By Breedlove
Editor’s note – This article originally appeared on AstrosConnection.com on January 31, 2001.
Super Bowl XXXV is now in the books. The Baltimore Ravens are the National Football League champions by virtue of defeating soundly the New York Army Ants, and they were so scary-good they should have gotten two trophies. It will never be said in baseball that one team beat the other simply because they were bigger, stronger, faster and more feral. Baseball remains a pursuit that treasures skill as much as talent and smarts as much as brawn. There is no such equivocation in football, where a Big Apple team can have the body language of the undersized child pretending not to hear his tormentor’s comments from the back of the bus.
In baseball there is no halftime, ergo no E-Trade MTV halftime show. That’s very good. Surely Bud Selig would feel the same need to have more bodies on the stage than in the stands. And surely Bud would distribute similar homemade-looking poster-board signs for all the on-field crowd extras to display. Someone else must have noticed the inside joke when Young Extra 1 held up the Marry Me, Mr. Rock Star sign and Young Extra 2 held up a nearly identical sign: No, Mr. Rock Star, Marry Me! The laughter along MTV corridors doubtless continues even now.
There were at least two good things going on at the Super Bowl. Two guys and two guys only were in the booth, and that is just perfect. When there are three I’m always a little surprised when the third one perks up and I have to think about who it is speaking to me now. In football it is poor, but in baseball, FOX take note, a third man is a hanging offense. Next was the EyeVideo gadget. I don’t think it helped the game in the least and I don’t think it would add anything to baseball, but it was very cool and I’d like to have that setup here at the house.
Now the Super Bowl is over and to a baseball fan this is Quiet Time. The seven weeks or so from late January through the middle of March are the absolute worst time of the year. It’s not just the offseason, which conjures images of trades, free agents, and winter ball; it’s this particular period that is grimly reminiscent of an Astrodome crowd in the Seventies. It drags and drags and then takes a breather when someone reports to Florida and then drags some more. Quiet Time. Over the six such stretches since his stewardship of the Astros began in November of 1995, Gerry Hunsicker has made exactly one deal, and that was the signing of free agent pitcher Tom Martin.
Martin made his Major League debut with the Astros at 27 years of age during their Division-winning 1997 campaign. Over the course of the season he appeared in 55 games, typically one left-handed inning at a time, and compiled a 5-3 record and 2.09 ERA. He did a fantastic job on the cheap and made Gerry the Hun look like a genius. He even threw a couple of innings in the Division Series against the Exercise Your Choppers ATL: one scoreless in the Kile 2-1 loss to Maddux, and a one-run eighth that was the fourth Atlanta tally in their 4-1 win in Game Three before 53,688 victory-starved freaks. Let the record reflect that no more than 10,000 engaged in chanting the Florida State battle cry or openly wet themselves at the sight of Chipper Jones.
Another expansion draft hit after the 1997 season, and with more lefties than they could ever hope to go through before requiring the services of someone like Yorkis Perez, the Astros left Tom Martin unprotected. Martin soon entered the federal witness protection program in Arizona, from whence he was promptly dealt to Cleveland for Someone Special during that club’s annual take-my-prospects-please pitching hunt. In three years on the reservation he has managed less than sixty total innings and he’s racked up some Nasdaq ERA’s. That is, he shot up to 13.00, then fell to 9.00, and has now come back down to near 4.00. Just about what everyone thought he was worth way back when he was a 2.00 during his Damn Yankees season.
It is probably for the best that this time of the baseball year is so dead. Quiet Time gives the clever authors of a gazillion columns and previews and magazines and books a chance to catch their collective breath before making futile attempts at declaring with authority what will happen next season. Having attended at least one Lollapalooza that I can recall suggests that I too will take a flying leap aboard the bandwagon and venture a futile attempt of my own. Not just yet – who can predict anything without a Diamond Mind simulation – but soon.
In the meantime I wonder how I will justify picking the Astros to win the Central Division. The Cardinals have some pitching and the Reds have some hitting and all the others are trying hard to abandon old habits. My most frank belief is that if everything were to go exactly right for every team in the division, the Houston Astros would be the clear favorites. That unfortunately seems to rely on an entire pitching staff returning from either surgery or the worst seasons of their careers and performing at its optimum level, along with the left side of the infield taking care of itself. In other words, the Astros are further from exactly right than some others.
Perhaps there are lessons to be absorbed and hope to be gained from the ridiculous parade of torment the Ravens of Baltimore unleashed on the Giants. An Astros player who saw that game might await redemption in 2001 if he ruminates over where the Ravens were last season, or when that franchise last won a Super Bowl. He might recall the ignominious suffering it endured at the hands of John Elway, or just how deep a hole from which Ray Lewis asked them to climb. That team won for many reasons, and many will be the reasons if the Astros can do the same. They’ll certainly need a healthy dose of belief, and probably at least one Tom Martin.