Jim Crane did not wait for the offseason. He fired GM Dana Brown in the middle of an AL West fight and put himself in charge of baseball operations, which means the Astros now walk into Citi Field with their owner effectively running the front office in real time. That is not a quiet transition. That is a man deciding, mid-race, that he trusts his own judgment over the people he hired to have it.
The Mets do not care about any of that, and neither does the scoreboard. Houston still has to win baseball games with the same roster, the same clubhouse, and now a very different chain of command watching every decision get made. Does a front office in chaos rattle a team that has been here before, or does a group this experienced just tune it out and play?
This is the first read on whether the Astros bend under the noise or ignore it completely, and it starts with Astros-Mets: who wins.