Kiss Our Astros Goodbye

In practice, I might not notice the Houston Astros’ disappearance from the National League all that much. With 162 games and oodles of non-divisional opponents on your dance card, what’s one home series and one road series in the scheme of things? But in theory and sentiment, I will surely miss our fraternal twins when they are snatched from our midst and set down in some foreign land. The Mets and the Astros came into this world together. They have the commemorative patches to prove it. Their strongest bonds of commonality are their 1962 birthdate and their bloody 1986 civil war pitting expansion brother against expansion brother, but their paths have crossed 561 times besides. In the mind’s eye, the Mets and Astros are forever enmeshed, perhaps inside the Astrodome where each team is trying to push one lousy run across the plate as the innings pass through the teens and meander into the twenties… Or the Astros are trotting by the Mets so relentlessly in the second game of a ...