TORONTO Blue Jays (57-71) vs. HOUSTON Astros (41-85)
August 23-25, 2013
Minute Maid Park
Houston, TX
HOUSTON (OWA) – This is a pretty tough time in a pretty tough season, even for the most hopeful and optimistic of Houston Astros fans.
The team is coming off of a lovely series earlier this week with North Texas, where once again the Astros played a convincing Billy Hayes, to the Rangers’ Turkish prison guards. This seemingly hapless group of Astros is now 5-15 in August, and 8-24 since the All Star break. They currently project to finish the season at 52-110 overall; or, if they continue the rest of the way at the post-ASB win-loss clip of .250 … well, we don’t even want to talk about that.
In short, the Astros are looking at their third straight sub-.350 season in a row, and this one may be the worst of them yet. I will defer to anyone who actually follows this team closely who strongly feels otherwise … but personally, I still feel – as I did at the outset of these Astro Dark Ages, a couple of off seasons ago – that this is the third year of a decade, at least, of terrible to mediocre baseball at MMPUS. It is my conviction that it will be 2020 – if then – before the Astros are a truly competitive team again.
On that pleasant note, we can contemplate the upcoming weekend series with the Toronto Blue Jays, currently holding down a distant last place in the AL East.
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SCHEDULE
Friday August 23 – 7:10 p.m. American CDT (not centigrade or metric or any of that bullshit)
Saturday August 24 – 6:10 p.m. American CDT
Sunday August 25 – 1:10 p.m. American CDT
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I was the first one to see the wisp of steam wafting out from under the hood of the car. I wasn’t sure I saw it at first, actually. We were going sixty-plus miles per hour at the time, down the beach highway in broad daylight; so it would have been a little hard to see, even if I was looking for it; which I don’t think I was.
But, maybe I was. Maybe I was.
Anyway, upon further inspection, it sure as hell was steam. And because it was, I now know this – what I saw that day, coming from under the hood of that DPS cruiser on the beach highway on the Bolivar Peninsula, in Galveston County, Texas, USA, Earth, was the first sure sign I ever got that a deity of some sort was personally interested and involved in at least some of the details of my otherwise insignificant, stupid-ass life. Laugh if you want to. I probably would, if I had not been shown otherwise in such a direct and personal way.
But I had been shown. That summer day, arrested and handcuffed in the back of a state trooper’s car, hauling ass down Highway 87 toward the Bolivar ferry landing and the district DPS office in Galveston beyond, I had my very first true religious epiphany; as powerful and meaningful to me as any burning bush or parting of the waters. As we shall see, this divine intervention on my behalf caused me to be momentarily grateful, and it probably solidified my faith, too, in some weird and perverted way. What it did not do was cause me change my ways much, or to adopt some hackneyed idea of living a “sanctified” life afterward; out of gratitude or fear or whatever the hell it is that causes people who are blessed with God’s good intentions to suddenly stop being who the fuck they are; and start trying to be someone else.
Whatever the creator had in mind for me that day, some kind of conversion apparently wasn’t it. Perhaps my perpetually dick-headed antics amused him in some way. Perhaps he felt southeast Texas had enough holy rollers already, and didn’t need another one just then; and anyway, he knew (he made me, after all) that I wasn’t really cut out for that sort of thing. Not much at all.
Or perhaps he really did expect me to come about, and was royally pissed off when I did no such thing. But I do not think so. We all believe what we believe, and our beliefs are all as different as we are, at least in some ways. Your god may want you to lead a church, or bring about world peace, or not believe in a god at all, or whatever. What mine apparently wanted for me, on that summer afternoon so many years ago, was that I not get arrested and hauled off to the Galveston County Jail that day.
And, thanks to his meddling (with the bottom hose of the cruiser’s radiator, it turns out), I did not. Hallelujah!
Among other things, this experience gave rise to a decades-long catch-phrase used by the smart set (okay, by me and my dumb-ass friends) – whenever we would be somehow miraculously saved from the jaws of defeat, or at least some extreme embarrassment of some sort, we would say, “God split that radiator hose!”
Yes! But there is a longer story involved here, which we will get to shortly.
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PITCHING MATCHUPS
Friday
TORONTO Todd Redmond, RHP (1-1, 3.32)
HOUSTON Jordan Lyles, RHP (5-6, 5.19)
Saturday
TORONTO To Be Announced, XHP (0-0, —-)
HOUSTON Brad Peacock, RHP (2-4, 5.59)
Sunday
TORONTO Mark Buehrle, LHP (9-7, 4.23)
HOUSTON Dallas Keuchel, LHP (5-7, 5.11)
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I cannot shake the feeling that I am receding.
It has been a very difficult summer for me, not being able to care very much about the Houston Astros. Not being able to care at all, to be truthful. I had some hope at the beginning of the season that my dire prediction for myself – that my lifelong love for this team would wither and die – was a too extreme over-reaction, and that by watching the wannabes and never wases that now make up the team play games every night, my fandom would somehow be rekindled. But, of course, Crane & Co. made sure that would not, could not happen. No regular local TV coverage in 2013 means that for the first time since about 1967, I have gone through almost an entire season without seeing a single Astros game, or a single play from a single game. This forced abstinence has effectively been the act of plowing under the ground where my love for the Astros once stood, and then salting it, so nothing will ever grow there again.
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It is always weird, when love goes away. A hole is left that one cannot always readily see. Whatever does grow back, where the love once grew … it may be something pleasant, or even really nice. But it will not be love. And whatever it is will be eternally diminished, by the remembrance of the love; the love that once grew in that place.
I used to think of past romantic entanglements, even true love affairs, as something like perished dinosaurs. These mighty, thundering things that I thought would never die; only now, they were extinct.
Extinct, but not entirely gone. They had perished, the life had gone out of them, and the love in them had died, utterly … and sometimes suddenly, and violently. My immediate reaction had always been to turn and walk (or run) away. No resolution, no “closure” (which is a word I fucking hate, by the way.) These mighty beasts from my past had died, and had fallen into the tar pits – like those at La Brea, out in California – and then, when I would least expect or need them to, the bones of them would be heaved back up by the tar, and back into view again; from back in an ancient history, so long ago.
I don’t know what will ultimately happen with the hole in me where my love for the Astros once grew and thrived. I am not at this point very optimistic. I think it is a hole that will never be refilled; that the Astros management’s inability to work out a local television deal this season was my de facto “closure”, and that unlike all those old dinosaurs of mine from the past, the bones of which still pop up on me from time to time (thanks so much, Facebook), my love of the Astros died, and then the bones sank to the bottom of the pit, and disintegrated.
I bounce through life
In a random pattern
Like an atom perhaps, or a billiard ball
Until I find myself way out where the air is thin
Burning silently where no eyes can see
Because the light gets sucked in before it can glow
And I feel like a black hole
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PROMOTIONS
Friday – $1 hot dogs; post game fireworks
Saturday – Orange replica jersey giveaway
Sunday – Nothing at all …
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Astros lose the series, 0-3.
Dark star crashes
Pouring its light into ashes
Reason tatters
The forces tear loose from the axisSearchlight casting
For faults in the clouds of delusionShall we go, you and I
While we can?
Through the transitive nightfall
Of diamonds
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