 30th in team ERA while the Cubs, 26th in the majors in ERA will soon continue their tanking by trading All-Star catcher Willson Contreras and switch-hitting left fielder Ian Happ. aseball Commissioner Rob Manfred will no doubt be very happy to have both New York teams in the postseason for the first time since 2015, but he can’t be pleased by the enormous disparity that exists between the three highest payroll teams — Mets, Yankees and Dodgers, along with the Astros — and the six bottom rung dregs, A’s, Tigers, Nationals, Reds, Royals and Cubs, none of which figure to get better any time soon.
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