Astros Have One Major Reason To Be Thankful Despite Frustrating Season

There’s not much to say about the American League West other than that it’s filled to the brim with mediocre-to-bad baseball teams that somehow, someway, have a legitimate path to the tournament that will end up crowning the champion of the sport at season’s end. It’s an improbable division, one the Houston Astros are lucky enough to find themselves in.

The Astros, Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners are all objectively having poor seasons that under any other circumstances would result in major disappointment. In many ways, that’s still the case, as fans of each of those three teams have spent the majority of the campaign pulling their hair out, yearning for some semblance of consistency. Even then, the baseball gods have still bestowed fortune on those organizations.

Houston, especially, is in a great spot. Despite going 4-6 over its last 10 games, the team is still somehow tied for first place in the division with the Rangers. Sure, there have been moments where it’s appeared that the Astros were separating themselves from the rest of the AL West pack, making the fact that one of the competitors has caught up a little disheartening, but all this should be analyzed in context. Any other season would see the Astros fighting to stay at .500 – and that’s it. This one, this weird, wacky one, has the team in the throes of a playoff race.

Who would’ve thought?

The Astros Have Been Given an Opportunity They Can’t Waste

Houston Astros designated hitter Yordan Alvarez. Credit | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The point is that Astros fans should be grateful for at least that one thing. It’s perfectly reasonable and OK to be upset about the roster construction, the managing, the lack of consistent pitching, or any number of other things that have gone wrong with the team in 2026. There’s so much to nitpick and complain about that it’s fairly unfathomable.

What Astros fans can’t find themselves doing is complaining about the macro situation as it pertains to this particular season. It could be so much worse. Just look at the Los Angeles Angels and the Athletics. Those two organizations can’t seem to get out of their own way time and again, and in a year where every team in the division seems to stink to some degree, they’ve found a way to stink it up the most.

That has afforded Houston a luxury that struggling teams rarely receive this late in the season: time.

The Astros haven’t played themselves out of anything. They haven’t watched the division disappear over the horizon; they try desperately to keep pace, only to eventually fail. Every frustrating loss, blown opportunity and ugly stretch has seemingly been followed by the realization that nobody else in the AL West is particularly interested in running away with this thing, either.

In the end, the AL West has been bad. Abysmal, even. The Astros are a part of that. They’ve largely stunk.

They might go on to win it all anyway.

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