The Astros are loaded but they keep losing. Could they become sellers?

NEW YORK — The last time the Houston Astros traveled to the Bronx, they were 15 games over .500, No. 2 in the American League wild-card race and two games out of first place in the AL West. Their starting pitching was the catalyst in a tight four-game split with the Yankees, in the midst of Houston dropping just one of nine successive series. 

But that was last August. In the first of a three-game set at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, the Bronx Bombers were on fire as they happily hosted a crestfallen Astros club. The barrage of runs was nothing new for the Juan Soto-powered Yankees, the team with the fourth-highest OPS in MLB. And the near-complete absence of activity from the Astros lineup was nothing new this spring, either.

Following a demoralizing 10-3 loss to the Yankees — on a night in which Justin Verlander took the mound, no less — Houston fell to 0-5 against its intraleague rival in 2024 and last place in its division. Right now, the only thing the Astros are competing for is the worst record in the American League.

"You don't expect to see them in the standings where they are," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said of Houston. "But it's baseball, and it's a stretch. So you still expect them to get it going. Hopefully, we can push that off for a few days. But they have all the players and the talent and guys who have been through the grind and have been kind of the standard over the last several years. 

"They've had three-week stretches where they haven't played really well, but it's obviously magnified at the start of the season. And it's probably a longer stretch than, certainly, they've been used to. But I know a lot of the guys they have over there, they're built to get through this."

Boone said it best. We just