Editor’s note – This article originally appeared on AstrosConnection.com.
Wow… nothing like an Astros playoff game to suck your scrotum into your stomach and make you lay in a fetal position all afternoon. Dropping 2 in a row to the Braves is nothing new to the Houston nine…and unfortunately nothing new to anyone who has been following this baseball team for the last 10 years.
I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to invest a whole lot of emotion or energy in the playoffs this year. After the end of the season slide (Can we please not tell any of the Astros that it’s October next year? Is that too much to ask?) I was (and still am) burnt by the clusterfarts (I don’t really mean farts…I mean something else entirely) I saw during that string. And yet, I burned a sick day to watch Brad Ausmus and Wade Miller try to drag the team towards winning. Par for the last few years, it turned out I wasn’t actually fibbing about being sick by the 8th inning. I had a nice ol’ stomachache going on. The only remedy was to turn off the game about the time that Larry Wayne deposited that ball in the Crawford Boxes. I went to go download a pirated version of XP to make myself feel better.
Most of me wants the Astros to beat the Love Cruise out of the Braves on Friday and for Roy Oswalt to pitch a perfect game and for all to be happy in Astrosland for a day. But there’s an angry, ugly, outraged, cynical part of me (it looks a lot like Jim Rome and I Love-Cruise out of it daily) that wants Roy to get shelled early so I can have a nice weekend.
Of course, Oswalt could act alone (I’ve been waiting to use that) but it’s hard to imagine the Astros bats are going to wake up enough for it to make a difference. The list of suspects is long and starts with Craig Biggio and Julio Lugo. These two have combined to go 1 for 15. When your table setters aren’t on base…well, in baseball parlance we call that a Derek Bell level of suck. Following closely is the latest addition to the Killer Breeze, Lance Berkman, who has managed to get his bat on the ball just enough to kill any rally he happens to stumble across.
In fact the only Astros hitting are Ausmus, Vinny Castilla and…holy Temptation Island 2, Jeff Bagwell (although he still doesn’t own a post season extra base hit.) Throw in some remarkably spotty defense from everyone but MexiMulletNoMore and Ausmus, and you have the recipe for Astros playoff baseball.
As much as I want to give up on them I can’t. As much as I am singing to my self “last verse, same as the first” after today’s game, I’m still going to try to get the cable in our building tuned to FoxGereatric, FoxDeviant or wherever they show the game on Friday. I’ll still feel little stabs of pain when the Braves score or when Mike Jackson ends up starting the game on a Dierker hunch. I’ll still run around my cube when anything good happens on the field. And I’ll still have to explain to my wife why I’m not in the mood to eat Friday night if they lose.
A Moment of Silence
I know that co-opting grief is a real slippery slope kind of proposition these days, but I would like to ask for a moment of silence… for Larry Dierker’s managing career. I know that Dierk is an easy target right about now. He’s responsible for everything from his mind-boggling moves (Jackson instead of Dotel, allowing Lugo to take the field) to the Anthrax scare in Austin yesterday to the fact that I ran out of toilet paper yesterday and my dogs’ 30 word vocabularies don’t include “go downstairs and get a roll of two ply from the Sam’s Pack of Charmin.”
However, he’s been the most successful manager in franchise history, he’s had the most victories and he’s won the most titles (and when you’ve won nothing, a division title seems like a lot). He’s been honest about his players and to the chagrin of more than a few, about their shortcomings. Because he wasn’t Terry Collins, he’ll always be a favorite of mine.
I think that come rain or shine in the remainder of the playoffs, by November, the Astros are going to be looking for a new manager. Whoever gets the job is going to have a wealth of pitching talent, some excellent hitters and miles and miles of baggage. Whoever they are, they’re going to screw the pooch a number of times as well. I hope they can deal with it as graciously as Dierker has the past few years.
One more thing before I go…
Cal Ripken is not an especially ugly man. I don’t think he’s necessarily the most handsome man on the planet either, although I’m probably not of the right persuasion to judge these kinds of things. I’d say on the whole, he’s a pretty average looking senior citizen…I mean middle-aged man.
However, make him about 5′ tall, give him shoulder length blonde hair and turn him into a teenage girl, and cruel fates be hanged, you have his daughter. For the record, no matter how many pretty plays he turned in on the field over the course of his career, Cal does not make a pretty young woman.
At least he’s going to leave her a lot of money someday.
