Mariners fans, the Houston Astros are still a big problem

Let’s not sugarcoat, this year has been humiliating and pathetic. Get no-hit twice, both by AL West rivals and both in a combined fashion. And which Seattle team played football on Sunday anyways? Believe it or not, the Seahawks allowed one less point than the Mariners did runs.

No, that wasn’t a typo. The Astros scored three touchdowns on the Mariners to cap off a series sweep and extend what has been a lopsided season series in favor of them. We couldn’t even finish them off with a 7-0 early lead earlier in the series. Do you know how one team simply can’t solve the other? Well safe to say, that’s been the Mariners against the Astros.

We’re not alone in being owned. For a while now, the Twins and Orioles have been torched by the Yankees. And for the poor Twins, their hard luck mostly comes in the playoffs. In 2013, the Indians couldn’t figure the Miguel Cabrera-led Tigers to save their lives.

So why can’t the Mariners figure Houston out? It’s not a curse, it’s not the gods of baseball, it’s just the way it is right now. Remember in 2006 when we finished 2-17 against the eventual division champion A’s? But what happened? Things quickly bounced the other way. The next season we owned the A’s and since then, there really hasn’t been one club dominating the other overall.

The hope is that sooner rather than later the AL West matchups will even out a little bit. Hopefully, soon we will own the Astros. But this has been nothing new since Houston joined the West six years ago. They have had our number year in and year out.

Despite 2013 and ’14 being 100-loss nightmares for Houston, they’ve still been right there to give us a big brother hug. Even in those games where we blew them out, it didn’t feel like a blowout. They never went down easy. They lit up our pitching until the very end, making every 27th out time to either take a stiff drink or a Tylenol.

And at the end of 2014, the Astros twice beat us two out of three to play spoiler against us in our hunt for the Wild Card. So what got worse for the Mariners was when this Houston team actually became a contender.

When the Mariners were supposed to contend in 2015, Houston surprised everyone en route to their first playoff berth as AL members. And just like Sunday, the Astros won a series against us in June 2015, scoring 23 combined runs in both wins.

This team can’t get out of our hair and go away. In 2016, the Astros quickly went from dead last to playoff contender, chasing our tail for Wild Card until the season’s very last week. In 2017 as you all know, they owned every other MLB team as well en route to their first World Series trophy.

And who could forget last year when it looked like we had a shot to overtake them for the West only to have them leapfrog it from us in June and never look back.

Folks, this domination is nothing new but don’t worry. If it feels annoying now, these things always cycle back around and don’t last forever. Someday we will have the Astros’ number. The team overall is just really good and against everyone. I mean hey, they do have 95 wins with practically a full month left.