Now batting for the American League, from the Houston Astros, Kyle Tucker.

Boo!

Astros fans don’t get it. Why are they booing Tucker at an All-Star Game in Seattle? He plays for the American League, the home team in this game, the same side as the Seattle Mariners. If they’re booing because of the 2017 World Series, Tucker wasn’t even on that team – he was playing for Buies Creek and Corpus Christi in the minors those six long years ago. For the record, the Buies Creek Astros were a Single A affiliate in North Carolina. They’ve since relocated up the road and are now the Fayetteville Woodpeckers, maybe the best team name in all of baseball.

There’s only two Astros still on the roster from the 2017 scandal Astros, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, and neither is an All-Star this season. So when is this booing crap gonna stop?

It’s not. Actually there is one way for it to stop and Astros fans don't want any part of it. It’s for the Astros to become losers, non-playoff contenders, humbled nobodies. As Reggie Jackson said, “fans don’t boo nobodies.”

So as long as the Astros keep winning division titles, American League pennants and World Series, they’re going to get boo’d and hooted and jeered. Fans of other teams, particularly in Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York, are going to despise the Astros. As Shakespeare would put it, those cities are tired of suffering the slings and arrows of the Astros outrageous fortunes.

So they boo – that’s all they got.

Think of the teams that get boo’d for seemingly no good reason: the Dallas Cowboys, the Duke University men’s basketball team, the New York Yankees. Sure, none of them has won squat in recent years, but still they’re hated wherever they go, That’s because losing is fleeting, but the stink of winning sticks with you.

Heck, the Yankees have won one lousy World Series in the past 20 years, but they’re still boo’d in every stadium outside The Bronx like Babe Ruth was in the on deck circle. You know, Boston had won four World Series and San Francisco three in the past two decades and fans aren’t booing their current players just for wearing Giants and Red Sox uniforms.

Consider this, in 1955 a musical-comedy called Damn Yankees hit Broadway and swept the Tony Awards. The play was based on a book called The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. It’s about a baseball fan who’s sick and tired of watching the Yankees win year after year, so he sells his soul to the devil in exchange for the Yankees failing to win the American League pennant.

Damn Yankees is a comedy, but there’s always a little truth in comedy. Between 1936 and 1964, (29 years) the Bronx Bombers won 22 American League pennants and 16 World Series. And that was back when only two teams made the post-season.

Yeah, there was good reason to hate the Yankees back then and still now. So you kinda understand why fans around the country aren’t particularly fond of the Astros these days. Booing the Astros has taken on a life of its own, and it’s going to live a long time. Fans just plain like to boo. One year in Philadelphia, they boo’d Santa Claus at an Eagles home game. What’d Santa do to deserve that?

You know that song, Everybody Loves a Winner? It’s not true. The Damn Astros are winners and unfortunately they’re just going to have to live with the consequences.