A Time Capsule From a Different Time and Emotional State, or Why The Suffering Makes Winning the World Series Even Sweeter
The 2017 Baseball Prospectus Annual Essay About the Astros Is About Championship Droughts. Connecting to Our Negative Emotions Makes Our Positive Emotions More Meaningful.
Like any normal person, I was shopping for Christmas gifts on December 24. And as I was heading towards the register at Barnes & Noble, I spied something on the clearance rack that caught my eye. It was the 2017 Baseball Prospectus Annual.
The Annual is what begat the Baseball Prospectus website back in the 1990s, and its format has remained the same for years. There is a chapter for each team. The bulk of the chapter is player stats and comments. But starting each chapter is an essay on the current state of each team. The Annual comes out each Winter and serves as a preview of the upcoming season.
Thus, on December 24, 2022, I was holding a time capsule. A document written six seasons earlier. Six really meaningful seasons earlier. I quickly turned to the Astros essay. What was the attitude about the Astros moving in to that season?
The Astros essay was written by Zachary Levine, former Astros beat writer at the Chronicle (before Chandler, before Jake, heck, even before Drellich) turned national baseball writer. It began:
Ten years can never constitute a drought. If you’re coming off a title, you’re still in that honeymoon period. If you’re a franchise starting from scratch, you’re not even allowed to use the word drought—three expansion teams have done it in a decade, and one of them had the word “Miracle” in their name.
Oh wow, He’s writing about the Astros never having won the World Series. That was such a short time ago. And yet, in the emotional life of being an Astros fan it was so long ago.
I looked back at the book’s cover where a sticker with a drawing of a chicken on it said “Cheep. $5.” So worth it.
Levine then discusses a relatively unremarkable moment. In Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, Lance Berkman singled to send Willy Taveras to third base with no outs. “That moment was the closest the Astros have ever become to being champions. Three strikeouts to end the eighth, three outs in the ninth, three more loses and a mostly sad decade later, it still is.”
As we long time Astro fans know, the experience of being an Astros fan up through 2017 was one of following a team that was most unremarkable. The team took 18 seasons to make its first playoffs, but did not advance in their three playoff appearances in the 1980s. The 1990s brought the best teams in Astros history, led by Bagwell and Biggio, but it never amounted to anything in the postseason. The team’s luck changed in the early rounds of the playoffs in 2004 and 2005, but not in its final outcome.
And at the same time, the Astros made little to no impression nationally on the sport. The ability to sign a Hall of Fame Texas hardball pitcher brought some attention in the ‘80s with Nolan Ryan and in the 2000s with Roger Clemens, but the team’s stars were never big personalities, and their postseason failures kept the team and its players from the national baseball consciousness.
Levine of course writes at the moment where that was all going to change. The Astros, the team more famous for their innovations in jersey and stadium design than postseason glory, had put together a juggernaut. The team would in 100 games that season and its first World Series. People paid attention to the Houston Astros. And the winning—and the paying attention to the Astros—have not stopped for a second since Levine hit send on his email to his publisher containing this essay.
The essay continues alternating between reflections on a championship drought measured in decades and analysis of the Astros specifically—discussing what the drought means and whether the 2017 could end it.1 The discussion of droughts mark how the passage of time shift attitudes among fans about their team.
“At twenty years, you’re still being kind of a jerk for calling it a drought…”
“If you have to wait fifty years, you may never see your team win.”
“Sixty years makes two generations, and that’s when decisions start to be made.”
“At eighty years, they make movies. And good for them, because really all that’s left of the connections are cinematic ones.”
“At ninety years, you devolve into the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the drought is a prison.”
The discussion of the championship drought for the Astros was of course ripe in 2017. The team had just finished its 55th season, right in between “you may never see your team win” and “that’s when decisions start to be made.”
But Levine also moves the discussion from the general to the specific situation of the Astros. The team had climbed out of the depths of the nadir in the early 2010s, but it was unclear that the rebuild would go from good in 2015 and 2016 to great.
Levine quotes James Yasko, founder the Astros County blog, as saying “Fifty-five years of not winning hasn’t been as psychologically damaging to me as much as 2011-2014.”
The reason that this essay stood out to me is how much it accurate captured my anxiousness about the 2017 season. I knew in that offseason that the 2017 would be good. But could it be that good?
We now stand six seasons later from the promise of that 2017 team—Levine points out the 2017’s youth and potential for improvement, the quality of the top of the rotation, though he notes that “solidifying [the rotation] by the end July with a fourth playoff quality starter from within or outside will be crucial” [editor’s note: yes, yes it was.”
And all of that promise was met. First in the magical 2017 season when the franchise won 101 games, took control of the AL West, and completed the playoff gauntlet, capped off by Charlie Morton shutting down the Dodgers for the last 4 innings of Game 7.
And the promise was met again and again over the last six seasons. The team kept winning—five division titles, six ALCS appearances, four pennants, and, in 2022 the second World Series title.
The psychological damage of the nadir that Yasko discussed above seems so distant, and the damage of those years (and yes, I suffered some of that damage myself) seems different now that we know that the tear down led to the golden age.
The feeling of anxiousness that existed in 2017 about this team—could they actually be The One—is no longer present in discussions of the 2023 team. The assumption among most fans is that they will win the division and make another playoff run. And fair enough, that’s all we have known for six seasons.
But reading a piece from 2017—from before the first World Series title and the flowering of the golden age—helped connect me with the anxiety I had about the 2017 season. Could the Astros, could my team, really be this good? I thought so entering the 2017 season. But I knew they might not. They had never been this good.
And even if they won in the regular season, they would get to the playoffs, where disaster always loomed.
Tonight, the Astros will unveil their second World Series banner above the Crawford Boxes. They will wear uniforms trimmed in gold this weekend and receive their World Series rings tomorrow. It will be a celebration of 2022, another magical season. And it will be a celebration of a postseason run that commanded the respect of the entire baseball world and led to people asking if this is a dynasty.
But in the wake of all of that celebration—and all of the joy created by a six year run that has met or exceeded the reasonable dreams of any fan—I think it is important to stay connected to the negative emotions that baseball creates. The anxiety about 2017 I described and the psychological damage from the nadir that Yasko described. The frustration of so many playoff disappointments in the 1990s and the ennui of following a team that literally went .500 over a 24 year period.
Why should we connect ourselves to the negative emotions of baseball? Because it makes the positive emotions so much sweeter. Why are championships so awesome? One reason is that they are the reward for so much suffering as fans.
So for this weekend’s celebration, I say l’chaim, my friends.
Spoiler alert:
