Jose Altuve, shocked to his haunches by an unexpected and unlikely throwing problem.

Now hear this. Especially you, Astroworld. And you, too, anti-Astroworld. Jose Altuve deserves your sympathy and empathy. Not your scorn.

Some of the greatest fielders in the business come up short or falter off line. Much of the time it happens not when they’re doing what they shouldn’t ought to be doing but when they’re doing it the way they’re supposed to be doing.

Baseball’s irrevocable laws include that anything can happen—and usually does. Even and especially in the negative. It doesn’t just happen to men who know better but did what they knew going in might be wrong. It happens to the best in the business, to men who enter trying to do right and end up doing too wrong without even trying.

A six-time All-Star who has at least one Gold Glove on his resume doesn’t premeditate and plot to turn a mostly right battle of the pitchers into a Monty Python’s Flying Circus-like comedy of error and surreality with his team measuring on the wrong end of the laugh-that-you-might-not-weep meter. And landing on the brink of being swept into winter vacation.

Bad enough Altuve had two throws disobey his right arm’s orders in Game Two, especially since one of them might have been tried and convicted on the right side if Astro first baseman Yuli Gurriel had gotten his mitt around instead of in front of the ball, even backhanding to try for it.

But all Altuve did in top of the sixth in Game Three was pick Tampa Bay Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe’s bouncing grounder with vacuum cleaner hands, throw to shortstop Carlos Correa ready to start a double play . . . and watch as though witness to a murder as the ball bounced past Correa, handing the Rays first and second and nobody out.

Altuve might have preferred an on-the-spot assassination over what followed. Opposite-field two-run single. The first sacrifice bunt seen all postseason long, from a team who avoided the bunt like the coronavirus all year long. Back-to-back hit batsmen to re-load the bases and push a run home. A pinch-hit shuttlecock becoming a two-run double.

None of that’s on Altuve. He didn’t surrender those hits or hit those batters. Remember that.

A 5-1 Rays lead—turned a mere 5-2 when Michael Brantley hit a kind of excuse-me solo homer in the bottom of the sixth—wasn’t the way either Altuve or the Astros planned things after Altuve’s one-out solo bomb in the bottom of the first handed the Astros the 1-0 lead that would last exactly four more innings.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered in the end, but still. And Castillo jammed Brantley into a fist fly to left center that Margot hustled in to grab to end it. The check swing won’t be dissected even a thirty-second as deep as will Altuve’s continuing throwing trouble.

There’s no good time to catch what sports calls the yips—the sudden inability of a ballplayer to execute what he’s been doing blindfolded all his life. And there isn’t always a good explanation for just how and why it happens. Just ask one of the most notorious cases, the only infielder in baseball who beat the yips back successfully while he still had a lot of career left.

“I can feel for Jose. There’s nothing worse in the world,” said Steve Sax, the one-time Los Angeles Dodgers second baseman whose thirty 1983 throwing errors were attributable to the yips—until, he once said, his final conversation with his dying father, when Dad told him it wasn’t a physical or mental block but unexpected lost confidence.

“It’s the most lonely place to be,” Sax continued in a telephone interview. “It’s embarrassing. It’s just awful. I hope he can grasp this as soon as possible because this thing is very simple. It’s right in front of him. So many people are going to say, ‘Oh, Jose, you have a mental block.’ He doesn’t. He has a temporary loss of confidence. It has nothing to do with his mental state. Something triggered him to start questioning his ability, that’s why he’s doing this. When he gets his confidence, this will disappear.”

The only problem is that the Astros’ postseason presence may disappear before Altuve’s problem or the Rays’ flying circus do. But he needed lots of help bringing the Astros to this brink and he got it, too. And exactly half of it wears Rays uniforms.

That goes for both enough Astro fans ready to plant the goat horns into Altuve’s forehead and enough anti-Astro fans proclaiming this, especially, is nothing but Astrogate karma. And don’t even think about killing his father to cure him.