The Houston Astros aim to become the first team since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees to win back-to-back championships, their roster stuffed with future Hall of Famers and All-Stars. It's because of that extraordinary roster makeup that their summerlong meandering seems to make no sense.
In the first week of September, the Astros went to Arlington to face the Texas Rangers in what felt like a pivotal series, and reminded baseball that they are the defending World Series champions. The Astros clubbed 16 homers and outscored the Rangers 39-10 over three games, wrecking the upstart opponents who had led the American League West for much of the summer.
Since then, they've lost a series to the Oakland Athletics and another to the Kansas City Royals, two of MLB's worst teams, results consistent with the wild inconsistency of the Astros this season. Houston went into Atlanta in April and dominated the Braves over three days, and followed that by taking two of three from the scorching-hot Tampa Bay Rays; later, the Astros took two of three games in Baltimore against the Orioles. The Astros have played some of their best baseball against the best teams.
But go figure, they just lost two of three to the O's at home, where they are under .500 this season, and have slogged enough that they are in jeopardy of missing the playoffs altogether. This summerlong drift is reminiscent of the team whose back-to-back feat they are trying to match -- the dynasty Yankees, who increasingly struggled during the regular seasons even as they stacked up championships. A champion's malaise.
"When you're used to winning, when you're supposed to win," said Paul O'Neill, the right fielder on those Yankees teams, "it does get harder."
Back then, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman compared his team to Sisyphus, forced to repeatedly push the same rock to the top of a hill. The Yankees of 1996-2001 played in the World Series five times in six years, and by 1999 and 2000, their collective attention span seemed to ebb as they played midsummer games that didn't generate as much adrenaline as those played in October.
The 2023 Astros might be having a similar experience. "It's human nature," said Mike Stanton, a reliever on those Yankees teams who now works as an analyst on Houston's broadcasts.
After winning the World Series in 1998 and 1999, the Yankees all but collapsed at the end of the 2000 regular season, losing 15 of their final 18 games; they finally clinched the division on a night when they were blown out in a game in Baltimore, only because the Boston Red Sox had lost. Yankees manager Joe Torre had to remind a quiet clubhouse to celebrate the achievement.
But the playoffs began, the most important and most intense games of the year, and the Yankees went back to being the champions, beating the A's, Seattle Mariners and New York Mets in 11 of 16 postseason games.
Stanton remembered what it was like to report to camp in February, with the weeks of spring training and months of the regular season ahead. "You get to spring training after the second or third [championship]," Stanton recalled, "and you're like, 'Crap, we have to do that again?'"
Over the course of those regular seasons, Stanton remembered, opposing players would ferry over jerseys and baseballs to the Yankees clubhouse for the likes of Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams to autograph. For other teams, facing those Yankees -- or these Astros -- was like a midseason World Series. "And we'd always get everybody else's A-game," O'Neill said.
For the Yankees, it was just another game, a necessary step to October, and sometimes those Yankees teams looked flat.
It would be very difficult for any current Astros player to speak of this out loud without their words being misconstrued. It's not that they don't care, or that they're not putting in the work. There are just some days over the baseball season -- or heck, in any job -- when there's more at stake, when your attention span is higher.
Stanton recalled that near the end of his career, he was playing with the first Washington Nationals teams, who were early in a cycle of rebuilding after moving from Montreal, playing in a mostly empty RFK Stadium. "I had real focus problems," he recalled.
The Astros have participated in the playoffs for six straight years, and been in the World Series in four of those seasons. Jose Altuve has played in nearly 100 postseason games, over seven Octobers and Novembers. Alex Bregman has nearly 400 playoff plate appearances. This is Justin Verlander's 18th season, and if the Astros reach the postseason, it'll be Verlander's 10th trip to the playoffs. The heightened adrenaline of October might be increasingly difficult to match over the course of the regular season.
But soon, all of that playoff experience can become a weapon. "As soon as the playoffs begin," O'Neill said, "once you get to the playoffs, you're playing in a part of the season and in games in which you are comfortable."
Games in which other, less accomplished players might not be nearly as comfortable, which is why O'Neill said that once the AL playoffs begin, he would view the Astros as the team to beat.
There were sluggish days even in the Yankees' greatest season, in 1998. The Yankees were so far ahead in the standings they clinched a playoff berth in late August, and over the last month, some form of boredom manifested in the group. After they played terribly in a loss against the Devil Rays, Torre called a team meeting and chastised the players, saying they couldn't just assume they would turn on and off their focus like a light switch.
But Torre also talked about his belief that "the cream would rise to the top," O'Neill recalled. "Those meetings meant a lot, because by the end of the meeting, you did feel that Joe Torre believed we were going to win."
Houston manager Dusty Baker bears a similar trust in his players. But the Astros won't get the chance to play in the most meaningful games of the season if they fail to win enough of the games needed to get them to baseball's October tournament.