Yankees: Astros’ final 2020 batting averages prove karma is real

The Houston Astros’ 2020 batting averages are a thing of beauty, even for struggling Yankees fans.

The Houston Astros will make the playoffs in 2020 only because Rob Manfred is an oily buffoon who decided to let more than half the league get their grubby hands on the pie (which also helped out the Yankees, but, uh………..you know what we mean).

However, they’ll enter the dance and face off with the AL Central champion Minnesota Twins ranking as the worst playoff team in MLB history, an honor they now share with the 2020 Milwaukee Brewers.

This is the future Manfreds want, so this will likely not be the last Charlie Whitehurst Seattle Seahawks-esque MLB playoff team we witness over the next few years, but it’s with great joy that we look back on an under-.500 Astros team creeping into the postseason after an incompetent 60-game sample.

Surely, though, it was all pitching, right?

A Red Sox-esque young staff, missing Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, and most of the bullpen pieces you remember, let down a bloodthirsty offense enough times that they were unable to creep higher in the standings?

Well, about that.

It turns out that a slider is a pretty damned difficult pitch to recognize if you don’t have a big, metal canister screaming out, “Slider!” every time one’s coming.

If one Astro struggled in the shortened season, that would be a difficult-to-reconcile outlier. If two struggled, it could be considered a trend. Well, what about every single offensive standout tripping into a 30-foot hole? That seem noteworthy to you?

Oh NO!

It’s tired to bash Jose Altuve’s outright incompetence in the prime of what looked like a Hall of Fame career (Hall of Fame veneer, more like!), but it’s wired to bash … Yuli Gurriel, the unsung villain in this whole charade.

It was Gurriel who sat fastball and blasted the tone-setting homer in Game 6 of last year’s ALCS. It was Gurriel who barely got a scratch for mocking Yu Darvish’s Asian heritage in the dugout of the 2017 World Series. Perhaps, of all the Astros, Gurriel’s brash attitude most warranted punishment these past few years and, uh, he got it!

We can’t let any of them slide, though. Even on the slim chance that the tattooed Altuve really was clean compared to the rest of his teammates (remember Carlos Correa screaming about that?!), he clearly didn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with an entire offseason of the “haters” and “losers” … correctly pointing out confirmed behavior, per Major League Baseball.

Rob Manfred didn’t do enough to punish this 25-man cheating roster wholesale, and every road stadium was emptied this year for reasons that go far beyond baseball, so it’s been exceedingly difficult for fans to facilitate justice.

However, perhaps the strain of the season combined with the removal of their banging safety net was enough to finally slay this beast.

After all, if a jersey buzzes and there’s no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Yankees: Here’s When NYY Fans Can Boo Astros in 2021

The 2021 New York Yankees schedule was released, and hopefully fans can be in the stands -- here's when you'll be able to boo the Houston Astros!