Houston Astros of the ‘80s

The logo for the Houston Astros in the 19080s.

Source: https://www.statmuse.com/mlb/team/1980-houston-astros-87/1980/stats

(may be subject to copyright)

When the Houston Astros finally won their first World Series in 2017, it completed a journey that started all the way back in 1980 and had its fair share of heartbreak.

The Houston Astros entered the Major Leagues as the Houston Colt .45s in 1962. They would become the Astros in 1965, a homage to the space program, which was based in Houston, and the Houston Astrodome, the newest wonder of the world.

Unfortunately, the baseball club was never really competitive. To compound the problem, in a blockbuster trade in 1971 they gave up the players that the Cincinnati Reds would use to build a dynasty and a two-time World Series champion in the 1970s .

Then a renaissance came to the Astrodome at the dawn of the 1980s. For a seven-year period, from 1980 to 1986, the Astros went to the playoffs three times and came within a whisker of going to the World Series.

There is an added significance to the Houston Astros of the ‘80s.

It would be the last championship series the Astros experienced in the 20^th century, and the last time they won the National League West.

Realignment would put them in the newly-created National League Central Division in 1995 which they won in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2001. They never advanced out of the divisional series.

Finally in 2004, they made it back to the National League Championship Series, but they made the playoffs as a wild-card team, and eventually lost to the champion St. Louis Cardinals. The Astros finally made it to the World Series in 2005, again as a wild card, defeating the Atlanta Braves in the divisional series and the Cardinals in the National League Championship Series before the Chicago White Sox swept them in the World Series.

It was another 10 years before they returned to the playoffs in 2015. By then, realignment had put them in the American League West Division in 2013. They qualified as a wild card, defeating the New York Yankees in the wild card game before losing to the Kansas City Royals in the divisional series.

Finally the Astros won the World Series in 2017, defeating the Los Angeles Dodgers, which was a bit ironic given the Dodgers defeated them in the playoffs in 1981 and went on to win the World Series. In 2017, the Astros won their first of three straight American League West division titles. In 2018, they won their divisional series over Cleveland before losing the championship series to the Boston Red Sox. In 2019, they returned to the World Series where they lost to the Washington Nationals/Montreal Expos in seven games. They defeated the Tampa Bay Rays in the divisional series then the Yankees in the championship series to advance to the World Series.

Before all that success, the Houston Astros of the ‘80s were an island in a sea of futility for a long time, and the first time the Astros experienced any real success.

What follows is a six-part series that looks at the Houston Astros of the ‘80s through my own memories and a little help from Wikipedia and The Baseball Almanac.