After suffering a three-game sweep in Oakland against the last-place Athletics, Houston Astros fans aren’t exactly hitting the panic button on the 2022 season … but they’re also certainly not pleased with what happened inside the Coliseum. However, those same Astros fans may want to look back a few years to some eerie similarities between what is happening this season and what happened on the way to the World Series in 2017 for a silver lining to the losses.
Check out the very strange similarities happening this season for the Houston Astros compared to what the team went through in the 2017 campaign
After dropping a 4-2 decision to the last-place A’s on Wednesday that cemented a three-game sweep in Oakland, the Houston Astros will take a 64-35 record into a seven-game homestand beginning on Thursday that will feature visits from the Seattle Mariners and Boston Red Sox. However, take out those last three losses in Oakland and you’ll find that Houston was 64-32 this season, the same record the franchise had through the first 96 games of the 2017 season. Take a glance in the record books and you’ll see that that was a campaign that eventually saw the Astros win the World Series in a seven-game thriller over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Channeling our best infomercial voice here, but wait … there’s more.
Also during that 2017 championship season, the Astros were swept in Oakland by the A’s, dropping a four-game set to the A’s right after Houston posted a sweep in Seattle. That’s exactly what happened this season as well, with the Astros winning all three games in the Pacific Northwest before stumbling against the Athletics.
Same record to start the season. Same sweep in Oakland following a sweep in Seattle. Five years apart, Astros fans are hoping that the string of coincidences originally pointed out in this tweet will result in the same postseason glory.
Sure, it’s a stretch and plenty would have to go right for the Houston Astros to follow this same path, but baseball is a superstitious sport filled with quirks and possibilities, right? Maybe, just maybe, the events of the seven games involving a pair of sweeps that have occurred for the Astros since the All-Star break is a preview of what’s to come in the postseason in the Lone Star State. If so, these coincidences will certainly be looked back upon as events that foreshadowed the future come October and November.