The Nature of Things

Finally!  Houston, we may have problems but our baseball team isn't one of them. Congratulations to the Astros for the most entertaining and thrilling season in this fan's long memory and for what surely must be one of the most exciting World Series in the history of the game. Congratulations to the unflappable Charlie Morton for the win in the final game of the series and for being on the mound for that final out. Nothing could have been more fitting. And thank you, Charlie, for not screwing around and walking people in that final inning. I don't think my heart could have taken it. Three batters up, three batters down. That's the way it is done. Baseball is an old-fashioned game, a game of nuance and grace and elegance and, yes, poetry, more balletic than bashing. It's a game without a clock which is why a particular game might last less than two hours or five hours and seventeen minutes. It takes as long as it takes. A lot of modern fans don't have the patien...

Five hours and seventeen minutes. That's how long last night's fifth game in the World Series lasted. It was almost 1:00 in the morning by the time it ended here in Houston. But Astros fans went home happy. Our team had won 13-12. This has been an aggravating, heart-stopping, nail-biting series all the way. Every game has been in doubt seemingly up until the last out, because these teams, the Dodgers and the Astros, just don't quit!  They've been playing baseball since March. The players must be exhausted both mentally and physically, especially after last night's game. But they don't quit. I've been a baseball fan since I was twelve years old and an Astros fan for almost forty years. It's really the only sport that I follow. The others are just background noise in my life, but baseball is the main event. This year's Astros team is the best I've ever seen. Not only are they good but they are a lot of fun to watch. This entire baseball season has ...

I am so proud of our Houston Astros. What a season they have had! For most of the season, they led their division and played one exciting heart-stopping game after another. They gave us thrill on top of thrill.  Their season ended today with a loss at Kansas City, but they've nothing to hang their heads about. One of the youngest, most inexperienced teams in the Major Leagues came this close to going to the American League Championship Series. Next year they'll be older, more experienced, and better. Now, we wish them a long and restful winter. As for us fans, like in the song, we'll wait'll next year and hope. As for now, go Cubs!

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” ―  A. Bartlett Giamatti ,  Take Time For Paradise: Americans And Their Games ~~~ So, the Astros have a 2-1 lead in games of the Division Series in the American League going into today's game. With just one more win, they can take this series and go on to the League Championship Series. In the seventh inning of today's game, they opened up a 6-2 lead over the Kansas City Royals. In the eighth inning, the manager, who has made brilliant moves all year, turned it over to his usually reliable bullpen to...

My beloved Houston Astros are having a good season this year. They are presently leading the Western Division of the American League and they have done for much of the season. They have some very exciting young players who play the game with the abandon and joy of Little Leaguers. They are great fun to watch. That hasn't been true in recent years. In fact, we fans have suffered through several years of below par baseball when our Astros had the worst record in the Major Leagues. 2015 is our reward for staying with them in all those years. All that being said, I do have some empathy for the plight of Phillies fans this year. Their favorite team has fallen from the great height they achieved in 2008. This year they, too, have played like Little Leaguers but not in a good way. They haven't had much joy.  In fact, there is no joy in Mudville...er...Philadelphia these days. Their season has turned into a horror movie.  

Who could have predicted? Very few baseball people, I think, would have thought in March that the end of the first month of the new baseball season would find my lowly but no less beloved Houston Astros in first place in their division. But that's where they are! Regardless of the outcome of today's games, they will end April in first place. STANDINGS AMERICAN LEAGUE EAST CENTRAL WEST   W L PCT GB Houston 14 7 .667 - LA Angels 10 11 .476 4.0 Seattle 10 11 .476 4.0 Oakland 9 13 .409 5.5 Texas 7 14 .333 7.0 After suffering through several years of below par teams, it has been a decided pleasure to see the team playing well and performing above expectations. Can they keep it up? Who knows? It's a long time until October. But no matter what happens, we'll always have April. And hope. Hope has been rekindled. Go 'Stros!   

We made what has become our annual June trip to Minute Maid Park the other night, courtesy of our thoughtful son-in-law, to see my Astros play the Atlanta Braves. It didn't turn out too well for the Astros that night. We weren't able to bring them any luck, but they bounced back the next day, beating the Braves 6-1. They actually seemed pretty flat in their play that night, but perhaps that was due to the pitching that they faced. One guy on the team, though, is never flat. Winning or losing, he's always hustling and it shows in his results. He's leading the major leagues in hits and in number of games with more than one hit. He's also leading the American League in stolen bases and is near the top in batting average. In the field, he's only had two errors all year. About the only statistic where he isn't among the leaders is home runs. He only has two, but that may be related to his physical stature - at 5'6" he's the shortest man in baseball...

Just a few more days until Major League baseball season starts. Spring training is almost over and many young players go to bed at night dreaming of glory days. Will this be their year? Even young players on "rebuilding" teams like my beloved Houston Astros , the team with the worst record in baseball for the last two years, have such dreams. All of which, of course, brings to mind the Springsteen song. Nearly everything in life brings to mind some Springsteen song.  Here he is with the E Street Band in a 1985 performance of his anthem to those lost days. Were any of us every really that young? (Props to Paul Krugman for first posting this video in his blog today. He was writing about the lost "glory days" of  tea party idol Paul Ryan, but I prefer to think about the glory days to come for talented young baseball players.)  

Yesterday was the last day of the regular season in baseball, the last game for my beloved Houston Astros. They won't be going to the post-season again this year. The fact is, they ended the season with the worst record in baseball - 55-107. This is the second year in a row they've earned that dubious distinction. The good news is that it makes them eligible to make the top draft pick again next year. For a team mostly stocked with 20 - 24-year-olds, that could be important. They are rebuilding from the ground up and the more talented young players they can latch on to, the better their chances of catching lightning in a bottle. You might think that a team with a 55-107 record had a deadly boring season. You would be wrong. April and May were good for the team. They played well and showed what they were capable of. Unfortunately, those two good months were followed by three mostly bad months which wiped out the gains they had made. But throughout it all, the kids - and they a...

It's the first weekend of the new baseball season and my team, the Astros, are at .500. That means they are on a pace to win 81 games this year. That's after losing a record 106 and winning only 56 last season. Winning 81 games this year would be a miraculous improvement. Of course, this is a very, very young and inexperienced team and probably no one, except maybe their mothers, really expects them to have a winning season, but stranger things have happened in baseball. Stranger things happen every day in baseball. That's one of the reasons the game never gets boring - except to boring people. The Astros are playing the Colorado Rockies at home in this first series of the season. In the first game of the season yesterday, their youth and inexperience showed. They made four - count 'em, four - errors. You can't win a major league baseball game when you make four errors and give up four unearned runs, and the Astros didn't. They lost 5-3. But at least they did h...

It's official.  The Houston Astros have tied the worst loss record of their history.  They have now lost 97 games this year with only 16 more to play.  They have the worst record in all of Major League Baseball.  Their next three games will be against the team with the best record in Major League Baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies.  By the time the Phillies leave town at the middle of the week, the Astros loss record could well stand at 100. Their sorry won/loss record does not tell the whole story though.  Many, if not most, of their games have been interesting.  That is especially true of the last couple of months in which they have featured a team of mostly rookies, and very young rookies at that.  These guys have been fun to watch with their enthusiasm and their energy.  Moreover, they are a talented group and they do know how to play the game.  They show great promise for the future and give their loyal fans, like me, hope that w...

When the world turns black, when petty politicians think more about their own reelections than the good of the country and the world, when madmen turn their guns on innocent children attending summer camp and their cheering section on right-wing radio tries to excuse them, when the earth continues to heat up and all hope seems futile, there's always baseball.  During the dog days of summer - and they all seem like dog days this year - the most perfect ballgame ever invented by humans offers respite and relief from days of unrelentingly bad news.  This season, though, for Astros fans like myself, even baseball hasn't given much relief. The Astros as of today and for most of the season are and have been possessors of the worst record in Major League Baseball.  Their current record is 33-69.  They are 36 games under .500.  This is territory that this franchise has not been in since John F. Kennedy was president.  They could well finish this season with the wor...

Our long national nightmare is over. Baseball season has begun. The boys of summer begin their game these days in places where it is still winter. Many of the ball parks hosting games over the next few days will be having snow flurries and weather more typical of football season. Nevertheless, the calendar says it is time and so we begin. My beloved Astros will be starting their season in Philadelphia tomorrow, a daunting prospect for them since they had the worst record in spring training and Philadelphia is one of the strongest teams in the league, the one that many prognosticators pick to go to the World Series this year. And now the Astros are further hobbled by injuries to key players on whom they were depending for improved play this year. It seems the poor guys just cannot catch a break. Still, one of the reasons that we love this game is that, on any given day, any team can beat any other team, even if that other team looks far superior on paper. They don't play the g...

So now it has come - that time that we have dreaded for the past six months. The end of baseball season. No more nightly visits with Brownie and JD. No more astonishingly balletic moves to gasp over, no more unjust umpires to moan over, no more ecstasy of victory or agony of defeat. The Astros' season is over. The season ended on a high note as they shut out the Cubs, but over the last week to ten days of the season, they had lost the momentum that they had enjoyed since the end of June. Suddenly, they were in a funk, playing with no more energy than they had during the first several weeks of the season when they were truly awful. They looked tired and out of their depth and they limped to the end of the season. For a while there in late August and early September, I had high hopes for the end of their season. I thought they would at least finish in third place and might even overtake the Cardinals for second place in the division. It was not to be. They finished fourth ou...

So, the Astros have swept the St. Louis Cardinals , making the second time in just a little over a week that they have swept a playoff-contending team, their first being a four game sweep of the Phillies. Not only that, but they didn't allow Albert Pujols to get a single hit during the three game series. He ended up 0-for-Houston! I tell you, some days life is good!

The New York Mets, AKA the Hated Mets, came to town this week to play a four game series with the Beloved Astros, and three games into the series, it has been just about all fans of either team could have hoped for. The games have been vastly entertaining. They have been marked by good pitching, good defense and just enough hitting. All the games have been close. Moreover, these games are being played by two teams that are going nowhere this year - "somewhere" being the playoffs - and yet both teams seem to be enjoying themselves, having fun with the game. You see lots of smiles and lots of energy from both teams. Both of the Mets and the Astros are in the process of getting younger and it shows in their attitudes. They are not worrying so much about winning the World Series just yet. They are happy to be playing in the major leagues and living their dreams. The Astros hitters have been hot lately, raising their batting averages and their runs per game since the All-St...

My beloved Houston Astros are five years removed from their lone World Series appearance, and, in those five years, the team has fallen on hard times. For fans of a team that was once respected for its professionalism and hard-nosed play, it's been painful to watch. There are signs though that that era and our frustration may be coming to an end. This week, the Astros traded their last two ties to their winning era, Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman. In return, they got some young and very promising players. All of a sudden, this formerly old team has gotten a lot younger. They have rookies or very young players at nearly all positions. These kids bring their enthusiasm and excitement with them to the game and that is very exciting to their fans. Suddenly, their games are fun to watch again. I know that they have a lot of learning to do and there will probably be some rough spots in the road ahead. Well, the Astros' road this year, as well as last year, has been mostly one o...

My beloved Houston Astros have had a really pathetic offensive attack this year. They are near the bottom of the National League in all categories of hitting. Their pitching has been more than adequate to compete in their division. Both Roy Oswalt and Brett Myers have pitched about as well as anybody in the league all season. Lately, Wandy Rodrigues has been rounding into form, and their two young guys, Felipe Paulino and Bud Norris, show great promise if they can just manage to stay healthy. Their "old reliable" Brian Moehler is, well, reliable. He knows how to pitch. Those are the starting pitchers. The bullpen, meanwhile, has been adequate and sometimes more than adequate. So the fact that the Astros head into the All-Star break next to last in their division and with one of the worst records in all of baseball is not the fault of the pitching. And the defense has been okay, so the poor record can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the hitters. When a team is se...

It's tough being a Houston Astros fan, especially this year. Last year, as well. Before that time, there was often disappointment for fans of the team but there was never embarrassment. The team always played hard and played well and even when they lost, they could hold their heads up. And so could their fans. Now through a combination of stupid decisions by the owner and his managers, the team has fallen on very hard times and the worst thing is that they make far too many errors on the field as well, really boneheaded moves that a professional baseball team with professional coaches just shouldn't make. They are just no fun to watch any more. That's not to say they don't have any good players. They do. Michael Bourn is certainly one of the premier center fielders in all of baseball. Hunter Pence may have fallen off a bit this year, but he is still a very good player. The two young pitchers they have in their rotation this year, Felipe Paulino and Bud Norris,...

Baseball season lasts from April through September, and, if you are very good, even longer. But even fans of the most mediocre baseball team are guaranteed at least six months with the best outdoor game ever invented that involves a ball. It's a long season and that's the way it is supposed to be - the way God intended - although, to some of us, the season seems to go by in the blink of any eye. The analogy is often made by sportscasters and writers that the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, and there is truth in that. Teams have to play all 162 games and every inning of every game, but even though it doesn't always seem that way, the games that are played in April count just as much as the games that are played in September. The point being that teams that get off to a slow start can find themselves in a hole too deep to climb out of even before a quarter of the season is over. That's the position that my favorite team, the Astros, find themselves in th...