The 2018 Houston Astros were one of the best baseball teams you’ll ever see, and they’ll watch the World Series from home

The headline was going to be constructed the same way for either outcome. If the Houston Astros had won, this would have been a lament for the poor Boston Red Sox and their vast stockpiles of talent. As is, the Red Sox got the two-out hits and clutch pitching, and they also got a three-run pop fly from Rafael Devers right when they needed it. They’re going to the World Series, and the Astros will have to watch from home.

But before spending the next week or two with the Red Sox, let’s ask ourselves an honest question: Did the Astros do anything wrong?

Cheated.

Wait, no, ha ha, we’re not touching that. For the sake of brevity, let’s take the Astros at their word, believe that they were only deploying anti-cheating countermeasures, and focus on baseball. Polish that question up a little, then: Did the 2018 Houston Astros do anything wrong when it came to building a championship team?

Not really.

The offseason featured the acquisition of Gerrit Cole, the best starting pitcher to change teams all winter. The return for the Pirates didn’t excite anybody, which means that the best team in baseball — the defending champions — got exponentially better without affecting their 2018 roster. That’s the dream, the goal for every offseason. Take a tyrannosaurus and give it an uzi. Make t-shirts of the gun-toting dinosaur and sell them for $29 each. What’s better than winning the World Series? Winning the World Series and making everyone else say, “Oh, crap” before the next season starts.

And what happened then was that Gerrit Cole was even better than expected. The Astros told him their secrets, and suddenly he was an ace. A co-ace. A co-co-co-ace, depending on how far you want to take this. Even if you knew that it was too early to anoint World Series champions in February, there was something extra impressive about the best team getting better.

It wasn’t just Cole, either. They had Justin Verlander for a full season instead of a half, and he was rejuvenated. The Astros told him their secrets, and he ended up somehow improving on what was already a Hall of Fame path. That left the rest of the rotation in shambles, what with a former Cy Young winner and two All-Stars.

The lineup was a similar embarrassment of riches. Their double-play combo was young and otherworldly. They were stacked in the outfield, and they had a gang of bearded bald dudes* who could hit the ball 450 feet. There was depth throughout the 25-man roster. They could hit, pitch, and (hopefully) protect leads. That last part, the bullpen, was the only work in progress.

* the technical term is “a gristle of bearded bald dudes”

The bullpen wasn’t what made the Astros hyperventilate this year. It wasn’t great in the ALCS, but they lost more because of ... everything. They lost because the Red Sox could hit Cole, because they could get to Verlander the second time around. They lost because Alex Bregman could walk, but not hit, because Jose Altuve was ailing.

The Astros also lost because the Red Sox kept driving in runs with two outs and because the Crawford Boxes were a bunch of Benedict Arnolds, helping the wrong side at the worst possible moments. And, uh, Joe West pretending like he could tell that Mookie Betts’ glove was over the fence line was sure something. They lost because Betts is also superhuman and showed off at the right time. They lost because Andrew Benintendi made one of the better game-ending plays of the last few years, much less the postseason. It’s all a rich tapestry.

But the important point here is that the Astros didn’t lose because of mistakes they made in the offseason. They weren’t a Greg Holland away from shutting the Red Sox down. Replacing Charlie Morton with Jake Arrieta wasn’t going to change the outcome of this series, and neither was a deal for Giancarlo Stanton to counterpunch the acquisition of J.D. Martinez.

No matter what the Astros did, they were still going to have to play baseball. And baseball is the worst.

Baseball is Altuve hobbling around in October. Baseball is Carlos Correa having a down year, which indirectly gives the other team home-field advantage. Baseball is their side getting two-out hits and your side screwing up against a closer who wants to sell his soul to ol’ Scratch to get out of the inning. Baseball isn’t meant to be decided over a best-of-seven series, but some jerk thought it made sense for some reason.

What all of that means is that is the Astros did just about everything right, and they still failed. They couldn’t account for all of the variables, and anyone in the front office would have been the first to admit that in the offseason. But when you’re adding a co-co-co-ace and wearing the championship belt, it’s okay to dream a little bit. And the Astros dreamed. They were even better than they were in 2017. Imagine if they knew that Alex Bregman might develop into an MVP candidate.

In the end, the Astros are but another reminder that baseball didn’t grow up playing Strat-O-Matic. All the cards were in place, and then Gerrit Cole stumbled, and there was an umpire involved, and then Rafael Devers hit a 359-foot homer, and, I don’t know, man, it was wild.

We’ve seen obscenely talented teams stumble in the postseason before — every Nationals team over the last several years, for example — but there really was something about these Astros that made you think they were going to be the ones to repeat. They were so young, yet they had the experience. They had depth in the rotation, lineup, and bench. They had the focus, and they saw that the aperture was open, so they were hoping it would all click and develop in the right way. They were a perfect killing machine. The Astros attacked the offseason like a team that had lost Game 7 last year.

In the end, they got hosed by the same math: A third of baseball makes the postseason every year, but three percent of baseball wins the World Series. It’s great that the Astros had a young, dominant regular-season team. They’ll be happy about that next year, too. It is the purest baseball truism possible, though, to note the Astros’ enviable roster didn’t guarantee a hot damned thing. They ran into one of the best Red Sox teams in history, and now they’re gone.

Still, I want to hammer the point home: The Houston Astros did almost everything right. They had the established players. They used their prospects to improve. They spent the kind of money and prospects it takes to employ Justin Verlander, and they never stopped trying to tinker and improve.

It worked last year. It didn’t work this year. It might not work for any of the next seven years, or it might work three out of the next four. The 2018 Astros are a brutal reminder that a collection of transcendent baseball talent doesn’t always have everything to do with it. Sometimes, there are ... things.

Beware the things. Always and forever.