Houston Astros

Houston Astros, American professional baseball team based in Houston that has won two World Series titles (2017 and 2022). The Astros play in the American League (AL) but were members of the National League (NL) for the first 51 seasons of the team’s existence and won an NL pennant in 2005 in addition to the team’s 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2022 AL pennants.

The team was founded in 1962 and was initially known as the Houston Colt .45s, taking its name from the famous sidearm of the American West. The team was at first fairly poor, as it finished among the bottom three positions in the NL in its first seven seasons. Perhaps the most notable occurrence during this period was the opening of the team’s new home stadium, the Astrodome (named for Houston’s role as a centre for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), in 1965. The Astrodome was the world’s first multipurpose domed sports stadium, and it was billed as the ballpark of the future. Its opening was a national media sensation, and the team adopted its current nickname to become more readily identified with the newly famous stadium.

In 1970 the Astros called up outfielder César Cedeño, who went on to earn All-Star honours four times and become arguably the team’s first superstar. He was joined by fellow All-Star outfielder José Cruz in 1975, but the Astros remained relatively unsuccessful throughout the 1970s, finishing higher than third in their division on just one occasion in the decade (second place in 1979). In 1980 the Astros signed pitching ace Nolan Ryan, who helped the team to its first postseason berth the following autumn. Houston was eliminated that year by the eventual champion Philadelphia Phillies in a dramatic five-game NL Championship Series (NLCS) that featured four extra-inning contests, including the deciding game. The Astros returned to the playoffs in the following strike-shortened 1981 season, but they fell to the Los Angeles Dodgers in another series that extended to the maximum five games. Future Cy Young Award winner Mike Scott was acquired in 1983, and he teamed with Ryan to give the Astros one of the most formidable pair of starting pitchers in the NL. In 1986 Houston earned another berth in the NLCS, where it was defeated by the New York Mets in six games. The series was notable for its LCS-record 16-inning game six, as well as for the fact that Scott was named Most Valuable Player of the series despite having played for the losing side.

Houston was a middle-of-the-pack team for the remainder of the 1980s and the early 1990s. But starting in 1993, it posted seven consecutive winning seasons and made three postseason appearances, led by the play of first baseman Jeff Bagwell and catcher–second baseman Craig Biggio, a pair known by Houston fans as “the Killer B’s.” The Astros were eliminated in the opening round of each of their three playoff appearances in 1997–99, and even after the team added a third star “B” in 1999—outfielder (and later first baseman) Lance Berkman—it remained unable to progress any farther until the middle of the next decade. The team left the Astrodome in 2000 to begin play in Enron Field (later Minute Maid Park). In 2004 the Astros advanced to the NLCS, where they lost a seven-game series to the St. Louis Cardinals. The team finally met with a modest amount of playoff luck the following year as it defeated the Cardinals in an NLCS rematch to earn a place in the first World Series in franchise history, where the Astros were swept by the Chicago White Sox. The aged team’s play soon fell off, and the Astros entered into a prolonged postseason drought. Houston reached a series of low points when it set single-season franchise records for losses in 2011 (106), 2012 (107), and 2013 (111).

In 2013 the Astros franchise was moved from the NL Central to the AL West to create two 15-team North American major baseball leagues. Two years later a rebuilt Astros squad shocked the baseball world by adding 16 wins to its total from the previous campaign and advancing to the playoffs. Houston built its young team using a savvy sabermetrics-focused approach, which famously led to a 2014 Sports Illustrated cover story anointing the forward-thinking team the “2017 World Series champions” while the moribund Astros were in the midst of a 92-loss campaign. But in the 2017 season Houston made that seemingly laughable prediction a reality by reeling off 101 wins and beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in a dramatic seven-game World Series to capture the first championship in franchise history. The Astros won a franchise-record 103 games in 2018 and advanced to another AL Championship Series, where the team was eliminated by the Boston Red Sox. Houston set a new team record with 107 wins in 2019, which it followed in the postseason by capturing another AL title and advancing to the third World Series appearance in franchise history. The Astros then lost a dramatic seven-game series to the Washington Nationals.

During the 2019 off-season, news reports exposed a sign-stealing campaign that the Astros undertook during the 2017 and 2018 seasons. In what was likely the most notorious episode of cheating in baseball since the Black Sox Scandal, the Astros created a system wherein the organization placed a video camera in the centre-field seats of their home stadium that was trained on the opposing catcher’s hand signals. A member of the organization would watch the live feed from the camera in Houston’s clubhouse and relay the signals to the team’s batters via audio cues, usually by loudly hitting a garbage can a predetermined number of times that corresponded with the type of pitch that was coming. The sign-stealing revelation shocked the baseball world, and the team’s coach and general manager were suspended for the 2020 season and fired soon thereafter. The Astros were also fined $5 million and forfeited picks in the 2020 and 2021 MLB drafts. However, the team was not stripped of its 2017 title, although many fans and media members now saw that championship as illegitimate.

Despite the turmoil of the scandal, the team remained one of the best in baseball during the following seasons. Houston advanced to the ALCS in 2020 (a seven-game loss to the Tampa Bay Rays) and to the World Series in 2021 (a six-game loss to the Atlanta Braves). In 2022 the Astros finished the regular season with the best record (106–56) in the American League, and the team easily advanced to the World Series, where it defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in six games.