Oh, Those Indecisive Astros!

If you’re harboring a dormant grudge against the Astros for whatever reason — and there are plenty of reasons…

• The Colt .45s getting out to a much better start in life than the Original Mets

• The infliction of carpeted indoor baseball upon the Grand Old Game

• 1969’s inexplicable yearlong flogging (the garden-variety Astros took ten of twelve from the Miracle Mets)

• Cooter’s

• Mike Scott’s sandpaper fetish

• Roger Clemens’s hero’s homecoming

• Abandonment of the National League, a poor-taste maneuver that also stuck us with Interleague baseball on a daily basis

• “What’s that sound? I think it’s coming from somewhere off the home team dugout. It’s like somebody’s beating on a trash can.”

• Not disposing of the Braves in the 2021 World Series

…there’s a reason to activate it.

The new year has arrived and the Houston Astros STILL have “TBD” listed as the start time for all their home games. Normally, I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t even check. Except the Mets will be commencing their upcoming season at Houston’s renamed Daikin Park on March 27, and I need to know the first-pitch time so I can calculate with dead-on balls accuracy the coming of the Baseball Equinox.

The Baseball Equinox, revealed in this space every offseason since 2005 was becoming 2006, is that moment in time when we as Mets fans are equidistant between the final out of the previous Met season and the first pitch of the next Met season. It is the dot in our existence that tells us last year is last year and next year is a veritable heartbeat away.

I do know that the 2024 Mets ceased being a going concern at exactly 11:23 PM Eastern Daylight Time on October 20, 2024, when Francisco Alvarez was retired on a 4-3 groundout to end the National League Championship Series. But I don’t know what the Astros have in mind for a first pitch on March 27, 2025. Almost every other team in the major leagues has set its start time. But not the White Sox (who presumably continue to dig out from their 2024 debris, so they can be forgiven) and not the Astros. I realize there are a lot of “Minute Maid Park” signs to replace, and that onerous task must be preoccupying a slew of busy Houstonians, but you’d figure these people would be practiced at renaming their facility, having had to rip “Enron” off the walls early in this century and get that juice caboose up and running above left field.

No, I don’t know why the Astros are not on the ball schedulewise, but the Equinox clock ticks away sans proper coordinates louder than any bat can thwack a wastebasket, so a decision must be made, one I am reluctant to go with, but I feel I have no choice.

I must approximate.

In weather forecasting, there are Astronomical seasons and Meteorological seasons. They don’t seem to be named for Astros and Mets, as they are the opposite of what’s going on right now. Astronomical is the exact season, involving those solstices you hear so much about on or around the 21st of December or June. Meteorological is probably more practical. Meteorological Winter, for example, starts December 1, which sounds about right, as there’s nothing autumnal about December. Meteorological Summer starts June 1, which doesn’t sound right if your elementary school didn’t let out until the third Friday of June, but we get it. June is summer. December is winter.

The Baseball Equinox is exact, except this year. We’re going to be Meteorological about it and go with what makes the most sense.

Fellow Mets fans of all ages, we may observe with confidence the Baseball Equinox at 7:10 PM Eastern Standard Time on January 7, 2025. It could be off by a few minutes or a couple of hours when we factor in the most likely actual first-pitch times based on precedent and best guesses, but the important thing is a) it’s close enough; and b) it’s 7:10 PM. You’ve likely already begun to feel a twitch in your remote-operating thumb every night at 7:10. You might as well indulge it this coming Tuesday night.

Welcome to almost next year. It’s still too cold out and we still don’t have all the information we need, but we’ve waited long enough for a real hint of Mets baseball.