You know, I’m a sympathetic person. Do I think it was unfair of Major League Baseball to ask the Astros to pack up and leave their homes and their families in the middle of a hurricane to go play a game at a neutral location to keep the TV schedule from getting messed up? Yes. Do I think the networks should have been more willing to mess with the schedule the same way they have countless times in the past, including in 2002 when they moved the Super Bowl to an entirely different week because of the September 11 attacks that forced several games to be canceled? Certainly. And do I think that home field truly is an advantage? Sure.
But can we please stop overshadowing the fact that Carlos Zambrano and the Cubs were also playing at a neutral site when Big Z pitched an amazing no no! The Cubs organization did not force the Astros to leave Houston - the league did. And I don’t think it’s fair to keep going on about the poor Astros and how they didn’t have a chance. If you can’t make your bats connect with balls you aren’t going to win games. End of story.
I’m not really an Astros fan, but the site was not exactly neutral. Driving from Chicago to Milwaukee takes about 1 hour and 42 minutes according to Google maps. The same drive from Houston to Milwaukee (for Houston’s make-up “home game”) takes 19 hours and 34 minutes … if the airports were open, it would take an Astros fan 2 hours and 32 minutes to fly into Milwaukee on one of the five planes that get there non-stop every day.
I understand that the point of this post is to fight back against downplaying Zambrano’s achievement (which I agree with), but it’s important that the other extreme isn’t taken. I read an admittedly-biased article in the Houston Chronicle that conceded “Yes, Carlos Zambrano was unhittable. No, the Astros wouldn’t have beaten him anywhere,” and that’s not the point … you don’t need to pity the Astros to think their play is negatively affected by something that has nothing to do with what is happening on the field.
Cubs fans have seen their fair share of bad luck since 1945, so belittling another club’s bad luck does not seem like very good karma. I’d imagine a similar reaction to this was coming in the form of a Cubs fan responding to a Marlins fan after Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS.
