The Houston Astros are visiting Yankee Stadium this week for their annual public flogging. This has become an unlikely perennial fixture of the local sporting calendar. We are well into a second century of Yankees-Red Sox being an epic baseball entanglement. We are well into a ninth different decade when Yankees-Dodgers has stirred the gas tanks in The Bronx.
And look, since one of life’s sacrosanct principles is “location/location/location,” it goes without saying that while the annual regularly scheduled Subway Series may have lost a few ounces of juice through the years, the Mets-Yankees rivalry for the heart and minds of baseball New York is still a thing.
But Yankees-Astros? Who had that one on the ol’ bingo card in, say, 1966? Or 1976? Or ever, really, until 2015, when the Yankees and Astros began colliding in the American League playoffs and the Astros went 4-for-4 against them — assisted, of course, by their bold trash-can scheme in 2017, the impetus for all the impassioned invective aimed at the Astros whenever they invade the Boogie Down.
The Astros arrive in a curious place. They are in a most-familiar position — in the upper quadrant of the AL West, a half-game behind the Rangers. But they are also, like 11 of the 15 members of the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, either at or under .500. They greeted these dueling realities Monday by firing general manager Dana Brown, whose contract was scheduled to lapse after the season and wasn’t expected back anyway. And, man. There are times when irony really does hit you on top of the head like an anvil dropped from the roof of the Flatiron Building.
