Neat. It’s the Astros again.
The Mariners took a series from the Astros to open their 2022 homestand, which was delightful, except for the part where Justin Verlander showed that he was definitely Verlinator or Robolander or pick your futuristic robotic sci-fi menace of choice. Neat and good. The Mariners also got the privilege of facing a depleted/slow-starting Astros team at home with the leather-lunged T-Mobile faithful shouting down all manner of old seafaring curses upon the Astros. They won’t have any of those benefits in this series, and will also arrive in Houston having been roughed up at the hands of the Florida Teams, but they will get to face Verlander again, because the universe is a cube tumbling quietly in the dark, indifferent to our human wishes.