The last time the Red Sox made the ALCS, in 2018, they played the Astros, and the world was a very different place. The Astros’s trash-can affair hasn’t yet been brought to light, Mookie Betts and Dave Dombrowski were still in Boston and what we call COVID-19 was, at it had been for thousands of years, just hanging out in bats, waiting to strike.
Now the Astros and Sox are at it again, except COVID has escaped from bats, Betts is in L.A., Dombo’s in Philadelphia and we all know what Houston has been up to.