Two events Sunday left a mark on my 25-year experience as a Houston Astros fan.
One Monkey, Thrown
One of those events occurred as I sat in the field boxes behind third base at Minute Maid Park. Moments before, Craig Biggio had lifted a tall fly ball into the stadium’s rafters. It was caught for what appeared to be the third out of the inning. The umpires conferred, however, and ruled that the ball had hit the roof in foul territory. They declared a dead ball and breathed new life into Biggio.
The man who was homer-less in 66 career playoff at-bats, and hitless in 56 of them, stepped back to the plate with two teammates on base, two outs and a 2-1 deficit facing his team. It was the second inning of a game that offered the club an opportunity for its first playoff series victory in its 43-year existence.
With the weight of the franchise on his shoulders, No. 7 watched ball three with unusual patience. He then drove the next pitch high toward the left field wall, off which his first-inning leadoff double had caromed. This shot carried farther, landing in the seats beyond. Biggio circled the bases behind Jose Vizcaino and Brad Ausmus. Minute Maid Park exploded as no crowd in Houston baseball ever had.
The Astros put another run on the board that inning on an RBI single by Biggio’s 14-year partner-in-crime and fellow former playoff goat Jeff Bagwell. The team then proceeded to the third inning with Roger Clemens on the mound and a 5-2 lead.
As Biggio trotted out to his position in left field, the fans in the Crawford Boxes rose to their feet in applause and chanted his name. He acknowledged them by shaking his glove, as if pumping his fist inside in celebration of finally getting The Big Hit in The Big Game.
Starting on just three days’ rest, Clemens and his 42-year-old legs were tired. After gutting out 87 pitches, he was replaced in the sixth inning with Houston still on top by three.
Almost like clockwork, Astros rookie reliever Chad Qualls permitted Braves rookie first baseman Adam LaRoche to match Biggio’s feat. LaRoche blasted a three-run upper-deck homer to tie the game. What business did this anonymous 24-year-old without even a full season under his belt have in effacing the heroics of an All-Star veteran who had waited his entire 17-year career to savor a would-be victory like this?
A history of futility flashed through the minds of Astros fans, and in three more innings it was over. Atlanta’s Most Wanted, Rafael Furcal, scuttled across a run in the top of the ninth off Russ Springer. The Astros were held scoreless for seven straight, leaving runners on third in the bottoms of the eighth and ninth.
The series headed back to Atlanta knotted 2-2 on a 6-5 come-from-behind Braves victory. The team that had ended Houston’s postseason three of four times in eight years extended its all-time playoff record against the Astros to 11-3.
Biggio threw the monkey off his back with a 3-for-4 day and three RBI, but the monkey found its way onto Qualls and Springer, and the Astros ended Sunday as a team that had still never advanced in a postseason series in eight attempts in more than four decades.
Cammy, R.I.P.
Preparing Monday morning to wade through reading facile attempts to blame Houston’s loss on manager Phil Garner, I opened my Web browser instead to find that former Astro and 1996 National League MVP Ken Caminiti had died Sunday of a heart attack at 41.
Caminiti was a throwback for me, and not because of what the inevitable tributes that will be repeated in the next few days will say about how hard he played the game. Perhaps the best highlight film of his career is one of Caminiti, having fallen onto his backside into foul territory, using his cannon of an arm to nail a runner across the diamond at first base.
And the anecdote that will be most often cited, rightfully so, is this one from the Associated Press:
Caminiti’s defining moment during his MVP season came on Aug. 18, 1996, in the oppressive heat of Monterrey, Mexico, as the Padres prepared to face the New York Mets in the finale of the first regular-season series played outside the United States and Canada.
Battling dehydration and an upset stomach, Caminiti took two liters of intravenous fluid, ate a candy bar, then hit two homers and drove in four runs in an 8-0 victory.
But what burns in my mind about Caminiti ties directly to what I saw Sunday at Minute Maid Park. Caminiti is a connection to a more naive time for Astros fans.
Before Clemens and Andy Pettitte, before Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt and Wade Miller, before Jeff Kent and Moises Alou, before Ausmus, Billy Wagner, Derek Bell and the Great Bill Spiers, before Larry Dierker or even Terry Collins as manager, there was a core of youngsters on the Astros roster destined for greatness, yet not necessarily in Houston.
Caminiti was the first of the New Astros. I attended his big-league debut at the Astrodome on July 16, 1987, when he powered Houston and Danny Darwin to a 2-1 victory over the Pirates with a triple, a home run, one of the team’s two RBI and both of its runs scored.
Caminiti joined the club nine months after the heartbreaking end to its magical 1986 season. The ’86 campaign was the peak of the Old Astros and the last time, I think, most Houston fans felt that theirs was truly the team to beat.
Yes, the Mets, at 108 wins, were 12 games better than the Astros, but the pitching staff, anchored by Mike Scott, Houston’s last Cy Young winner perhaps until Clemens or Oswalt is anointed this November, fed confidence to the team and its fans. Everybody who watched that series knows that had the Astros held on to beat the Mets in Game 6 at the Astrodome, Mike Scott would have won a decisive Game 7 to advance to face the Red Sox and a 24-year-old Clemens in the World Series. The talk of an Astros postseason drought would not have existed.
So Caminiti was a New Astro joining the Old Astros in their waning years. When Nolan Ryan in 1987 would lead the league in ERA and strikeouts but finish 8-16 with dismal run support, leaving the season after next to seal his immortality in a Rangers cap.
When Jose Cruz would end his 19-year career in 1988 in a Yankees uniform. When Scott in 1989 would finally become a 20-game winner, the first for the Astros since Joe Niekro in 1980, but finish second in Cy Young voting to a reliever who got nearly half his career saves in that one fluke season.
Youth Movement
Biggio joined Caminiti on the club on June 26, 1988. His debut week Biggio caught 1986 rookie star Jim Deshaies. Then Joaquin Andujar, in his final big-league season and far removed from his fiery ’70s tenure with the Astros. Then the veteran lefty of the 1986 rotation, Bob Knepper. And finally The Old Man himself, Ryan. A couple of weeks later, Scott returned from injury, and Biggio caught him too.
Biggio and Caminiti also played alongside Glenn Davis and Billy Doran, Billy Hatcher and Kevin Bass. If you want to go back further than those stars of the 1986 squad, throw in Alan Ashby, Terry Puhl, Craig Reynolds, Denny Walling and Dave Smith, members of the 1980 and 1981 playoff clubs.
Biggio and Caminiti were the last active Astros to have played under 1986 National League Manager of the Year Hal Lanier. Caminiti joined the club almost a month to the day after Scrap-Iron Garner played his last game in a Houston uniform before a June 19, 1987 trade to the Dodgers.
Luis Gonzalez became an Astro as a late-season call-up on Sept. 4, 1990, and Steve Finley joined the Astros with Pete Harnisch and Curt Schilling in the Jan. 10, 1991 trade that sent a fading Davis to the Orioles.
A few months earlier the Astros had made a far less heralded swap on Aug. 30, 1990, sending reliever Larry Anderson to Boston for a double-A third baseman who hit with a decent batting average but just middling power. Since third base was occupied by Caminiti, the Astros shifted the prospect named Bagwell to first base.
On Opening Day at Riverfront in Cincinnati, April 8, 1991, with Old Astro Art Howe as skipper, the core of the New Astros premiered, fielding a starting line-up that included center fielder Finley batting second, catcher Biggio batting third, left fielder Gonzalez batting fourth, third baseman Caminiti batting fifth and first baseman Bagwell, in his big-league debut, batting sixth. Scott took the hill for Houston in the final season of his career.
The Astros suffered the first of their franchise-record-tying 97 defeats that year, finishing last for the first time in 16 years. In the 13 seasons since then, the Astros have finished below .500 just once, placed first or second 10 times, made the playoffs five times and twice more missed by just one game.
Considering the other talent on that team, including Schilling, Darryl Kile and Kenny Lofton, it should come as no surprise that the Astros were destined for success. Only most of those players were never part of much of it.
Stars Never Aligned
Caminiti and Finley went to the Padres in a Dec. 28, 1994, 12-player deal following the strike-terminated campaign. Despite a heroic 8-for-17 performance in the ’99 Division Series in his second stint with the Astros, Caminiti spent his best years in San Diego.
Finley never came back to Houston but excelled with the Padres and in Arizona. Let it not be said that Finley has not played a part in Astros playoff destiny, however. His grand slam for the Dodgers in the bottom of the ninth to break a 3-3 tie with the Giants on Oct. 2 allowed the Astros to take a one-game lead over San Francisco and the next day to clinch the 2004 National Leage Wild Card.
Gonzalez was traded to the Cubs on June 28, 1994, then bounced around among Chicago, Houston and Detroit. In a second stint with Houston he went 4-for-12 in the ’97 Division Series but did not become a star until joining the Diamondbacks in 1999.
Caminiti and Finley shared a pennant-winner in San Diego in 1998, and Finley and Gonzalez contributed to a World Series victory in Arizona in 2001, with Gonzalez slugging 57 home runs that season, almost as many as the 62 he hit in seven years with Houston.
Schilling and Lofton spent just 1991 as role players with Houston, so whatever their future success in Arizona and Cleveland, they are hardly remembered with the Astros. At least Houston enjoyed the fruits of Kile’s labor through its 1997 division title, its first playoff birth since 1986. In his one start in the ’97 Division Series, Kile scattered just two hits and two runs over seven innings.
Kile’s departure under free agency after the 1997 season was a tough blow, but the constancy of Shane Reynolds in those years, the acquisition of Randy Johnson at the trade deadline on July 31, 1998 and the emergence of Mike Hampton and Jose Lima as 20-game winners in 1999 softened it.
Following a bad bout with the Rockies, Kile’s success with the Cardinals was cut short with his death at 33 on June 22, 2002. Kile and Caminiti are the second and third players from the 1991 Astros to die tragically young: shortstop Andujar Cedeno died in an automobile accident at 31 on October 31, 2000.
That 1991 team was the youngest, an average of 26.1 for the position players and 26.4 for the pitchers, the Astros have been in 25 years. They were the poorest-performing Astros team in 29 seasons from 1976 until 2004, covering all but four years of my life and more than my entire experience as a sentient baseball fan.
But thinking back to that season, things were fresh then. The franchise’s only playoff losses to that point were just barely failures: in Game 5s in 1980 and 1981, and in the bottom of the 16th with two aboard, just inches from Kevin Bass? bat and sending the ball into Scott’s split fingers for Game 7 in 1986.
That was before we knew the tortuous postseasons of ’97, ’98, ’99 and ’01, when the Astros barely made the Braves and Padres perspire but themselves appeared to be in a constant pouring sweat, with Dierker on the hot seat and surly in post-game press conferences. It was previously unenjoyed prosperity in the regular season coupled with heretofore unknown suffering in the playoffs.
Caminiti was the first of the New Astros. He may not have been with the club in his finest seasons, the times when he might have made the difference. That was not his fault. As Bagwell once said, had they kept that team together, they would have won it all.
And Caminiti sure gave it a run in ’99, when the Astros actually played Atlanta into extra innings threatening to take a 2-1 series lead. If only they could have scored the game-winner with the bases loaded and no outs in the bottom of the tenth.
It was Camniti’s single that moved Bagwell into scoring position that inning. Caminiti was 3-for-6 that day and hit three home runs and drove in eight in the series. It was the finest Division Series for an Astro until the monumental four-homer, nine-RBI performance of Carlos Beltran this postseason.
When I think of Caminiti, I think of when the franchise turned the page from the Astros I knew as a kid to the Astros I knew and know now as an adult. The stars were there in those days, even if they never aligned.
Two Monkeys, Thrown
As much as the Astros might have enjoyed claiming their first series victory before the home crowd, their play Wednesday and Saturday allowed them a luxury Sunday they had not enjoyed in two decades: the chance to take care of business another day.
And like so much of what this team did in coming back with a 36-10 finish to the regular season, they showed Monday that their confidence was not shaken, not by a long shot.
They enter the NLCS with worn-out pitching thrown out of order against a St. Louis team with the best record in baseball. But they also march into town with a 39-12 record in the last eight weeks and 36 runs in their five games against Atlanta. Game 5’s linescore speaks for itself as a tribute to guts:
Team 123 456 789 R H E ------------------------------ Houston 021 001 530 12 17 1 Atlanta 000 020 100 3 9 1
This one was for Cammy. And Bidge, too. In the two games in franchise history that mattered most, the chance to do what had never been done, his 6-for-9 with three doubles, a homer, four RBI and three runs scored was no small feat. It dispels for all time the rap that he cannot hit in the playoffs.
But the only statistic that really matters to Biggio, Bagwell, their teammates and all their fans: Houston 3, Atlanta 2.
You might not have believed. But they did.
Say hello to the new New Astros.