Baseball's most surprising team is trying to erase years of futility

ANAHEIM, Calif. – On the benches under the giant ball caps in front of Angel Stadium, the boys and men of summer gather and wait for the small buses that ferry the famous New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox or Detroit Tigers from their hotels. Some of the players arrive in cabs or airport cars. But most come on the buses for the price of a tip or their gratitude, then step to the curb and walk in bunches to the iron gate across the plaza. The boys and men shuffle their baseball cards and 8-by-11s to match the faces of the players and trot alongside them, offering the cards and photos and a pen, and sometimes there is victory and other times nothing more than the hope that the next small bus carries a more generous crew. Depending on the team in town, there could be a dozen or even dozens of them, waiting, organizing their binders, staring off toward East Orangewood Avenue and the coming of the buses.

On Thursday afternoon, the best team in the American League would be here, a full five games in front of the Angels and better so far than Kansas City or Detroit or even the Yankees, a team of home run hitters and base stealers and a batting champion and maybe the finest pitcher in the league. So there, in anticipation, sitting under the giant ball cap in front of Angel Stadium, waiting on the little bus that would bring the Houston Astros, sat … one man. He did come with a duffel bag large enough for two or three.

It might take some time to get used to the Astros as something other than, you know, the Astros, to ponder their record – 19-10, including three losses in three days this week to the Texas Rangers before Thursday's ninth-inning rally against the Angels – and view it as a reasonable assessment of who and what the Astros are and will be.

Maybe the lone man of summer will tell a friend or two.

"I think we're for real," ace Dallas Keuchel said Thursday afternoon. "And I'm liking the way we're playing."

Jose Altuve admitted he doesn't spend much time out in Houston. Between the ballgames and the travel he has few nights off, and his days are spent angling toward 7 p.m. But he does hear the folks talk, and what they say makes him happy. Altuve was around when the Astros were losing 324 games in three years. Then they lost 92 games last year, which was still terrible but wasn't 111 losses either, and the thought around the game was maybe the Astros were ready to be average, to start cashing in on the kinds of draft picks that come with 111 losses and then some pretty deft amassing of talent and borderline talent.

But this, this is interesting. A 10-game winning streak. Eighteen wins by the early days of May. General competence in a lot of areas. The commissioner himself went to Houston this week and fawned, "Everybody loves turnarounds. It's something about the human condition…"

Course, nobody wants to hear it. Not about cool (and occasionally hacked) computer systems. Not about 19-win improvements when that gets you to 70. Not about guys in charge with MBAs and another new field manager. Not about on-the-verge prospects. Not about drafts that go great and drafts that go sideways. Not about, you know, soon.

Nobody really believes a bad team can win until it wins, but a month of good ball is just that, which is to say it's little except a hell of a lot better than the alternative, and the Astros have been plenty of that. The human condition runs deep in a clubhouse that hasn't seen even a significant July for a while.

"People come to me," Altuve said, "and say we make them very proud."

They'll start there.

The Astros are, by reputation, homer-happy, strikeout-prone types. And they do, indeed, lead the American League in both, by a lot of home runs and strikeouts. They also lead the league in stolen bases. They walk a bunch. They have the second-best bullpen, to the Royals. They're pretty good defensively. The lineup starts with Altuve, the rotation starts with Keuchel and Collin McHugh, and sometime maybe this summer Carlos Correa, the 20-year-old shortstop prospect nobody doesn't adore (and one Astros player called the second coming of Alex Rodriguez), will push the whole thing forward another few inches.

The Astros might not be great, but they are relevant, and it appears they won't be terrible again for a long time, which counts as fairly significant progress. Manager A.J. Hinch would seem to fit. He is smart and levelheaded and runs a good clubhouse. Altuve is in every way an organizational cornerstone, the kind of man and player who demands more. There is talent here, not everywhere, but enough to matter.

"For me, [the losing] was like yesterday," Altuve said. "The last couple years, we were in the rebuilding process, like everybody knew. It was a hard time. But I knew something was going to happen. This year, it's different. I know it's a lot of early to be saying that."

What else are they to believe? And then why would they believe otherwise?

The goal, Keuchel said, "We just wanted to play better than we have the last couple years."

He smiled.

"That being said," he added, "anything would have been better."

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