What a disastrous weekend. Are we nearing the end of an 11 year era of dominance? After 2 championships, several more championship appearances, playoffs in all but 2 seasons, is it possible that bad drafting and roster management has doomed this dynasty to end?
I mean Ja’marr Chase had just twelve yards. Twelve yards! And is Kyren Williams a committee back now?
Oh, I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about the Astros? No, no, no, this is about my fantasy football team, my own storied, storied franchise, now victim of the fact that yours truly couldn’t be bothered to sit down and do any research until 10 minutes before draft time.
That’s the nature, though, of a fantasy league populated by guys in their mid-forties, now pulled in seven directions between work, kids, their activities and home repair. (Is there more painful existence in Houston than that period between when your air conditioner breaks and when the AC guy can come fix it?)
One guy last year told me he experimented with having ChatGPT set his lineup. You auto drafted and you let AI set your lineup? What do we even need you in the league for?
But I digress. (Not really. To digress, I would have had to have started on topic.)
I ignored the cardinal law of fantasy football: Nobody wants to hear about your fantasy football team. Even the other people in your own league don’t want to hear about your fantasy football team. So, I apologize; I should have kept this to myself, or better yet, do what I usually do and bothered Cody with it.
I guess after the Astros’ 3 losses in 3 games in Tropicana, I would just rather write about anything else. Before the series, I asked my friend Ian Malinowski from DraysBay what he thought about the upcoming series.
“Rays-Astros is weird, we’re both mostly comfortable as long as we don’t get swept, which is kind of an uncomfortable spot to be in actually,” he said.
That was true. Both teams were 3-4 games up in their division with not much time left for their rivals to catch up. Just don’t get swept, and it’ll be manageable.
Pray that they don’t get swept. The Astros heard that prayer and answered it, but it wasn’t the answer we wanted. “No.”
There’s no shame in losing to the best team in league, but now the Astros find themselves just 1 game up on the Rangers.
So what do the Astros need to do now? They need to beat the teams they ought to beat if they’re truly going to say they deserve to play next month. They have a 3 game series against the AL East leading Braves still left, but the rest of the games are against 3 of the 4 worst teams in the AL: the Mariners, the Royals and the Athletics.
It’s not a high bar. It hasn’t been a high bar all season, but the bar is there for the high jump, not the limbo. Play like you’re better than 3 of the 4 worst teams in the league.
That starts tonight against the Kansas City Royals.
Michael Wacha starts for the Royals. Wacha might play for a bad team, but he’s not a bad pitcher. An All-Star in 2026, 35-year old right-hander Wacha is 9-8 in 29 starts with a 3.25 ERA, 1.11 WHIP, a 7.2 K/9 and 2.4 BB/9.
Wacha had four consecutive starts where he picked up the win, until it the streak was broken in his last outing, but you couldn’t blame it on him. Wacha pitched 6 innings of scoreless 3-hit ball against Arizona, walking 4 and striking out 4, but got a no decision, as the Royals would go on to lose in extra innings.
Hunter Brown starts for the Astros, and if the Astros want to take this division, Hunter Brown needs to start pitching the way we know Hunter Brown can. This rotation has too many question marks already for Brown to be another one.
The game will be broadcast at 7:10 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.
This post will be updated with starting lineup as they are made available.
We hope you will join us and the rest of the Launch Angle community for the game! The turnout has been amazing on the TLA Discord Server for the game threads.
Join us again for today’s game. Just join the Discord server using this link: https://launch-angle.com/discord .
For more detailed instructions, please see the Guide to the Launch Angle.
If you’ve participated in game threads on other Astros sites in the past, you will probably see a lot of familiar names. Chat, lurk, do whatever! (But please say “hi”, so we know you’re not a bot.)
By the way, there is a TLA Discord Fantasy Football League. It’s not the one I was talking about at the beginning of this piece, but there is one and they have a channel #fantasy-sports in the Discord server and everything.
Feature photo from @astros on X, Source Link.
Final stretch to turn the corner. We have to find a way to score runs again. But with Pena turning back into the old version of himself, and alavarez likely playing hurt, it will be a tall task indeed.
Well that sucks
Medical team 1637 Wins, Common sense 1 Win