Houston Astros: The Good and the Bad Heading to the ALCS

The Houston Astros won some incredible postseason games against the Seattle Mariners to advance to their American League record sixth consecutive LCS.

In a bit of serendipity they will now face their 2017 and 2019 ALCS foes in the New York Yankees, a team that continuously claims they would have won the World Series in 2017 were it not for the Astros ineffective sign stealing scheme.

Despite the fact there’s no evidence of cheating in the 2019 season or postseason and conflicting reports of whether the Astros used their system in the 2017 postseason, now is the Astros chance to leave the Yankee fans without any doubt in their minds who the class of the American League is and has been over the past half decade.

But before the Astros got to this point they had to sweep a series against the Seattle Mariners in an extremely hard fought ALDS.

Two of the games were instant classics with Yordan Alvarez’s incredible three run walk off homer in game one and the battle of the bullpens that lasted 18 innings in game three before Jeremy Pena’s solo shot put an end to the game.

6 takeaways from the Houston Astros’ ALDS win heading into the ALCS against the Yankees.

While there were plenty of positives for the Astros coming out of the ALDS there are still some concerning issues they need to fix going forward to make it back to the fall classic.

The pitching in the division series for the Astros was overall spectacular, especially in the back end. The flip side can be said for the back end of the Astros lineup which has truly given the team little to no help.

The Astros leaned on pitching all year and this series was a microcosm of the 2022 Astros. Get just enough hitting to win games and the pitching will take care of the rest. While the Astros exploded for eight runs in game one, five of them came in the eighth and ninth innings. They scored just eight runs in the other 34 innings played.

Without further adue let’s see what parts of the team are in a good place going forward and where the Astros will need to improve in order to beat the New York Yankees.