Tag Houston Astros

Life imitates art that makes people laugh; Life nearly as funny

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I ran across this short post today calling attention to a new site that’s tracking real newspaper headlines that read like the front page of The Onion.  When you’ve got folks going with headlines like “Man pulls knife on friends, runs away, hits head, injures self” and “God caught backing multiple candidates” you may not need professional comedy to ease the woes of a bad day at work, but I like to be prepared so I’m heading off to The Juice Box to see what my last-place Houston Astros (now featuring the worst record in both leagues!) have to offer.

→UPDATE, later the same night: after battling to limit the Braves to just nine runs in the first five innings, our heroes played them even the rest of the way for a classic 11-4 loss.  And, they won the all-important LOB battle 8-7!

Dear Drayton McLane,

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McLane and CraneI heard your announcement today that you have a deal to sell the Houston Astros and I just wanted to drop you a note to say thanks for getting the hell out of the way.

Like most Astros’ fans back in 1992, I was pleased that you bought the team from John McMullen because that got rid of the guy who ran off Nolan Ryan.  With his team meandering in the bottom half of the division, McMullen didn’t want to pay a 41-year-old power pitcher despite the fact that he was still effective and was (and still is) a local icon; bad enough, but Ryan ended up having another five years (three winning seasons) and two more no-hitters and thus became wed to another team which he now, in fact, owns, and whose cap he wears in Cooperstown.  Not that I’m bitter.

It’s not that I felt you would be a big improvement, mind you; since I wasn’t involved in the grocery business or Wal-Mart I didn’t have any idea who you were.  But you weren’t McMullen, and that was good enough.  My mistake.  What I didn’t know then was that you weren’t capable of trusting the people you hired to run your business—even though it was a business you readily admitted you knew absolutely nothing about—and that you’d turn into a pain in the neck meddler who eventually chased off the best baseball leaders this franchise has ever known.

Some say that you were too cheap to spend the money it took to win; that’s not true.  You spent plenty of money, but a lot of the time you spent it on questionable free agent pickups (Greg Swindell?  Carlos Lee?  Miguel Tejada?) rather than the things that keep a team and an organization strong and competitive: high draft choices, pitching and defense.  Some think your legacy is the team’s winning record, and it’s true the Astros have had success on the field during your tenure: the majority of playoff appearances, and the only World Series appearance in franchise history.  Congratulations on that, it was a great ride…and seems so long ago now.  But we still have a few things we’ll be able to remember you by:

Like Minute Maid Park!  Beautiful ball park, I agree…good thing, too, since you used my money to build it—ironic, too, since you’re the one who’s the billionaire and the owner of a company that employs dozens 1402_Minute_Maid_Park_and_Rooftopof millionaires, and I’m not.  But you blackmailed all of Astros Nation and even the parts of the city that never gave a damn about baseball when you threatened to move the team—the ball club and the economic engine—if we didn’t front you the money for a new ball park to boost your revenue streams, or some such business euphemism.  Insisting that taxpayers finance a private business construction project was surely a surprising position to see from you, being such an outspoken supporter of capitalism and all.

And there’s the new level of tasteful presentation: oh, all the advertisements in said Minute Maid Park!!  You know, back when the doors opened in 2000 I thought that my ass was the only flat surface in there that didn’t have an ad slapped on it, but over the years you worked your ass off and proved me wrong.  The Chick-fil-A Eat More Fowl poles is a monumental achievement, and dovetails nicely with wonderful and all-too-serious promotional events like Dog Day in the Park—I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard howling about that one!

Finally, you’re leaving us with the excitement of watching a young baseball team come into its own.  Sure, they have the worst record in the National League right now, but we play in the same league as the Pirates so I expect to jump up and nestle into fifth place any day now.  The best part of that is, this is a gift that could just keep on giving for years to come!

So, fair winds and following seas, Drayton, as you shove off…no hard feelings, but I’m pleased you’re leaving.  As was the case in 1992, I don’t know much about the new guy; although he knows baseball in a way you never did, we’ll have to wait and see what he does when it comes to running the business.  But if his first decision is to pull the plug on your buddy Milo, I’ll be lining up for World Series tickets!

What fools these mortals be

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Somebody (Albert Einstein?  Rita Mae Brown?) said the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  Well, I admit I’m as crazy as the next guy.

Although I know better, I subscribe to the (one and only) Houston daily newspaper, and I take the sports section to work to read at lunch.  Last Friday there was a throwaway sentence in Houston’s Leading Information Source’s game story on the previous night’s Astros’ embarrassing loss to contest with the Mets: “…and a four-base error on right fielder Hunter Pence opened the way for the Mets to push across three unearned runs in [the] eighth.”

Four-base error?  Interesting; I wonder what happened?  But I had to keep wondering, because there was no further mention of the event in that story.  Nothing; it seemed an odd thing to overlook.  When I got home later in the day I clicked on a Yahoo! Sports headline about a “Little League homer” in the majors and noticed a familiar brick-colored jersey in the picture: Pence had turned a lazy pop-up down the line into a home run for a guy playing his first game in nine months!  Here, see for yourself.

There are subjective editing decisions to be made at several stops along the way on every story in every paper; I get that.  In this instance I don’t know if the writer failed by not bothering to explain this one truly unusual thing that occurred and the desk in Houston didn’t notice the omission, or if the desk noticed but failed to send the story back for a rewrite; or, if the writer did write it up but the desk failed by making a really poor choice of what to cut to make the story fit the hole.  (Let’s not even consider the possibility that someone made an editorial decision to low-profile the thing so as not to embarrass the player or the team.)

Why was I expecting even a competent recap of the game from this newspaper?  Because I am a fool, it appears.

But I am not one of the fools that the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick thinks local television stations are trying to attract with their newscasts.  He’s writing specifically about the local stations in New York, but I’ve seen enough local TV news around the country to say that his criticism applies pretty damn much everywhere.  His modest proposal: “What would happen if one of these newscasts surrendered the race to attract fools and went after those disenfranchised viewers who would tune to a local newscast for news, the real stuff? What’s the worst that could happen?”  Check out some of his quick and easy steps to stop dumbing-down the broadcast by cutting out a few things, like:

1. Lead our winter/summer newscasts with hysterical word that winter/summer weather is here, with more winter/summer weather expected until the spring/fall. We will no longer, during our weather reports, suggest what kind of clothing to wear when it’s cold or hot.

4. All promos for network primetime shows will be seen in advertising and promos around the news, and not within the news, as if it were news. We have too much respect for our viewers and our profession to be in on such a credibility-killing compromised game.

5. Our reporters and anchors will be hired based on their ability to credibly gather, investigate and literately report the news, and no longer on the basis of beauty, sex-appeal, ethnicity and race. That’s right, the ugly will be given a fair shot. And no more “see these?” cleavage will be displayed by our reporters, not even during weather reports.

7. Our anchors will not engage in forced chit-chat after every report, a transparently phony formula to promote folksiness and trust. Tragedies will stand as self-evident, no need for our anchors to tell us that the news just seen was “Sad news” followed by the other anchor’s, “Very sad news, indeed.”

9. We will not send reporters to provide live reports while standing outside a closed bank that was robbed 20 hours earlier. Unless the robbers are still inside.

The worst that could happen?  We’re all stuck with the same drivel we’ve got now, and I’ve still got something to complain about!

April 12

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1633, Galileo convicted of heresy; 1777, Henry Clay born; 1861, America’s Civil War began; 1878, Boss Tweed died; 1947, David Letterman born; 1954, Bill Haley and the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock”; 1961, Douglas MacArthur declined an invitation to become baseball commissioner.  Oh yeah, and a man flew in space.

For the first time.  Ever. Gagarin

I’ve never felt the significance of that.  I understand the significance, but I can’t feel just how earthshaking that must have been to anyone who was more than, let’s say, 20, at the time: people old enough to have an understanding of how things are, who lived in a world where people didn’t leave the planet except in flights of fancy.

Fifty years ago I was four years old, the oldest of three kids living in Birmingham, Alabama.   I knew nothing about Yuri Gagarin or the Soviet Union, or the Redstone Arsenal just 50 miles away in Huntsville, where Wernher von Braun and his team were developing the heavy lift rocket that would make the moon landing possible.  (You had three TV stations to choose from (not counting educational television), if you were lucky, telephones had dials and many lived in booths, cars as well as fish had fins, the prestigious post-season college basketball tournament was the NIT, and there were only 16 big league baseball teams.)

Today I’m 50 years older; I live outside of Houston, and I work in the American space program, for the public affairs office at the Johnson Space Center.  Today I interviewed the astronaut who will command the last flight of the space shuttle, which is planned for this summer.   Just a regular work day.

If I can’t imagine the amazement that people felt 50 years ago, can I imagine what the world would be like if we had never left the planet, even for brief periods?  Would we have had any incentive to create semiconductors (and then faster semiconductors), to miniaturize computers, to put geostationary satellites in orbit?  Would we still have put a powerful telescope in orbit that would revolutionize astronomy, or have figured out a way to fix it once it got there?  Would Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas still have been inspired to create other worlds that in some ways have come true in ours?  Would the Colt .45s still be in the National League?

1965, first National League game at the Astrodome (Phillies 2, Astros 0; oh well).  Less than two months later Houston became the Mission Control Center for U.S. manned spaceflight on Gemini 4, the flight that featured the first American spacewalk.  Then we went to the moon—for that, I was old enough to feel the amazement.  Then we stopped going to the moon, or anywhere else in space.

1981, first space shuttle flight.  It was amazing to watch that launch—it was so much different than other rockets we’d seen—and I remember being very skeptical about that thing making a soft landing when it came down.  Then it started pulling off missions that the Mercury 7 only ever dreamed about: retrieving and repairing satellites, supporting all kinds of advanced and (to the layman) esoteric science research, staying in space for weeks at a time—weeks, I tell you!  Then docking to a Russian space station, then building one of our very own in a successful partnership with most of the Western world.  Now that’s amazing!

2011: the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight, the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle mission, and NASA announces where Enterprise, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour will spend their retirement.

April 12, 2061: Boy, I wish I knew…

A belated Happy New Year

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An incredibly busy week at work, and since I don’t get any kick out of torture I won’t bore you with the details.  But it was enough to force my attention away from here; so, anything interesting happen during the first week of 2011?  Hmm…

The new Congress convening opens up some avenues for productive discussion (and some fun at Speaker Boehner’s expense)…Haley Barbour’s unfortunate attempt to rewrite the history of the Jim Crow South was good for a “did he really say that” Danny Thomas spit take…I want to talk about reading the Constitution, and taking on budget deficits, and court rulings on televised nudity, and the repeal amendment, and the lie of the year.  And I will, in time.

But first, did you see the results of the election for new members to the Baseball Hall of Fame?  I mean, the guys at the bottom of the list.

Here in southeast Texas especially, this election grabbed our attention  because it’s the first time a full-blooded Houston Astro had a real chance to get into the Hall.  There are HOFers who played in Houston—some, like Joe Morgan, started their careers here; some, like Nolan Ryan, were here in their prime; and some, like Robin Roberts and Eddie Mathews, passed through heading for the end of the line.  But not one Hall of Famer wears an Astros cap on his plaque, even though there’s been a team here for almost 50 years.

t1_bagwellJeff Bagwell spent his whole major league career as an Astro, and this was his first year of eligibility.  There are legitimate arguments for and against him being in the Hall, but he was one of the best in the game during the 1990s and early 2000s and a fan favorite; he was the first Astro to have a real chance, and he’ll have 14 more…Craig Biggio is in the on deck circle for 2013, and he won’t need that many swings to get a hit.

There are always arguments about who deserves to be in the Hall, and that’s fun.  But why are some of these guys even on the ballot: Carlos Baerga?  Lenny Harris?  B.J. Surhoff?  Kirk Rueter?

The requirements to be on the ballot are only that you played ten seasons in the majors (granted, no mean feat) and that you’ve been retired for five seasons, and that’s why some of the worthies coming up for consideration soon will be Jeromy Burnitz, Scott Erickson (oh geez), Phil Nevin (Phil Nevin?) and Alex S. Gonzalez along with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux.

And we can have those arguments later.  For now, close your eyes and listen to those sweetest of words: pitchers and catchers report in less than six weeks.