Astros 5, A’s 1
W: McHugh (2-0)
L: Milone (0-2)
Submitted by Reuben
By 3:42 Central Time Sunday afternoon everyone wanted to know: Who is this Collin Mc… Hugh? Whatshisname. Who is that guy? Where did he come from? Whose shirts does he wear? And why is it that no one could remember ever hearing of him before last week?
Stories vary widely about the origins of the mysterious Mr. McHugh. Some say he had never played professional baseball until a month ago, when he was discovered performing Herculean feats of farming prowess in a cornfield outside of Lucas, Kansas, and convinced by an Astros employee to try throwing a baseball. Others insist that he’s played major league baseball for years, except his name used to be Johan Santana, and he used to throw left-handed.
And then there are those who believe that he was found in a crate, hidden in a warehouse belonging to the US Government, the product of top-secret experiments conducted by Nazis to create the ultimate soldier/curve-ball specialist. Oddly, no one in the Astros’ front office can quite remember whose idea it was to trade for Mr. McHugh, or where they’d even heard of him. One source familiar with the Astros’ thinking explains that if you squint at the computer printout of McHugh’s career Sabermetric stats, it looks a little bit like an image of Jesus wearing a baseball cap.
Easily the most plausible theory of Mr. McHugh’s genesis, however, involves Astros manager Bo Porter, who, of course, is largely, if not solely, responsible for every win or loss earned by the club. Fans and 3rd-string Chronicle writers alike laud Porter’s brilliance for his rumored use of a time machine to travel 20 years into the past and enroll a young McHugh in a little-known pitching academy perched upon a mountainside in Nepal, run by a group of mute Buddhist monks.
Believers in this theory praise Porter in particular for coming up with the idea to plant a post-hypnotic suggestion in McHugh’s mind, that would prevent him from tapping into his vast pitching abilities until he donned an Astros uniform and had Jason Castro whisper the mystic phrase “yangervis solarte” in his ear. However, Porter draws heavy criticism from the same sources because, they argue, any halfway-competent MLB manager with access to a time machine would have gone back to 2009 and insisted that his organization draft Mike Trout, and not, say, Jiovanni Mier.
While his history prior to last week may be shrouded in obscurity, what is perfectly clear is that Mr. McHugh pitched another dominant baseball game Sunday, tossing 8.666666667 innings of 2-hit ball, allowing 1 meaningless run and striking out 7. Unfortunately, I was not able to watch the game, although… can any of us truly be sure that we’ve actually seen Collin McHugh pitch? Or have we just dreamt it?
**Check out the GameZone thread, full of hearsay and tall tales.
**And the mlb.com boxscore, with the “facts”.