Here is what Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel will be doing on Friday night at Minute Maid Park when they play Game 1 of another World Series, for the greatest American League team since the Yankees of the late '90s:

Each one of them will be playing in his 81st postseason game since 2017.

It means that each one of them has played the equivalent of half a season in the postseason alone. Whatever happens against the Phillies, the three of them will always be legends of the fall in Houston, on merit.

Carlos Correa played for the Twins this season and could be on the move over the offseason as he becomes a free agent again. George Springer is in Toronto, and Gerrit Cole, once Justin Verlander’s co-ace with the Astros, is with the Yankees.

Verlander missed most of 2020 and all of '21 (including a trip to the World Series) recovering from Tommy John surgery. He is back. Lance McCullers Jr. had Tommy John surgery of his own. He is back. Martín Maldonado, the Astros’ catcher, wasn’t around in ’17, but he has now played 44 postseason games, dating back to October of ’18.

But Altuve, Bregman and Gurriel are about to play in their fourth World Series in six years and trying to win their second, after having just played in the American League Championship Series for the sixth consecutive season.

But in the middle of it all, as the pitching staff and batting order has changed, kids like Jeremy Peña have stepped right in for Correa at shortstop and Yordan Alvarez has become a slugging sensation, are the three who have made up the Astros’ core for six straight Octobers:

Altuve: Who has 23 postseason home runs, the second most in history.

Bregman: Who now has 43 postseason RBIs, the most by a third baseman.

Gurriel: Who has 81 hits and is merely hitting a cool .367 in October of 2022.

The Astros just keep coming. Even when they were 29-31 in the short season of 2020, playing under the shadow of the organization’s sign-stealing scandal, they still made it to Game 7 of the ALCS against the Rays, doing that after falling behind three games to none.

The Astros are deep and talented and as tough an out as there is in the sport. Altuve didn’t get a hit against the Yankees until Game 3, finally breaking an 0-for-25 slump. Alvarez, the home run star of the Astros’ sweep of the Mariners in their division series, went just 3-for-14 against the Yankees, with just one RBI. And the Astros still swept them.

It was the fourth time the Astros have knocked the Yankees out of October in the past decade. No other team has knocked the Yanks out of the postseason on four separate occasions. The Yankees have now lost the last five league championship series they’ve played. The Astros? They’ve won four in the past six years.

They don’t have a star as big as Bryce Harper for the Phillies. But the Astros’ team -- now 7-0 in this postseason, seven trying to get to 11 -- is the star, as it tries to finally get 73-year-old Dusty Baker a World Series title and reward him for being the right manager for the Astros at the most important time in the franchise’s history.

“We want to win this for Dusty,” Bregman said earlier this week.

Even when the Yankees showed some fight in Game 4 on Sunday night, jumping out to a 3-0 lead and then getting back ahead later, the Astros showed more fight. They were ballers to the end, until Aaron Judge made the last out of the Yankees' season, tapping a ball back to Ryan Pressly and putting Houston back in the World Series. Alvarez got his first RBI against the Yankees when it mattered. Bregman knocked in a big run, because he does that. Gurriel knocked in a run as well. Of course Peña, the kid at short, had the big, loud three-run homer that got the Astros back into it as Yankee Stadium became more and more quiet as the Yankees’ night got longer.

It’s not one of them. It’s all of them. Springer goes and Correa goes and Cole goes and Verlander goes away for a while and so does McCullers. Now they all go for four more against the Phillies, as tough an out as they are these days.

McCullers pitched the last four innings of the 2017 ALCS when the Astros beat the Yankees in Game 7. On Sunday night, he was the starter in Game 4. Here is what he said afterward:

“When everything happened a few years ago, we knew the one thing that we could do is we could win and we could win and win a lot. I understand people are still not going to like us. They’re going to boo us, but at some point you have to respect what we’re doing.”

What he said.