Astros: Sunday is an interesting day in team history

The Houston Astros will be a part of history on Sunday and won’t even be playing.

As the occasional off days in major league history have been a dreaded Monday or Thursday, over time the schedules started to change. For the Houston Astros, they will be off this Sunday, April 11, for the first time in over 20 years.

While it is a tough task to go deep into the files of previous season’s schedules, I have done the work for you. Since 2003, the Astros have never missed playing on Sunday in the regular season, but for a season like 2021, can you truly even notice that this is a weird occurrence? We have gotten to the point in baseball and in the world that if an interesting fact is dropped on us, some people will say, “well yeah, it’s 2020/2021.”

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The schedules I dug into didn’t show the happening of off days due weather conditions postponing it, but the All-Star game festivities never seemed to be a factor. In the end, this little factoid means nothing to the game of baseball, other than it feels like it restricts the balance of off days. While this is a new norm in MLB, it is worth noticing that the game is changing in subtle ways before our eyes.

As ESPN only dates back to 2003 in their schedule archives, it is a journey to find the last time an Astros team wan’t working on the Sabbath. While their is no religious indicative to a baseball organization, the 2021 Astros will have the chance to rest on the “Lord’s Day.”

For a game of repetition and of reoccurring events, it’s interesting to see new plans and ideas modify for a faster, higher scoring game. Every decade brings forth new talent and a new era of baseball, which is either accepted or ridiculed harshly. This new change to a simple schedule isn’t drastically changing the game, but it does point to a new way of cancelling out repetition in baseball.