By Tone Loc
Editor’s note – This article originally appeared on AstrosConnection.com on April 20, 2000.
Perhaps the most tiresome cliche in today’s corporate world is the “paradigm shift”, a fancy-sounding buzzword that’s been used to describe everything from the decade-long bull market to the emergence of Jesse Ventura to the popularity of bread machines. Like all overworked expressions, its utterance today draws more groans than a trip to the proctologist, but even so all such platitudes contain in them a grain of inspiration, and a paradigm shift is exactly the most appropriate term to describe the new on-field challenges that the move to Enron Field has thrust upon the Astro organization.
Early-season fireworks notwithstanding, it’s way too soon to tell whether Enron will function as a hitter’s or a pitcher’s park relative to the league. We don’t know yet how much of the extra offense is park-related, how much is climate-related, and how much is due simply to the Astros’ H-bombs (Holt and Henry). But it is obvious that Enron resembles the Astrodome as much as Colonial Williamsburg resembles Tomorrowland, and it’s not much of a stretch to assume that it WILL be friendlier to hitters than the cavernous Dome. This new reality will dramatically alter the approach the Astro organization must take to continue to field a competitive ballclub.
As we all know, the Astrodome competed with Dodger Stadium for the title of the most extreme pitcher’s park in baseball. While that seems obvious to us today, it should be noted that it took the Houston front office over a decade to figure this out, as evidenced by the disastrous blundering of the Spec Richardson years. Unable to apply the proper Astrodome filters in its evaluation of talent, the organization continually misread its young hitters’ performances, wrote them off as “disappointments”, and shipped them off to other teams, where they would blossom and thrive. Joe Morgan, Rusty Staub, John Mayberry, and Cliff Johnson were prime examples of this. Because the Astrodome muzzled run scoring, it made a slew of mediocre pitchers look better than they were, and the Astros would always erroneously think that their pitching was fine; they would never recognize that they needed to make a real effort to develop a truly outstanding staff. The end result was a monochromatic pile of .500 seasons characterized by glistening home records and road marks that would have embarrassed the Rockets.
When Tal Smith assumed control of the franchise in the late 1970’s, the Astros finally came to realize that they would never win consistently unless they accepted the fact that, thanks to the Dome, their hitters’ raw stats were much better than they looked, and that their pitchers’ numbers weren’t. So Tal and company put together a legitimate championship-quality pitching staff, anchored by the great J.R. Richard, which keyed the team’s first steady run of success around the turn of the eighties. They also realized that players like Jose Cruz and Terry Puhl were contributing far more than their good-but-not-great raw statistics would have suggested, and resisted the temptation to trade them away. The team’s on-field performance reflected this newfound wisdom, and the necessary ingredients for success under the Dome became well known. Since then, the Astros have had their share of good and bad years, and even a few great offensive teams, but the organization never lost sight of the fact that outstanding pitching would have to be the cornerstone of any sustained success, and planned accordingly.
Now Enron changes the equation. There have been premature parallels drawn between the EFUS and Coors Field, often laced with the fatalistic attitude that the Astros are doomed because Coors supposedly keeps the Rockies from winning. Balderdash. Ballparks don’t win or lose pennants; organizations do. In a remarkable inversion of Spec Richardson’s problems so many years ago, the pre-O’Dowd Rockies lost because they ignored their home park’s distortions and concluded that Dante Bichette was a superstar and John Thomson was a bum. Enron Field, in all likelihood, will not be kind to the same types of players the Astrodome favored, but it will help SOMEBODY. The challenge right now before Gerry Hunsicker is to determine what type of player this might be. It is no longer necessarily true that the best kind of “specialty” player to have around in Houston is a flyball pitcher like Shane Reynolds or Jose Lima; the new ballpark might well favor a line-drive hitter like Richard Hidalgo, or a lefthanded power hitter like Daryle Ward, or a groundball pitcher like, er, Mike Hampton. We don’t really know yet; all we can do is theorize until Enron hosts enough games to provide a decent enough sample to hang our hats on, with and without the roof. Once the evidence is in, it will be up to the Astro front office to respond accordingly to keep the franchise afloat on the field.
Given the track records of Gerry Hunsicker and Tim Purpura, I trust that the Astros will adjust to this paradigm shift a lot sooner than Spec Richardson did in his day. In the meantime, we’ll probably be in for a ride as wild as the NASDAQ while we figure out what we have in Enron.