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...

Yogi Berra 1925 - 2015 Hall of Fame catcher and Hall of Fame human being. Philosopher who saw clearly that maybe the fork in the road didn't matter; what mattered was that you make a choice and stick with it. A player who embodied the joy of the game. An icon of my childhood and one of the reasons I am a baseball fan. Yogi Berra played all nine innings.

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!   

The baseball season is over. All 162 games are in the books. My Houston Astros won't be going to the playoffs. Again. But at least this year they didn't end up in last place in their division. In fact, the team made considerable improvement. Last year they won only 51 games. This year they won 70. Still not .500 but getting closer. More importantly, all of their (very) young players got another year under their belts and they form the nucleus of what could be a very good team in the future and for years to come. The core of that nucleus is their talented second baseman, Jose Altuve. Altuve played 158 games out of 162 this year, including the last one. For that last game with the Mets, the brain trust of the team debated keeping him out of the lineup. He was leading in the batting title race by a few points over Victor Martinez of Detroit. If he didn't play, there was a good chance that he would back into the championship. If he did play and had a bad day and Martinez had a ...

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...

There are a lot of bad things going on in this country. In all too many instances, our government "of the people" is actually government "of the rich people and rich corporations" as the super-rich have bought and paid for the politicians who run the government. We have become an oligarchy of the rich and this is fully sanctioned by the Supreme Court which is supposed to uphold the Constitution and support our individual rights. The Roberts Court, though, is simply an extension of the oligarchy. Moreover, in many states, the oligarchs are attempting to steal the presidential election by preemptively removing from the rolls of eligible voters Democrats and minority voters who presumably would not be voting for their preferred candidate. They claim widespread voter fraud, but the only noticeable fraud is that perpetrated by these states in trying to deny their citizens their rights. These are examples to make any American who loves this country and what it has stood f...

I was listening to the Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning and her panel of guests - a bunch of political pundits - were going on and on about how the presidential election would be decided by 15 "battleground" states because all the other 35 are already in the bag for one of the two major parties. All of a sudden I just wanted to scream or pull my hair out or maybe both - just do something dramatic! I thought, "Oh. My. God! I cannot stand this for another six months!!!" Wherever one turns these days, it is all presidential politics all the time and most of what we hear is just dreck. And it's only May! The conventions haven't convened yet. The real campaign hasn't even really started, but already I am totally disgusted with the process. The cynicism, the lying, the posturing - it's all just too much for me. Time to tune out. Thank God for baseball. At least I will have the distraction of the most perfect game ever invented through September and eve...

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...

(1.)  I guess by now you've heard Rick Perry's statement about how we would treat (George W. Bush appointed) Fed chairman Ben Bernanke in Texas.  He said we'd be "pretty ugly" to him. Well, last night on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert played the video of Perry saying that, then Colbert responded, "Oh, no! They're going to make him live in Houston!" That may not have earned Colbert too many friends in the big city, but it is a perfect illustration of how the nonsensical statements of Perry (or any other candidate) should be treated.  They should be made fun of.  They should be laughed at.  The idiocy of the candidate should be pointed at and pointed out at every opportunity.  For example, when Perry makes the statement that "more and more scientists are skeptical about global warming," a good journalist or even a moderately intelligent person in his audience should ask him to name one of those skeptical scientists. (2)  Meantime, the ot...

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...

(1.) The FBI seems to be on a roll lately, having made several high profile arrests. The latest was this week's capture of one of their Ten Most Wanted, "Whitey" Bulger . Bulger had been on the lam for years, apparently with the complicity of some law enforcement people who had been paid off to turn a blind eye. Some of those folks are already serving long prison sentences and, with the capture of the man himself, it is possible that others will soon follow. Bulger, who is thought to be responsible for at least 19 murders, should be right behind them. We sometimes get the impression that our law enforcement agencies are incompetent, but the FBI is going a long way toward redeeming its reputation. It's very nice and confidence-building for the average citizen to see things working the way they are supposed to. (2.) If Rick Perry decides to run for president, it seems that he will have a rumor problem. The rumor is that he is gay . Whether or not there is any tr...

It was one of the best kinds of afternoons - hours spent browsing through book stores followed by a wonderful late lunch at a favorite restaurant. All with my favorite person. It's one of those pleasures that may be fading away in the future as book stores struggle to stay open in the age of Internet book buying. But today at least we still found a couple of them open and full of books. Full of books that I just had to have. I had a mental list of books that I wanted for my "to be read" list and I found several of them, but then I found another book that I didn't know I wanted until I picked it up. It was Good Poems, American Places selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor. I picked it up and the book fell open to this poem: Baseball by John Updike It looks easy from a distance, easy and lazy, even, until you stand up to the plate and see the fastball sailing inside, an inch from your chin, or circle in the outfield straining to get a bead on a small black do...

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...