Age Before Beauty? Astros vs. White Sox AL Wild Card Series Preview
No one will be happier than the Houston Astros when the second game of their Wild Card Series starts. See, during the first game, they won’t have a playoff win-loss record, so the fact that they went 81-81 this year, the worst record ever to win a division title, will come up early and often. That’s such a striking fact that we’ll no doubt continue to hear about it throughout the playoffs, but in their first game, it’s going to be one of the main topics of conversation. Houston would love nothing more than to leave behind that pedestrian regular season and get back to what the team normally does in October: maraud through the American League towards the World Series.
The Chicago White Sox, on the other hand, would probably be happy to live in the 2026 regular season forever. Written off before the year even began, they started hot and kept winning. While pundits expected them to continue their slow rebuild, their youth movement bubbled over into major league success far faster than expected. They led the AL Central longer than any other team this season. They won 24 more games than they did last year, which was itself a 19-game improvement on the year before. Unless they win the World Series, the 2026 White Sox will be remembered for their miraculous regular season, not whatever goes on in the few games they play afterwards. But being remembered is for the future; right now, all that matters is avoiding going home for one more series. So while Chicago has blown away expectations and Houston has fallen short of meeting their own, none of that matters for the next two or three games.
The divergent regular season experiences of these two clubs make for an interesting setup for this clash. But that’s just the big picture storyline. The series has several points of interest on both sides that I’m excited to talk about.
The Astros posted so-so offensive numbers this year, but it wasn’t Yordan Alvarez’s fault. The presumptive AL MVP did it all in 2026. He played in nearly every game and hit .316/.432/.601, with each triple slash stat leading the majors, but for most of the season, the team struggled to find productive hitters to surround him with. When the White Sox pitch to the Astros, they’ll be thinking about Alvarez’s effect on the game almost constantly. If he lurks a few batters in the future, the stakes in the current plate appearance rise. When he’s at the plate, the intentional walk math becomes important, as does having their best available pitcher on the mound. After he bats, there’s a natural lull – eight batters of buffer before the next time the Sox have to face the bogeyman.
It’s probably not fair to say that it doesn’t matter how Chicago’s pitchers try to get Alvarez out, but that’s how it feels to me. He doesn’t have weaknesses. He hits lefties and righties equally well, and he tattoos fastballs and breaking balls with equal venom. How his at-bats go will have a lot to do with how the series goes. But if you’re the White Sox, you can’t really game plan for him, so that simplifies their approach. Try not to let Alvarez beat you, it goes without saying, but how will you get the other Astros out?
For a lot of this year, that didn’t feel like a tough question. These aren’t your older brother’s Astros; the lineup isn’t dotted with Silver Sluggers the way it once was. But that might be changing just in time for the most important stretch of the year, which would be an exceedingly Astros thing to do. Isaac Paredes bats after Alvarez and thus gets a steady stream of bonus runners on base. His game plan is simple: take something the Sox throw him and deposit it in the Crawford Boxes, and for two-plus runs if he’s batting after an intentional walk. That strategy worked better than ever in 2026; Paredes hit .262/.360/.447, 30% above league average, and launched 25 home runs, 14 of which came at home.
Behind Paredes, the Astros have a cluster of hitters who had middling seasons but great finishes. Yainer Diaz, Christian Walker, and Lucas Spence have combined for 11 home runs in the last two weeks (Paredes and Alvarez each have four, and leadoff hitter Jeremy Peña has five), helping propel Houston to the most home runs in the majors this year. That presents a tough bind for the White Sox, who seem likely to use David Sandlin, Erick Fedde, and Davis Martin, three fly ball pitchers, in this three-game set.
But there’s good news for Chicago buried here, too. Sandlin, Fedde, and Martin are all righties, just like staff ace Sean Burke, who is slated to start the middle game of the series. Five of the top six hitters in the Houston lineup are righties, and Alvarez is equally lethal against everyone. And whichever nominal starter handles bulk innings in the first game, they’ll be doing so with plenty of help from the bullpen, from openers to multi-inning stoppers. The Sox are going to be bullpenning extensively in the games that Burke doesn’t start. That gives the Sox plenty of flexibility to protect their relatively weaker starters.
Given recent form, the matchup between Houston’s batters and Chicago’s starters tilts towards the home team. The White Sox hope to upend that with their bullpen, which was the strength of the pitching staff this year. Grant Taylor worked his way to the top of the bullpen hierarchy after a transcendent season, and he’s also a great fit for this series. He throws hard, keeps the ball on the ground, and peppers righties with a sinker/slider/four-seamer mix that lines up well against the righty-heavy Astros attack.
Taylor’s jack-of-all-trades season is probably a benefit here, too. Houston’s lineup isn’t staggered; there’s a big pocket of righties at the top and a gaggle of lefties at the bottom. That’s an argument in favor of planning for matchups instead of innings. Taylor is going to enter the game in high-leverage spots, and he’s probably going to face Alvarez at least twice in three games. Having flexibility about which inning those clashes take place in can only help the White Sox.
The Sox have many options for going after the lefty-heavy bottom of the Houston lineup — plus wrapping around to face Alvarez, presumably — and I’m intrigued to see how they handle it. Sean Newcomb, Hagen Smith, and Bryan Hudson all have benign platoon splits and posted excellent numbers this year. They can’t all face their best matchups, though; at least one of them is going to be tasked with slogging through the righty-heavy section of the lineup. I’ve gone back and forth on my thinking there, but right now I’d lean towards giving those assignments to Hudson, who has handled tough assignments for the Sox all year long.
If this side of the ball feels like it’s advantage Houston to you, you’re not alone. The White Sox don’t inspire a lot of confidence on the run prevention side, and while the Astros scuffled through most of the year, they’re still the Astros, and no one in baseball is hitting better than Alvarez right now. That puts a lot of pressure on the Chicago offense to hold up its end of the bargain. Luckily, that side of the ball lines up far better for the South Siders.
The Sox also hit a ton of homers, with the newly-beefy Miguel Vargas, NPB phenom Munetaka Murakami, and Colson Montgomery each eclipsing 30 long balls this year. The rest of the team complements that power well. Sam Antonacci gets on base a ton at the top of the lineup, and Chase Meidroth and Tristan Peters both put together solid all-around seasons towards the bottom, with each of them getting on base and cracking enough homers to prop up the run scoring when Murakami and Vargas weren’t lighting up the scoreboard. Kyle Teel missed substantial time with two different injuries this year, but he returned in September to provide even more length and on-base skill. The Sox even have a wonderful group of righty pinch-hitters, led by a resurgent Randal Grichuk, to protect their platoon bats.
Starting pitching was the weakest part of the Astros’ season. Their rotation ranked 28th in WAR this year, no matter which flavor of the stat you prefer. That was undoubtedly the biggest thing holding Houston back from a better year. Nineteen different Astros started at least one game, and 14 of those 19 posted ERAs above 5.00 in their starts. Tatsuya Imai, the team’s marquee winter signing, pitched so poorly that he got demoted to long relief. They simply didn’t have enough starters to cover the long, grinding season, particularly with Hunter Brown missing most of the first half of the year.
But obviously, it’s October, so Houston has a great rotation. I mean it! Sure, 19 pitchers made starts for them this year and most of those guys stunk. But if you limit yourself to their top three arms, the story looks very different. Peter Lambert, a minor acquisition this past winter after a year in NPB, has been both effective and available, compiling a 3.82 ERA across 29 starts and 155 2/3 innings. Brown, the team’s ace, was very good when healthy this year, and he looks fully healthy at the moment. He’ll handle the second game of the series, which leaves Hayden Wesneski for a potential decider. Lambert, Brown, and Wesneski combined for a 3.50 ERA and solid peripherals this year. They aren’t the best trio among playoff teams by any means, but they’re right around average. That’s a huge improvement from what you’d expect out of the Astros if you just looked at their full-season pitching numbers. Their issue has been with depth, not with their top arms, and this three-game series plays perfectly to their strengths.
There’s one positive note here for Chicago, though. Brown and Wesneski will be on regular rest for their starts, but the Astros spent the last week of the season in all hands on deck mode, which means they don’t have a fully-rested starter available for Game 1. Manager Joe Espada announced that they’re making it a bullpen game, though he declined to name a nominal “starter” beyond that. Lambert threw two innings on two days’ rest in the regular season finale yesterday; I think he’s likely to repeat something similar tomorrow. Ethan Pecko, who has mostly operated as a following pitcher this year, also pitched yesterday and will likely fill some bulk innings Tuesday. Pitching high-import innings on short rest is uncharted territory for both Lambert and Pecko, but piggybacking those two plus scrounging some other innings from the rest of the ‘pen seems like Houston’s best option by far.
The White Sox are hardly dead in the water, even against Houston’s best. Lambert got to his excellent numbers without missing a ton of bats, which bodes well for the whiff-happy sluggers dotting Chicago’s lineup, and he’ll be pitching on short rest too. Wesneski just got done posting a career-low strikeout rate, although he paired it with a career-high groundball rate to make up for it. Brown – well, okay, Brown strikes a lot of guys out. But the most likely path for the White Sox to beat the Astros is with a pile of homers, and Lambert and Wesneski are the most likely pitchers to offer those up.
They’re the most likely pitchers out of the three starters, at least. The Houston bullpen was average rather than abysmal this year, so they might sound like the tougher unit to crack, but their trajectory is the inverse of the rotation – they’re heading into the playoffs in turmoil. Closer Josh Hader was his usual excellent self this year after missing the first two months of the season, and setup man Bryan Abreu bounced back from a horrid start to settle in as a late-inning option, but the rest of the ‘pen looked quite bad in the last month of the season.
Ideally, Houston would use Bryan King and Bennett Sousa in high-leverage spots against the lefty-heavy Chicago lineup. But those guys both look off at the moment, and potentially unplayably so. King has gotten tagged for four-plus runs in three of his last 10 appearances, and he only struck out eight of the 50 batters he’s faced during that stretch. Sousa has walked nearly as many as he’s struck out in the last month, and he’s gotten tagged for three homers in just over 10 innings in that span. AJ Blubaugh is also trending the wrong way; he was a multi-inning option for the team earlier this year, but he’s hit a wall of late, with eight strikeouts, eight walks, and a pile of ERA estimators around 7.50 in 12 short appearances in September. In an ideal world, the Astros would rely on him for key bridge innings. In reality, they’ll be watching the game through covered eyes when he enters.
Pecko will likely fall into a multi-inning relief role until the team needs him to start, likely the back half of the ALDS if they make it that far. He’s a classic fifth starter having a replacement level kind of season, but he’s been in great form of late, and beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to filling out a postseason pitching staff with Houston’s roster. Miguel Ullola, a rookie starter working out of the ‘pen in the big leagues, will likely draw high-leverage innings in this series, and those frames will be appointment television, with his excellent fastball going against the four-seam-hunting White Sox. Imai has looked pretty good out of the bullpen, and the Astros need every arm they can find, so he’ll probably get plenty of playoff opportunities too.
It would behoove Houston to get as much length as possible out of the team’s starters. The lighter the bullpen workload, the more can be assigned to Hader and Abreu. That’s true of every team, of course – more starter innings mean fewer fringy bullpen arms – but the Astros have a clear hierarchy between their best few relievers and the next group. But that itself presents a bind – Houston’s starters are going to have to stretch themselves for extra innings against a team that punishes mistakes. The fifth, sixth, and seventh innings are going to be a big determinant of how the White Sox do in this series. If they’re forcing starters out of the game and feasting on the weak bullpen arms, the Astros don’t have a lot of answers. If they’re letting Lambert and company last six-plus innings or flailing at the lefty relievers who replace them, this series will be over in a hurry.
That’s a much harder matchup to call than the other side of the box score, where I give the Astros offense a clear edge. There’s no stopping Alvarez. The guys surrounding him are finally clicking. The White Sox, having arrived in the playoffs earlier than expected, don’t have the pitching depth you’d expect from a playoff team. In future years, their front office will surely address that shortcoming, but that doesn’t matter for the next three games.
My prediction, then? Houston in two. The White Sox are one of the best stories of the year. The Astros are basically the opposite of that – a watered-down version of a team that’s been playing late into October for the last decade. If neutral fan interest and novelty determined playoff matchups, the White Sox would be overwhelming favorites. But the Astros are built for this. Their team looks better in a short series than in a long sprint. Their lineup matches up well with a so-so Chicago rotation. The White Sox don’t have great solutions to Houston’s bats. Anything can happen in a three game series, of course – and like I said, the White Sox bats against the Astros middle relievers is a matchup that could flip the series – but the most likely outcome is the same one we’ve been seeing for years: Houston’s wily vets outslug and outlast another playoff debutante.