SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 7

August 27- August 29, 2010

Astros (58-69) vs. Mets (63-64)

Citi Field
126th Street & Roosevelt Avenue
Flushing, NY 11368

**********

The Astros have been playing a lot better lately and, uh . . . oh, hell, just read about it here.

A DAY IN THE LIFE. It was mid-morning on a late spring Saturday – and hot as hell – when I set off down the railroad tracks, heading for I knew not where. Home, possibly. I was wearing metal baseball cleats, and an old style Senior League baseball uniform. I was a Tiger that season, and the team name was spelled out in yellow block letters across the chest of my heavy button-up cotton/rayon jersey, the one with number 12 on the back. The borders of the jersey, from the sleeves to the front flaps, were edged by a double line of similarly colored yellow piping. My pants were all white except for a narrow single line of yellow running from below my belt down to where the elastic was bunched up at my mid-calf, halfway down my bright yellow uniform socks. It was the style back then to have one’s pant leg folded over the elastic at mid-calf, which left only the sides of the stirrups of one’s outer socks showing below the pant leg, over the white sanitary hose worn underneath.

My yellow cap with the white ‘T’ on front was tipped back about halfway on my head, and my shoulder-length hair hung out the back and sides of the cap, and out the front, too, except when I brushed it away from my face. I was beginning to work up a sweat as I walked along in that hot-ass uniform, and pretty soon the hair in my eyes was no longer a problem. I lifted the cap and brushed the damp hair straight back and then put the cap back on, and continued on down the line.

There were tall trees lining the right-of-way on both sides of those tracks, and if one tried hard enough one could imagine being out in the middle of the wilderness somewhere, walking down a lonely trail. But actually, I was walking through neighborhoods that had grown up over the years around the tracks. If I looked through the trees on either side, I could see backyard fances, and sometimes the backyards and people and houses beyond them.

The reason I was walking down the railroad tracks in my baseball uniform is vaguely interesting. I’d been kicked out of my game that morning by my manager, who also happened to be my father. He got pissed off about something I said, something he misunderstood, to tell the truth. But in those days, it did not take much. He was over-sensitive to everything I said, and I was over-sensitive to his reactions. On this day, one thing led to another and – just like that – I was history. I was the team’s starting catcher and one of the better hitters, and I’d been standing in the on deck circle prior to the beginning of the second inning, swinging a 32 oz. wooden bat with a big lead donut on it. I was warming up, and talking to someone, one of my friends, through the 20 ft. tall chain link fence that bordered the field behind the dugouts and backstop.

I don’t remember what I said, but it was nothing to do with my father and it wasn’t directed his way. But he went ape shit, anyway. He was probably pissed off at me for something else I’d done, and was just using the opportunity to vent on me. Really, his life was beginning to fall apart then, but I did not realize it at the time. That probably had something to do with the hair-trigger temper that was a recent development of his when it came to me. But I didn’t understand it. I knew we were too different to be very close, and there was always distance between us. But he used to be pleasant with me, at least. I hated it that now it seemed like I pissed him off on sight.

My only reaction to him going off on me that morning was to look at him like he was fucking crazy. That drove him to distraction. He started off by telling me I was out of the lineup, and to go sit on the bench. I mentioned something about the vicious hangover I had that morning, and that I didn’t get up early on a Saturday and put on a hot uniform just to come out there and sit. “Fine then,” he said, escalating his tone.

“Your out of the fucking game. Get out of the dugout . . . get the fuck out of here.”

“OK. But, can I borrow your car keys?”

“I’ll tell you what. You’re off the fucking team.”

It was the third time that season that he had kicked me off the team; a season which was barely half over. Later on, he would cool off and reinstate me. He always did. I always came back, too. It used to piss me off because he never chose a private moment to boot me off the team, it was always right out in front of everyone, which was embarrassing. He was a real dick about it. Still, for all that, he was my dad, and I didn’t really want to make him look bad, which refusing to come back to the team would have done.

Also, I was 15, and it was my last year in that league, and I was having a terrific season. In the pre-season one of the other dads pointed out to me a small hitch in my swing, barely noticeable, that caused my head to tilt slightly just as the ball was coming into the hitting zone. This resulted in me just missing some fat pitches, and popping up some more. Once I got the hitch straightened out, I started hitting the fuck out of the ball, better than I ever had. I’d always had some power, but that spring was unreal. I was leading the league in home runs, and it seemed like everything I hit either went over the fence or bounced off of it.

So my motives weren’t pure, but I knew I’d be back in the lineup the next week. The times before when I’d been kicked out, my mom or another parent or a friend had given me a ride home. But that morning my mom was doing something else, and no one else was there who could give me a lift. There were train tracks running behind the bleachers and a stand of tallow trees on the first base side of our field, so I made my way through the trees and started walking down the tracks in the general direction of our house, three or four miles away. I knew those tracks went through the Southern Pacific switching yard under the overpass at the end of our street, so I figured I’d get home eventually as long as I stayed on the right-of-way.

But I was open to alternatives.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Friday August 27, 2010
Game Time: 6:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None.
Matchup: Houston – Nelson Figueroa (1-0, 2.42) Bishop of Naples and a vocal opponent of Arianism and Pelagianism.
New York – Mike Pelfrey (12-7, 3.80) The name Michael signifies “Who is like to God?” and is the war cry of the good angels in the battle being fought in Heaven against Satan and his followers

Saturday August 28, 2010
Game Time: 6:10 p.m. CDT
Television: My20
Promotion: None. Nada.
Matchup: Houston –Brett Myers (9-7, 3.08) There was a young man from Stamboul/Who soliloquized thus to his tool/”You took all my wealth/And you ruined my health/And now you won’t pee, you old fool.”
New York – Johan Santana (10-8, 2.94) My name is Yon Yohnson/I work in Wisconsin/I work in a lumbermill there/The people I meet when I walk down the street/They say, “What’s your name?”/And I say “My name is Yon Yohnson/I work in Wisconsin . . .”

Sunday August 29, 2010
Game Time: 12:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Some Mets teddy bear or something.
Houston – Bud Norris (6-7, 5.03) Norris entregou seu terceiro começo reto da qualidade prendendo o Phillies a cinco batidas e um funcionado em seis vezes terça-feira. Ele didn’ t começ uma decisão mas é 5-0 com uma ERA 3.03 em seus seis começos passados. He’ s 4-2 com uma ERA 3.91 desde a vinda fora o DL.
New York – R.A. Dickey (8-5, 3.64) Um local three-run em o que o juntamento chamasse um knuckleball terrível transformou um começo da qualidade em uma nenhum-decisão última terça-feira em Citi. Mas Dickey’ o inimigo seguinte de s é o Astros, uma equipe que prendeu a dois funciona sobre 8 1/3 das vezes mais adiantadas este mês em Houston.

**********

SALLY CAN’T DANCE. “So, how does it feel, being in a wheelchair?”

“What?”

“How does it feel – you know – to be stuck in that thing, like, forever?”

The young reporter was nervous, and cleared his throat. His retarded editor had sent him out to do a retarded story of human interest, to find one of the handicapped students at his school and ask them retarded questions like, you know, how does it feel to be in a wheelchair? The reporter felt uncomfortable and, as Jennifer Aniston might say, a bit like a re-tard for even asking.

That young reporter was me, by the way, working earnestly for my high school newspaper, Populi Verbum. I had taken Journalism I my junior year on a whim. I needed an elective to fill out my schedule, and I’d already taken Home Ec (twice) and Bachelor Living and the blow-off classes like that, and my girlfriend wanted to take Journalism, so I did, too.

It worked out pretty well, actually. Normally the J-I students stayed out of the way when the paper was being readied for a printing (usually every third week or so), while the Journalism II and III students did all the heavy lifting. We were supposed to watch, and learn. But they were short on upper level students that year, and many of the ones they had were, well, retarded. So was the editor, a big girl with glasses who thought a gripping opinion piece might focus on the pros and cons of students picking up after themselves in the cafeteria. They’d had a music column the year before, and a pretty good one, but the guy who wrote it had graduated. Since I was the only one in any of the classes who exhibited a broad knowledge of the current popular music and was willing to do it, I got the music column gig. Quite a big deal, I thought, though the J-II and III students looked down on it, because it wasn’t “real” reporting.

That is how I ended up out in the field asking dumb and offensive question to students with MS and ALS and such. The editor thought that even though my music column was popular with the readers, I needed to get out and get some “real” reporting experience. Right. I ended up not completing that assignment, and figured I’d lose my column to boot, but fuck her, I wasn’t asking any more questions like that. Anyway, as it happened I got to keep the column – usually two or three short reviews of current LP releases – and no one ever asked me to do any “real” reporting again. Sweet.

The other nice thing about that class was I was the oldest student in it, and one of only two guys. The rest were 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls, a lot of them attractive 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls. Of course I couldn’t do anything about that, since my girlfriend was in there with me. She was a 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girl, too, and was friends with a lot of the other girls in that class, so they were usually hanging around her and/or my desk (it was a pretty informal atmosphere.) Truth is, I kind of ended up running that class.

One girl I really liked – as a friend now – was named Susan. She was one of my girlfriend’s friends, and sort of pretty. Yellow hair and a nice smile, in some ways just another slim teen-aged babe in your standard 1970s attire. What I really liked about Susan was she had an attitude. This 95-lb. girl would get right up in the face of anyone who was fucking with her. No fear. I liked that.

My girlfriend knew something was up right away, of course, and she got on my ass about it. But I swore this girl Susan was just a friend, which she was, and eventually that other died down. We had a lot of fun in that class. The teacher was only a few years older than us and pretty inexperienced, and she was happy to let us do what we wanted, as long as it didn’t get her in any real trouble.

One time we were helping put together the paper for the press run. Back then, before computers in the classroom, we had to cut out copies of the stories run off on a mimeograph machine and stick them to these boards the actual size of the newspaper pages. The boards had wax lines on them, and we’d stick the stories to the wax, mixing and matching and moving things around the board until it all fit.

A few of us stayed late to finish, because the boards had to be at the printers by 11:00 that evening, or something like that. By the time we were done it was 8:00 p.m. Susan said she needed a ride, so she and my girlfriend and I got in my Skylark and I drove us home. I dropped my girlfriend off first because she lived on the other side of the West End, and her mom was already pissed that we’d stayed as late as we did. I kissed her good night and then Susan slid into my front seat and I headed for her house, only a few streets over from mine.

It was the first time I’d had any kind of conversation with her outside of school, with no one else butting in. I asked her some things about her family – I thought I knew one of her brothers – but the whole situation was kind of awkward, and I don’t really know why. Susan was pretty talkative – and sarcastic-funny – in class, but now she was quiet and kind of timid, and I saw her in a different way than I had before. Without the up front brashness to cover up, she was a pretty scared little girl; and it made me feel like protecting her and doing whatever I could to make everything all right for her.

And, of course, I couldn’t do that. I had a girlfriend who I was really happy with already (I’ll have to tell you about her sometime), and there was no way I could pull off the guardian angel thing with Susan platonically, that I knew of. I’d end up falling for her if she didn’t fall for me first, and either way that would have been nothing but trouble.

I don’t think Susan and I were ever as close again as we were that night after I dropped my girlfriend off, the night we sat in her driveway for 15 minutes and said maybe ten words between us, just sitting there in sweet silence. Nothing physical happened – like I said, we hardly even spoke – but I would not have wanted to be anywhere else on the planet that night for those fifteen minutes. I felt like time had slowed down and I had been given the gift of Vision, if only for a few minutes . . the vision to see, to know what everything about everything meant, to see every blip and planet and star on that starry night and know each one and understand the arrangement of it all, including the arrangement of me and this pretty, skinny blonde girl alone together in my car on this odd and random night. She was a friend of mine, but my feelings for her had been changed. I never even touched her, but after that night I thought of her often, though usually from afar. All through high school and after, long after. Way past the time when the girlfriend I valued so much then was long, long gone. When the night was clear and cold, especially, I would think of her. I would think I could smell the smoke from her cigarette, and see her golden hair blowing lightly in the breeze, and hear her next to me, being quiet. One thing she had told me once was that she really liked my hair, it was ‘cool’ . . . what it was, was pretty damn long, and that was a problem, because ever since then I have worn my hair longer than I should have, all the way up to now. Because of what Susan said once, if you want to know the truth, in that wonderful, offhand way she said things.

I’d been sitting in the recliner in my living room staring at the ceiling for hours when my wife came in. It was a Saturday, and she’d been out shopping with her friends. We’d been married only a couple of years then, and did most things happily together, but both of us understood that sometimes it was good for her to go shopping or something with her friends, and for me to drink a few cold ones with mine or, as it happened, to sit alone for awhile in the living room, thinking about things from long ago.

That day I’d got a phone call from a guy I used to hang out with some back in the high school days. I hadn’t heard from him in years. His name was Sam, and he had always talked like a ‘50s hipster/beatnik for some reason. It wasn’t an affectation as far as I could tell, it was just the way he talked. He reminded me of Sugar Bear – he sounded like him, and kind of looked like him, too – and in fact I used to call him ‘Sugar Bear’ sometimes, back in the old days. Anyway, Sug Sam called to tell me that my old friend Susan had died the night before, they thought from an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 27 years old, twice divorced, and had two young children. And was still pretty, Sam said. But he said all the old fiestiness had long gone out of her. She’d been through two rough marriages. One guy ended up doing a 10-year stretch in Huntsville, and the other (a guy I knew) was a fucking loser, and left her much worse for the wear. Some of this I had known, but not all of it.

Sam said for the last few years, after her second marriage broke up, Susan had just been kind of lost, and no one had been able to get through to her, or get her to talk about what hurt her so much, or to ease her pain in any significant way. She was always an experimenter when it came to controlled substances, a self-medicator. And one night she just medicated herself too much, I guess.

And upon hearing it I remember being sort of overwhelmed for a few minutes by that same feeling I’d had one night so many years before, the feeling of wanting to protect this sweet girl, and to make her smile and be happy. When that feeling passed, I was left kind of disoriented, split between the present and the time before, when things were breezy and easy and nothing mattered all that much, and I could look across a schoolroom desk at a skinny little blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl, and I could say something retarded that made those eyes of hers light up, maybe made her laugh out loud. From down deep, where all the joy comes from.

And then I let go, and was fully back in the present. I pushed the footrest of the recliner in with my legs, and got up to go help my wife carry things in from her car. It was already fall, and when I walked outside I noticed the coolness in the air. It was going to start getting cold pretty soon, it wouldn’t be long now.

**********

INJURIES

Houston

New York

**********

SOME KIND OF VENTILATOR. I’d been walking down the right-of-way for awhile, and had crossed a few residential streets, when I came to the intersection of a major thoroughfare, to a full-blown railroad crossing. I decided I was tired of walking down the tracks, so I turned west down the avenue, and trudged on as the traffic whizzed by. It was well past mid-morning now, my game was probably already over. It was getting really hot, and I still had another twenty minutes or so of walking before I’d be home.

I’d been going down the road a little way when an orange and white El Camino passed me up and then pulled up to the curb, up ahead of me. It was a friend of mine named Jerry, a senior who was actually a friend of my brother’s, but who had taken a liking to me, in a sort of big-brotherly way. This was important to me at the time, because Jerry was cool. He wore a floppy suede hat everywhere, and a puca-shell necklace, and he kind of looked like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. And he drove that fine El Camino. It was a major coup for me when Jerry started coming to pick me up to ride around and smoke weed with him in that cool-ass car, listening to Frank Zappa or Kevin Ayers or something else equally weird. My peers thought this was definitely an imprimatur of coolness, and looked up to me after that.

This morning Jerry had been riding around looking for something to do, and the unlikely prospect of coming up on me walking down Calder Avenue in my baseball uniform was as much of a pleasant surprise for him as it was for me to have him come find me and save me from the rest of the walk home.

Did I want to go straight home? Jerry asked me. No. Hell, no. Not only would I have to deal with my mother wanting to know what it was I had done to get myself kicked out of the game, by now my father was probably home, too. He wouldn’t have said anything to me. In fact, he would have ignored me utterly, for that day and the rest of the weekend. To tell the truth, sometimes that stung as much as being told to get the fuck out of the dugout.

So Jerry reached across into the glove box and pulled out a fat baggie full of gold colored straw. Sensimilla. Jerry always had the best weed. There were two pink-colored cigarettes at the top of the lid, already rolled, and when we got to a stoplight, Jerry pulled one of the smokes out and lit it with his ever present Zippo. He took a deep drag, and then as he pulled away from the light, he handed it over to me. I did the same, and so it went for awhile. We rode around the West End listening to UFO, I think it was. I’m not really sure, because by about halfway through the second joint, I was literally in my own little world. Being that wasted was always interesting, and different. It made almost any music sound good, for one thing. That day UFO, a second-rate 1970s hard rock band that featured once and future Scorpions guitarist Michael Schenker, sounded fucking awesome to me. But honestly, I really didn’t like being that fucked up. When I got too high, there was always some part of me that was fighting to get back to normal. I could never could quite completely enjoy the buzz. I didn’t tell anybody about that, though. Wouldn’t have been cool.

Anyway, we rode around like that for awhile. I did not really want to go home. I knew I probably should, though. Smoking weed always made me lose track of time, but even so I knew by now my parents would really be wondering where in the hell I was. I was thinking of telling Jerry to just drop me off at the house when he looked over and asked me if I wanted to try a little “toot.” Cocaine. It was a question I’d been dreading.

I knew Jerry did coke. He was one of a small number of kids we knew who did it. It gave them a special status. But I was secretly afraid of it. I had a comfort zone when it came to getting fucked up. I could deal with any type of alcohol. Weed I could deal with, but I really didn’t like the high a lot of the time. I smoked it because everyone else did, but I quit doing it pretty early on. I had a real affinity for prescription drugs, because they were easy to get (from our parents) and strictly measured, like alcohol. You knew what you were getting, pretty much. The stuff beyond that scared me a lot, though, and thank goodness for that.

That day in Jerry’s car, I had to go against everything I believed in at the time, everything I’d been working toward for so long. I wanted more than anything to be cool, to fit in. But I just couldn’t do the coke, man. At the risk of blowing my insider cool status forever, I turned Jerry down on his offer. “OK, that’s cool, man,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and take you home.”

I don’t know whether Jerry was just trying to get rid of me after I wouldn’t do the coke with him, or if he had some flash of insight or understanding or maybe even empathy for me. I do know he never told anyone about this episode, I would have known if he had. So my ‘cool’ status was secure. It was a few years later that I realized how stupid it was to try so hard to be cool. For one thing, I found out I was already cool, I didn’t have to try to be. I’m only halfway joking. What I found was that when I quit trying to be someone else or live up to someone else’s expectations, when I was just myself, people liked me and thought I was cool and wanted to be around me and be like me. It works this way for most people, I’m sure; but who would have thought? It is one of those unexplainable quirks of nature that practically every kid has to go through a stage of trying to be ‘cool’ in some way, of being something other than what he or she is. Unfortunately, some never get past it, or get sucked under before they can figure it all out. I am just lucky I did not. I did not know it then, or even for a long while after, but that day in Jerry’s El Camino I was at a crossroads. I could have gone either way, and had I decided to rush in blindly against my instinct, on into the unknown, well . . . who knows what would have happened? I could have got through it all right, anyway. Or not.

**********

I was sitting alone on my deck out back. It was dark, and starting to get a little cool, actually. Still, I stayed out there, because I needed to think about some things. I could hear my family in the house, and it made me feel warm inside. I wanted to go join them, and I would soon. But first, I needed to take care of something going on in my head. I’d had a sort of revelation that day, an epiphany, almost. I’d been trying to put the finishing touches on a submission I had due when I realized that after years of trying to figure everything out on my own, and not being able to, suddenly I had got it, or part of it, anyway. I always knew there had to be some kind of arc to my fucked up life, but I never could see it, it was always obscure to me. I started writing these Series Previews that are supposed to be about the Astros upcoming series but hardly ever are. What I have been doing with them, unknowingly until now . . . I’ve always had my other life going on, while at the same time I’ve had my baseball life going on. My life as a fan, and then a player, and then as a fan again. Always running parallel to my other life, the one of chasing women and getting fucked up and endless disappointments and having people die on me. But for some reason, I never thought of one in tandem with the other.

And, I still don’t. But what I have done, I realize now, in these self-indulgent Previews that SnS has been so kind in letting me inflict on everyone else, is to look at my other life through the prism of my baseball life, including my long life as a fan of the Astros. I don’t think I would ever have thought to do this on my own.

But, strangely, the reflection of my life off of my baseball life has given me just the right amount of deflection or refraction or whatever, and now the other life, the one that has been obscure to me, the one that always seemed like someone else had lived it, not me . . . now that life has taken on some meaning and clarity, and I have been able to discern a pattern to it, sort of. I can see a sort of arc to it now. Which is a great benefit to me, I think, although it is to no one else, I’m sure.

I still don’t know why I was put here, or who sent me, exactly. I’ve long ago forgot what my instructions were, if I ever knew. I feel just right, though; like I am becoming self-actualized or something. God loves me, and apparently Abraham Maslow does, too. As did this golden-haired girl, who was as tough as they come but really wasn’t. Who thought my hair was cool, who loved me like I loved her, with her mind, from afar. And who loves me still, I can literally feel it, from wherever she is out there.

I love baseball, man, and the Astros. And I love my children, and my wife. I love my life. And I love a lot of other things out there, things that are harder to explain.

********

Houston wins the series, 2-1.

THE WEATHER

Listen as she speaks to you
Hear the voices flutter through
The barriers arranged by you

Close the shutters draw the shades
Filter out the everglades
Glistening with evening dew

Thunder calls through waterfalls
Rising tides and ocean walls
I can hear you when you sigh

Listen as she speaks to you
Hear the voices flutter through
Watch them fall and let them lie

I can hear you when you sigh
Through the water in the sky

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 6

August 6- August 8, 2010

Astros (47-60) vs. Brewers (50-59)

Brewer Park of Broken Dreams
One Brewers Way
Milwaukee, WI 53214

**********

ROY AND LANCE. Like a lot Astros fans lately, I have been thinking about the sudden departure from the team of Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt, both lost to better, bigger spending organizations at the trade deadline just past. I have not been thinking of the losses so much in immediate terms – how much money was saved? What players were got in return? – but rather, I have been considering it from a longer view.

Berkman’s leaving seems almost benign, which surprises me a little. He was an icon in Houston. Not on the level of Biggio-Bagwell, but way up there. Due to the vagaries of his contract situation, Twinkie wasn’t likely to be retained by the Astros past the end of this season anyway, we are told. So it kind of made sense for them to trade away one of the best hitters the franchise has ever known, or ever will know, in exchange for some serviceable baseball talent. They did it while they could still get any return for Lance at all. Hell, apparently some fans are waving goodbye to him even as they are preparing to welcome him back. That seems crazy to me, but it might happen – if Berkman declines his option next year and goes on the market, Drayton McLane is enough of a sentimentalist to bring Berkman back, if he feels like it. No question.

On the other hand, the departure of Roy Oswalt has generated much more ambivalent feeling among the faithful. He has fallen into disfavor for ‘demanding’ a trade (Ed Wade’s words, not mine) recently, and for not stepping up to help fill the leadership void on the team left when Bagwell and Biggio (and, I would add, Ausmus) departed.

I cannot speak to the former – I don’t have any insiders close to the team . . . unless Junction Jack counts. Back in college J.J. and I and a few other wild-ass bastards friends of ours used to drive down into Mexico, to Lake Baccarac, which was still fairly new back then. We acted like we were the original Sinaloa cowboys and, once there, and high on mescal and something or other from that week’s local ganja selection, we would simultaneously try to catch a lot of fish and not get thrown into the district jail by the local policia.

Anyway, the latter accusation against Oswalt, that he failed to step up and become a team leader, that one I cannot quite get behind.

I don’t think it is in Oswalt’s nature to lead, at least not overtly. Some people – hell, most people – don’t have that in them; and getting paid a lot of money is not going to make any difference, for anyone preparing to make that argument. I think Roy O. would not be out of line if at some point in the last few weeks he allowed himself to wonder, ‘Jesus, what the hell do these people want? I was the best pitcher in my league (cumulatively) for ten years. Pitching only for the Astros. That isn’t good enough for them?’

I loved Oswalt from the day I first saw him. He was, to me, the epitome of a Gerry Hunsicker era draft pick, maybe an apt poster child for the whole Hunsicker regime. At a time when it seemed every team was drafting pitchers at least partly based on physical stature alone, when seemingly none of the draftee hurlers were under 6’ 4” and 230 lbs., the Astros picked the relatively diminutive 5’ 10”, 170 lb. Oswalt in the 23rd round of the 1996 draft, out of some no-name community college in Mississippi. He was the 684th player taken, overall.

Oswalt opened some eyes that summer pitching for the USA team in the Olympics, but I didn’t see him until he was called up a month or so into the 2001 season. He was not a big guy, okay; but like similarly-sized new teammate Billy Wagner, Oswalt had strong legs, as was readily apparent. And, like Wagner, he had the sense to make full use of his lower body in helping get the ball up to the plate in a hurry. After spending his first few weeks with the Astros in the bullpen, Oswalt was moved into the starting rotation. And the rest is history.

I loved just watching Roy O. pitch. He was a craftsman as much as a flamethrower. What really impressed me was his demeanor out on the mound. He never seemed overmatched out there, or tentative or afraid, even as a rookie. He stood straight up on the rubber, looking kind of skinny and not quite polished, got his sign, and then he just threw the fucking ball; with an idea of where it was going, and why. He was driven and determined and relentless, and admired by baseball people everywhere, not just in Houston. He wasn’t a leader in the classic sense. He was a nearly constant rotation anchor, though; in the time of Tim ‘Spongebob’ Redding and Jeriome ’15-game winner’ Robertson and the DQ & Alice show, and the rest. He was the bridge from the Larry Dierker-led division winning staffs of the Y2K era to the present time. By the time Oswalt made his Astros debut, Mike Hampton was long gone, Lima Time had maybe a month left, Scott Elarton maybe two, and Shane Reynolds would be gone in another year.

I think most people categorize the different incarnations of the Astros teams over the years in terms of who the best hitters were at the time. The Jose Cruz-Terry Puhl period, the Glenn Davis era, the Bagwell-Biggio epoch. And that is probably the best way to think about it. It surprised me a little when I realized the other day, upon hearing the news that Roy Oswalt had been traded to Philadelphia, that I tend to categorize the team historically by pitching staffs, rather than who was in the batting order. Maybe that’s from spending my formative years watching 3-2 and 2-1 nail-biters in the Astrodome, I don’t know. I first became truly MLB-aware in the late 1960s. Dierker was a player back then, and the staff ace. There were a lot of young guys on that staff, hard throwers like Tom Griffin and Don Wilson and Jack Billingham. Things didn’t exactly work out for some of them, at least in Houston. Four or five years later, J.R. Richard came to town, an exceedingly tall, raw-boned looking guy from the wilds of north central Louisiana, who could throw really, really hard; and soon thereafter some guy named Joe something was picked off the scrap heap, purchased from Atlanta for a pittance. Throw Joaquin Andujar right in there somewhere, too. Nolan Ryan was soon brought in, then Bob Knepper; and Mike Scott wasn’t far behind them. And so on. In the future I will likely collectively remember the immediate post-playoff years under Jimy, the resurgence in 2004-2005, and the dark ages that set in after that, as Oswalt’s era. Now that Roy is gone, someone else will have to step up, be acquired, or emerge, and fill his role.

The thing about Oswalt, he was deceptively strong. He maybe did not look so durable, though; and one of the fun things to do in the years Roy was here was read various ‘experts’ like that tool from BP, Wil Carroll (usually echoed a few days later by Pinwheel or JdJO, or both), predicting Oswalt would succumb to arm injury woes anytime now. And he never did, really. He had an in-season ‘dead arm’ a few times along the way, and he famously dealt with a tricky groin for awhile; but his arm never actually went bad on him, or gave out. Some attribute this durability of his to the myth-like, almost surely apocryphal story in which Roy received a heavy-duty shock in that golden right arm of his one day several years ago, while fooling around with the battery in his truck.

Maybe. But some of the deceptive part of his sturdiness was due to the fact Roy O. was one of those people possessed of a physiology that used to be referred to as ‘wiry.’ Not big and bulky, but not weak, either. As tough as wire. Other than his legs and butt, which of course were the key, the rest of Oswalt made him appear as a sort of skinny, country-ass fuck, like someone you’d see pumping gas at a rural filling station. Laconic and hard to read, the guy gives you the directions you asked for. But was he really helping you out? Or giving you the bum steer? It was counterintuitive for some people, including me at first, to see the smallish-for-a-starting-pitcher but actually normal-sized Oswalt out there, firing 95 mph fastballs knee high on the corners. Something had to give, right?

Nope. I have in my mind a mental picture from a dream I once had about Roy Oswalt, set sometime after his playing days end. In my dream, Roy was living at his place in Mississippi, out in the country. It was late fall/early winter, and the leaves were on the ground, and it was kind of wet out. The air was steely cold under a grayish-white sky, with a stiff wind backing. Roy was inside his house, but realized he needed some more wood for the fireplace wood-burning stove. So he walked through the front doorway and around to the side of his house, where he had neatly stacked a couple of cords of split hardwood. He had harvested the wood by knocking down some trees with his bulldozer, and dragged them over to the side of the house with his tractor. He trimmed and cut logs into lengths with his Husqvarna 24” logging chainsaw, and he spilt the lengths with his hydraulic log-splitter. Roy grabbed up a couple of armloads of firewood off of the stack, almost effortlessly, and slowly carried it back into his house.

Outside, just beyond this tableau, a car had passed by on the road out front, and a young kid in the back seat witnessed this scene. Or, better yet, a barn owl was sitting up in a tree in the yard, wise and solitary, its huge black eyes taking in everything. No, I’ve got it. A red wolf was moving across Oswalt’s property, unhurriedly on his way to wherever it is wolves go. He suddenly sensed movement in the periphery of his vision, and glanced up in time to see Oswalt carrying a seemingly disproportionate amount of wood across the deck in front of his house and back inside. The wolf’s glance only lasted a second or two, just long enough to discern there was no immediate danger. No prospective meal, either. But in that few seconds of time, our wolf formed the wolf-equivalent of a coherent thought, in the front part of his lupine brain. And he voiced that thought, to himself, in whatever the language is that wolves speak to themselves in. He said, “Damn, that little guy is bad-ass.” And then, imperceptibly, he nodded. It was a nod only wolves can see. It was really just a minute motion of the wolf’s head, from straight ahead to slightly upward, back, and to the left. In the wolf world, this type of nod is a sign of grudging respect for an individual from a non-wolf species. The wolf nodded in Oswalt’s direction, but Roy was already gone. The wolf seemed to consider this for a second – probably me projecting a little here – and then he moved on, as well.

For a man, if he even knew the wolf was there, which Roy didn’t – red wolves are famously stealthy . . . for a man, a nod of respect from a wolf would be a great honor, I would think. I certainly would be honored. Either way, I am with the wolves on this one. Roy Oswalt was bad-ass. And for an extraordinary length of time in the baseball world, he was our bad-ass. Despite the bouts of whining and the demanding of a trade and accusations that he was not always the best teammate, I am sorry to see him go.

Like the red wolf in his yard, I give Oswalt my imperceptible nod of respect. He was bad-ass, and I will miss watching him.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Friday August 6, 2010
Game Time: 7:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Sports Authority Special Coupon, sponsored by Sports Authority. The first 10,000 fans will get a ‘special coupon’ from the ‘Sports Authority’, whatever that is. This sort of non-promotion promotion is typical, and apparently a big deal to Brewers fans.
Matchup: Houston – Wandy Rodriguez (9-11, 4.49) Wandy had a rocky first half. Since the All-Star break, he is 3-0, 2.14, allowing 14 hits and 18/4 K/BB in 21 IP (3 starts.) He seems to have settled into the groove he was in for most of the last two seasons. That’s a good thing.
Milwaukee – David Bush (5-9, 4.55) [Beavis&Butthead]Bush, heh-heh-heh. His name is Bush, heh-heh. [/Beavis&Butthead]

Saturday August 7, 2010
Game Time: 6:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None. Nada. Kiene.
Matchup: Houston –Brett Myers (8-6, 3.10) Mr. Reliable for the Astros this season; and with Oswalt gone, the de facto ace of the staff. But Myers has earned the designation, by being remarkably consistent, and consistently good.
Milwaukee – Randy Wolf (7-9, 4.91) Wolf is part of the long and continuing tradition of ballplayers with surnames from the animal kingdom. The Astros had Lamb; some Bass, Bream and Ray; Fox and Wolf, of course; before slaughtering a Bullock for the main course. I figured Wolf would have annihilated a guy like Mike Lamb in their head-to-head meetings over the years, because Lamb never could hit lefties, but also because, you know. . . but it appears they never faced each other, darn it. One of the Pittsburgh pitching staffs in the early 1970s featured Lamb, Moose, and Veale. Mmmm. . . tasty.

Sunday August 8, 2010
Game Time: 1:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: DQ Family Day; and Klement’s Sausage Italian Racing Sausage Bobblehead; sponsored by Dairy Queen and Klement’s Sausage, respectively. The DQ promotion is actually pretty sweet. Fans buy a ticket in the “terrace” (i.e., upper deck), and get a coupon for a free hot dog and drink (‘soda’, in Milwaukee parlance), and a coupon for a buy one-get one free Blizzard. I presume there are DQ outlets in or near the stadium. The sausage promotion is a bobblehead of the Italian Sausage entry in the sausage races run between innings in Milwaukee. I guess once you have collected all your favorite players’ bobbleheads, in Milwaukee it is a natural to start collecting your favorite sausages.
Houston – Wesley Wright (1-1, 4.44) We want Wesley. Wesley wins. Wesley’s wild? Wrong! Wesley’s wonderful! Woohoo!
Milwaukee – Yovanni Gallardo (10-5, 2.71) Gallardo. Dollar, goal, roll, dog, rag, drag . . .

**********

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

I knew this girl once, back in school, and she was really pretty. I don’t mean “hot” or anything like that. Neither did she have the classical good looks – high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and a delicate facial bone structure. She was just pretty. Fresh and wholesome looking. For lack of a better descriptive example, she was Mary Ann to everyone else’s Ginger. She had long-ish dark brown hair, and even darker eyes. She was never a girlfriend of mine or anything, or even really a friend, I just kind of knew her. On the odd occasions when we met, walking across campus, or at a party . . . just seeing her always kind of made my day.

This girl’s whole face lit up when she smiled, which was pretty often. She literally beamed. But from the beginning I thought I detected something else there, too. When she smiled at you, all her facial inflections and body language signaled that she was wholly sincere, and I never doubted that she was. But just beyond the borders of her face, from just behind her, emitted something that seemed like a physical incarnation of something else, something approaching deep sadness. At least, that is what I thought at the time. The thinnest ribbon of darkness outlined her beautiful, beaming face, and for a brief moment a shaft of dark light would glint over her shoulder and onto me. What was that? I would think about it awhile, and eventually convince myself I didn’t really see anything. But by now I am pretty sure I did. I cannot adequately describe it in physical/spatial terms, but it almost appeared as if she had a second shadow following her around, a darker, heavier version of the original.

I don’t know what happened to that girl after school. For all I know she went on to a great career, a storybook marriage with wonderful kids, and a life of true happiness, mostly unmarred by the darkness out there everywhere. I certainly hope she did. Maybe the menacing darkness that seemed to stalk her in our college days decided she was too bright and good for even an extra shadow to fuck with, and so this extra shadow moved on, to dog the footfalls of some other poor soul.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The red wolf that happened by Roy Oswalt’s house several winters from now, just as Roy was coming outside for more firewood, had intruded briefly into our dreamy little vignette set at Roy’s place, and then just as quickly had left. But he didn’t exactly leave. He moved outside the frame of the picture, and out of our direct vision, as wolves will do. But something – I have no idea what and neither did he – something made that wolf want to linger there on the periphery of the scene for another moment, just beyond the lines of our collective sight and awareness. He hunched down silently behind some brush, and a small, fallen tree at the edge of Oswalt’s property, and he stared back at Roy’s house.

When Roy had been outside earlier, the wolf had noticed the interior of his house, through the slightly open front door. The wolf did not see much detail, but somehow processed the idea that the home emitted warmth and light and a certain level of comfort no wolf in this world will ever likely experience for very long, if ever. And deep down in his emotionless natural soul this wolf felt a tiny, brief tinge of something he’d never known, something like regret. This cold-blooded predator and howler at the midnight moon experienced, for just a second, a sort of longing.

He longed for something he did not know, and never would know, from a time so far back in history this fuzzy fellow, as apparently bright as he was for his kind, could not begin to comprehend it, or know how far back in time the object of his longing really was. Actually, we are talking mega-time here, hundreds of thousands of years (times seven for a canine, remember), too many years to be sensibly comprehended even by the bi-peds the wolf occasionally saw in his roamings around; like the little guy he saw earlier, carrying all the wood. In truth, the time frame this wolf was attempting to contemplate went all the way back to the time when his genetic branch had suddenly and dramatically split, back in the mists of pre-history. A time when some of his ancient ancestors left their brethren and made one of the biggest leaps of faith ever made by anyone (or thing) in biological history. They did this despite all their instincts and accumulated common wolf sense that compelled them not to. These ancient wolf ancestors had hunched down in the cold outside the mouth of a cave, just like their modern counterpart did at Oswalt’s house, and they saw the glowing light coming out of the cave opening, and they could smell cooking meat, and could hear the sounds of grunting camaraderie coming from inside, and they could sense the warmth there; and they could almost feel the comfort present in that bright, warm and safe place.

This is what they did next. One of the wolves, because it had to be just one very brave one at first, before more would see this action and follow, or not. . . one of the wolves befriended a caveman one day, while both were out hunting for their respective dinners. They had both stopped to rest, and warily, silently, they sat next to one another on a log. The dirty, hairy bi-pedal human dragged his paw-like hand across his protruding brow and then, following a built-in instinct he had no clue about then and his descendents still don’t understand, he tentatively reached out and lightly stroked the back of his new canine acquaintance’s neck, on the scruff. Right at the spot where the wolf’s mother used to pick him up with her teeth and cart him around while running her errands, back when he was just a pup. And the wolf experienced something like appreciation for maybe the first time, certainly towards a human. He opened his terrible, tooth-filled mouth, extended his rough sandpaper tongue, and lightly licked the back of the caveman’s hand.

After that, of course, it was all over. Man had got himself a best friend, St. Bernard had someone to bring him his brandy, and I was bestowed upon a lemon beagle with a mind of his own, who is barking like a harbor seal out in my backyard just now; who from time-to-time deigns to communicate with me. Telepathically, he insists.

What our crouching wolf’s ancestors did, some of them, against all reason and good wolf sense, was form an alliance with this often stupid and mindlessly destructive race of mammals, who slaughtered wolves among other things with abandon and would continue to, forever. Those early wolves crossed the gulf between them and the two-legged cave dwellers anyway, because somehow they knew they had to do it; they had to befriend the humans, and allow themselves to be mutated and dumbed down to accommodate the human’s needs, to become companions and even servants to these humans. And to gain their trust and affection. All so that the rest of them, the wolves who did not cross over and all the descendants for the rest of time of the wolves who did not cross over, would have a chance, at least, to dodge extinction. A chance to survive.

What those early wolves did was mull over what they perceived as their their options at the time. Then they decided it was time, for the first time ever, for some of them to come in from the cold.

Wolves are not our brothers;
They are not our subordinates, either.
They are another nation, caught up just like us
In the complex web of time and life.

**********

INJURIES

Houston
•Alberto Arias (RHP) – An eleven-year-old, all-American boy, who lost his mother to death at an early age. Though unenthusiastic in his schooling, he is intelligent, adventurous, and generally athletic, with a proficiency in judo, scuba diving, and the handling of firearms.

•Geoff Blum (3B-SS, ex-Mgr.) – A US government scientist, considered to be “one of the three top scientists in the world,” with interests and technical know-how spanning many fields of science. Raising Alberto Arias and Tommy Manzella as a single father, he is exceedingly conscientious with a charitable sense of decency, combined with the willingness and ability to take violent decisive action when necessary, for survival or defense.

•Brian Moehler (RHP) – A special agent/bodyguard/pilot from Intelligence One. Governmental fears that Arias could “fall into the wrong hands” resulted in the assignment of Moehler to guard and tutor him. Brian was born in Wilmette, Illinois. He is stated to be an expert in judo, having a third-degree black belt; as well as the ability to defeat noted experts in various martial arts, including sumo wrestling.

•Tommy Manzella (SS) – A street-wise Calcutta orphan, who becomes the eleven-year old adopted son of Dr. Geoff Blum. Rarely depicted without his bejeweled turban and Nehru jacket, he is proficient in judo, having learned it from an American Marine. The seventh son of a seventh son, Tommy seems to possess mystical powers (including snake charming, levitation, magic, and hypnotism) which may or may not be attributed to parlor trickery. The Blums met Manzella while Dr. Blum is lecturing at Calcutta University. Though slightly more circumspect than Alberto, Tommy can reliably be talked into participating in most any adventure by his adoptive brother

•Felipe Paulino (RHP) – A small white dog, a Pekingese. Felipe often provides comic relief, but he is occasionally instrumental in foiling the bad guys. Though unable to speak, unlike his heroes Astro and Scooby Doo, Paulino seems uncannily able to understand human speech (especially that of his master, Alberto) and is capable of complex facial expressions.

Milwaukee
•Doug Davis (LHP) – Left elbow tendinitis.

•Jody Gerut (OF) – Bruised left heel.

•Carlos Gomez (OF) – Busted coconut.

•Gregg Zaun (C, man about town, bon vivant) – Some kind of problem with his labia???

**********

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men

Oswalt’s wolf had the germ of an idea and presence of mind to tap into whatever it was inside him that allowed him to peer back into time, all the way back to his earliest ancestors. Which is a remarkable thing, and reminds me of something from way back.

We were visiting my mother’s family in western Pennsylvania, and one day several of us kids, my brothers and cousins and some neighborhood boys, were playing in my grandfather’s pasture, firing crabapples at one another. My grandparents had stubby-looking crabapple trees nearly everywhere on their land, so ammunition was readily available, on the vine (unripened and hard) and on the ground (beginning to rot, all nice and squishy.) Then one of my cousins spotted a rather large hornet nest hanging from the bottom limb of one of the crabapple trees, maybe six feet off of the ground. We stood and looked at it for awhile, transfixed. Then we walked off a distance and began throwing crabapples at the nest.

I was 10 years old at most, but even I knew what we were doing, while entertaining, probably wasn’t such a great idea. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one of my older cousins delivered those hornets a message pitch; some chin music, high and tight. The next thing we knew, hundreds of really pissed-off hornets were swarming all around the pasture, looking for someone to fuck with.

I did not know at the time I was mildly allergic to some varieties of the Pennsylvania hornet, but I was. I got stung on the cheek, about an inch-and-a-half below my right eyeball. Almost instantly, that side of my face began swelling, a welt that eventually grew to softball size. My grandfather slapped some pre-chewed (by him) Red Man on my face, which was fucking nasty. But the tobacco juice drew out a lot of the poison, apparently. It wasn’t long before I was back out in that pasture again, squinting out of my bum eye, and firing crabapples around with abandon.

The odd thing was that just before my cousin’s toss found its mark, sending hornets swarming, I happened to be looking at the nest, and saw a soldier hornet crawling down the side of it. Then the crabapple hit, and I literally watched that particular hornet take off from the side of the hive, spot me, then make a direct line across the pasture for my face and plant his stinger into my cheek. The whole sequence lasted probably two seconds, but to me it unfolded in slow motion, almost.

I won’t forget that day. In a twist on the old WWI adage that you always heard the bullet that would kill you coming, I can say you sometimes see the hornet that’s going to sting you heading your way.

And, I would add, you can always see a certain kind of trouble coming, from way, way off, just like that hornet . . . you can always see coming the darkness that is going to do you in. I indentify so much with that wolf crouching outside Roy O.’s door in my dream, the one with the savant-like ability too see into the distant past; to see, from somewhere like here, straight back down the time tunnel to his million year old great-great-grandfather. I think part of the reason is because I, too, have stared down that tunnel. Not back a million years, maybe; but at least as far back as 1899 or so, to the hardscrabble coal mines and oil fields and company towns of extreme north-central West Virginia. In the front room of a damp, cold company house in late January, 60+ years before I was born, my fate was essentially sealed.

My paternal grandfather, my father’s father, was born on that day in that place, and from the moment of his first breath he had the hellhounds on his trail. I could see the shadow lurking over my infant grandfather, through the time tunnel, from my vantage point here and now. I could see it attaching itself to him, knowing that what it was really doing was setting out to get me in the end, three generations before I was even born.

The demons which hounded my grandfather drove him to an early death. He had started a career and family, but his wife abandoned them all a few years later, I never learned exactly why. The shadow had clearly descended upon him by then. The night he died, two years later in a house fire he started by passing out in bed with a cigarette, his oldest son ran into the bedroom to try and get his father out. But he could not, and had to flee to save his own skin. He watched his father burned to a crisp in the subsequent conflagration, all because he (the boy) was not strong enough to save the day. A few years prior, he had come home from elementary school one day, to find his mother in flagrante delicto, you might say, with a neighbor from down the street. He hadn’t been able to do anything to fix that, either. She left forever two days later.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

That boy grew up to be a father himself. As a child, in a hot, smoky bedroom with the flames closing in on him . . . in a suburban living room on a bright spring afternoon, he had seen that already he was doomed. He eventually passed on some of the existential blackness in his soul, onto someone he dearly loved, who was too young and naïve to know what was happening, to see whose instructions were being carried out, to defend himself from it. This recipient tried to deal with the darkness he inherited the best way he knew how. He tried to kill the demons outright for awhile, with various killing agents, but that did not work. He tried to think his way around them, to ignore them, to sic Jesus on them. None of that ultimately worked, either. I think he finally realized it was best just to go the way of his friend and mentor, a man called Jim Duncan. Duncan, you’ll remember, was the wraith-like apparition/former U.S. Marshal who materialized out of the heat and dust of some coastal plain one day and rode into the town of Lago, and then systematically exacted from it the most brutal, soul-cleansing revenge imaginable. At one point during the biblical mayhem he induced, Duncan and a midget sat in a tavern, drinking whiskey shots and contemplating plans to ambush and slaughter some people they wanted dead. The midget turned to Duncan and said, “What happens after?”
“Hmmm?”
“What do we do, once it is over?”
“You live with it.”

The demon-haunted boy who had turned into a demon-haunted man looked down a dark tunnel like the one the wolf looked through. Like the one he had seen his grandfather through . . . the innocent baby’s beginning and the drunk man’s end. But this time, instead of looking backward in time, he looked forward. He wanted to see if there was a light at the end of that tunnel for him; which of course would mean he was about to be run over by a train.

**********

Astros sweep the Brewers, 3-0, vaulting themselves into third place.

THE WEATHER

**********

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 5

July 16-July 18, 2010

Astros (36-53) vs. Pirates (30-58)

PNC Park
115 Federal Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15212

**********

I can hear chants and incantations
And some guy is mentioning me in his prayers
Well, I don’t know what it is
But there’s definitely something going on upstairs

IS THAT A REAL PONCHO? OR IS THAT A SEARS PONCHO? Going into/coming out of the All Star break, the Astros look to be in a lot better shape than they were about a month-and-a-half ago. Oh, they are still not very good, and they are going nowhere with regard to the standings; but they are now solidly mediocre, which I will take over ‘fucking awful’ just about any day. The insertion of Chris Johnson and Jason Castro into the lineup has seemed to rev things up a bit. . . oh, alright, the offense is still woeful sucks. They have been getting some really good pitching out of the starters, though, and that has kept them from sliding all the way down the slippery slope, so far. I no longer think they’ll lose 115 games this season, or even 100.

Lately I’ve been mentally comparing this season to 2000, rightly or wrongly. One of the main differences is that prior to this season, most anyone with any sense knew the team was going to be bad, if not this bad. I don’t think very many fans at all saw 2000 coming. I know I didn’t. But I’ll say this – if suffering through a crappy season is the only option, let it be with a team with a crippled offense and decent pitching, like this year; rather than a decent offense and zero pitching. I couldn’t watch many of the high scoring borefests in 2000 for very long, but a lot of the games this season, especially lately, have been interesting and even gripping.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Friday July 16, 2010
Game Time: 6:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Pirates Beach Towel, sponsored by Fed Ex Ground. It’ll come in handy for Pirate fans headed for the Pittsburgh beaches this summer.
Matchup: Houston – Brett Myers (6-6, 3.41) Myers has been solid all season, and lately he has even got better. He has pitched at least six innings in all 18 of his starts so far. That is called taking care of business. You’ve got to pick up every stitch, you know? ‘Cause the rabbit’s running in the ditch. And beatniks are out to make it rich.
Pittsburgh – Zach Duke (3-8, 5.49) Zach Duke was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the third of seven children. Duke claims not to have any horrible memories of his home life; although his family was of working class background, he remembered always having shelter and other resources. The community considered his family to be a respectable, with well-behaved children. Duke’s father was by all accounts a mild-mannered man; he was a carpenter who was often unemployed due to rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. During these periods, Duke’s mother supplemented the family income by working as a waitress.

Saturday July 17, 2010
Game Time: 6:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: An Italian Celebration. There are a lot of Italians in the Pittsburgh area; along with every other kind of ethnic group you could think of. I’ve been to Italian celebrations – my wife is Sicilian, which is the same thing, sort of – and all I can say is bring a lot of beer, and I hope you like spirited conversation. And good food. And a lot of guys in pin-striped suits, standing around and mumbling to each other.
Matchup: Houston – Bud Norris (2-6, 5.97) Norris sometimes looks like he might get it together and become a decent middle of the rotation starter. This is usually when he starts against the Co-ardinals. Other times he looks helpless helpless helpless helpless. This is in his starts against everybody else. He should probably stop while he can. Get some fried eggs and country ham. Find somewhere where they don’t care who he am.
Pittsburgh – Ross Ohlendorf (1-7, 4.22) Ross Ohlendorf was born in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia, the youngest of nine children. His mother was an alcoholic prostitute. His father was an alcoholic and former railroad employee who had lost his legs after being hit by a freight train. He would usually come home inebriated, and would suffer from his wife’s wrath as often as his sons. Ohlendorf claimed that he and his brother were regularly beaten by their mother, often for no reason. He once spent three days in a coma after his mother struck him with a wooden plank, and on many occasions he was forced by his mother to watch her having sex with strange men. He also claimed that his mother would dress him in girls’ clothing. His sister supports this story, and she claims that she once had two pictures of Ohlendorf as a toddler dressed in girls’ clothes. Ohlendorf described an incident when he was given a mule as a gift by his uncle, only to see his mother shoot and kill it. He also claimed that, at the age of eight, he was given a teddy bear by one of his teachers, and was then beaten by his mother for accepting charity.

Sunday July 18, 2010
Game Time: 12:35 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Kids’ Paddle Ball Set, sponsored by Huggies – the disposable diaper mega-conglomerate – and Giant Eagle, a regional chain of grocery stores. Brilliant idea, just brilliant. We are talking a Pirates-themed paddle, with a rubber ball attached to it by a long straight rubber band. You remember playing with a paddle ball setup as a kid, yes? I am glad I won’t be in the PNC stands for this. Paddle noises in your ear, rubber balls in your beer.
Matchup: Houston – Roy Oswalt (6-10, 3.08) RoyO is pitching like he is 22, instead of 32. He says he
feels better now than he ever has. Last time out, he tossed a one-hitter at these same Pirates. They
must look like easy pickings to him. Roy’s slim and they’re weak, they got the teeth of the hydra upon
them. Roy’s pitching like an untamed youth – that’s the truth – with a cloak full of eagles.
Pittsburgh – Paul Maholm (5-7, 4.37) Paul Maholm was born in Australia. His father was an American naval officer and his mother an Australian. He almost died at birth, but recovered; only to almost drown in a swimming pool at age two. In his teens, he pled guilty to a charge related to a gang-rape at a beach in Sydney. He was put on probation. During this time he received electroshock therapy. There is some evidence to suggest that this course of treatment only exacerbated Maholm’s violent sexual tendencies. It is known that he had virtually memorized the text of the 1963 novel The Collector by John Fowles, in which a man keeps a woman in his basement against her will until she dies. A copy of the novel can always be found on Maholm’s person, no matter where he is or what he is doing. Maholm got married, but his wife left after only a week. He then emigrated to the United States. He lived in Boynton Beach, Florida, in a mansion on Mission Hill Rd., and made a small fortune in real estate while developing an interest in photography. Over the next few years, he was in and out of court facing various charges related to sexual misconduct. He eventually raped a young woman he had lured into his truck on the pretense of photographing her for a modeling contract. This would become part of his modus operandi during his later rape and murder sprees. Despite several convictions, Maholm has never been jailed for any crime.

**********

All the bush league batters
Are left to die on the diamond
While in the stands, the home crowd scatters
For the turnstiles

THE TRAVELING BASE HIT SHOW. By far the most noteworthy thing to happen to the Astros lately is the hiring of franchise icon Jeff Bagwell to be the team’s batting (or hitting – which is it?) coach, to replace Sean Berry. Opinion on this move runs from, it was a cynical PR move spurred on by the business side of the Astros operation, to the Astros will now start hitting on a prodigious scale, with Bagwell instructing them. Personally, I don’t know which. I have never been real clear on what a hitting coach actually does, or to what degree highly paid major league hitters listen to position coaches at all. One thing I do know – the scribes and talk show yahoos wondering how Bags is going to teach hitting while simultaneously dissuading any pupil from adopting his unusual style and stance from his playing days don’t know much about hitting. No matter what you look like or where you are at the start, the basics of the swing are the same for everyone – try to pick up the ball out of the pitcher’s hand, don’t start your swing too early, keep your weight back as long as possible, keep your swing as level as you can through the hitting zone, etc., etc. Jeff Bagwell knows all this stuff like Einstein knew physics. The trick, as it always is in teaching, is to get what one knows across to one’s students so that they know it as well as you do, and can use it.

Probably Bagwell’s greatest asset will be that he is Jeff Bagwell. I think players will listen to him just because of that. I know I would.

There has been speculation as to why Bagwell took the Astros job at all. He doesn’t need it – he is set for life financially, from his high-paid playing days; and pretty much all he can do in this new position is fail. If he is successful, in the sense that the team’s hitting noticeably improves under his tutelage, people will say, “Of course, it’s Jeff Bagwell.  It is easy for him” If it doesn’t improve, he will be blamed unmercilessly.

Bagwell himself said that he’d been hanging out with his wife and kids since he retired, and had done a lot of fishing and played a lot of golf, and that he was tired of it. He wanted to do something constructive. In addition, people close to him were urging him to “do something with (his) life.” He said that when he decided to do so, and started thinking about possible jobs, he realized the only thing he really knew well was baseball. Which makes sense. It would seem like a waste to have someone with Bagwell’s baseball knowledge and skills selling insurance or cars or real estate.

True cynics doubt Bagwell’s explanations – there has been talk, perhaps sarcastic, that he really wanted to get back out on the road to take advantage of some of the other perks that go with being a well-known professional athlete, or a recently retired one. I wouldn’t know, and it isn’t my business. I do think I can understand the thinking behind the reasoning Bags is putting out there, though. He is in his 40s now.  That is an age where a lot of men look up from whatever it is they have been doing for twenty years, and ask themselves, Is this it? Is this all I am to be remembered for, if I am to be remembered at all? As a guy who sure could keep a balance sheet balanced? Who could win lawsuits? Sell a lot of cars? Hit a baseball a long fucking way? Most guys end up saying, “Yeah, I can live with that” and go on doing what they were doing; some tell themselves they’ll think about it again in another ten years. And some, like Bagwell, decide to do something different.

Being a major league hitting coach isn’t the noblest thing anyone ever did. In the end, though, it is really just teaching, basically. And anyone who has ever taught can tell you, putting aside all the ancillary bullshit that goes with the job, teaching – passing along one’s knowledge to others – has rewards that are hard to articulate, almost impossible to properly compensate, yet are very real, and compelling.

Bagwell said his wife was on his ass to get out and do something, too. That says a lot to me. I am sure she knows he’ll be gone fairly often, out on the road without her and their children. Yet she urged him to do it. Maybe some of it was he was getting on her nerves, but I imagine some of it may have also been because she realized it would be best for him, in the long run. As far as I know, Bagwell didn’t grow up in a compound on Cape Cod somewhere. He’s from the middle class, and was likely imbued with middle class values growing up. Yes, he was in possession of a rare talent that made him rich at a young age, and able to live like some of the privileged classes do; and he did for awhile. But my guess is that at some point he began to feel a little worthless, like he wasn’t pulling his weight, in an existential sense, or really making any contribution to his society. That is middle class thinking, all the way. He wasn’t going to be happy with himself until he could balance the leisure available to him with some work, a real job. Maybe his wife realized that even before he did, and began urging him to think about doing something.

Or maybe she is just a nag, and was nagging the shit out of him to get out of the house. I don’t know, but I’d like to think not. I guess I am just too sentimental about marriage, but my inclination is to think Ms. Bags did what she did because she is on her husband’s side, all the way. Anyone who has been married for any length of time knows a lot of the shit you thought was important to a marriage at the beginning isn’t, really. But one thing that is important is that you and your spouse, through disagreements and arguments and whatever else, always are on the same side, never on opposite sides. You always stand up for your wife or husband, whether you think he/she is right or not. You always do things with at least 50% of your thoughts concerned with how whatever you do will affect your better half. It is not selflessness, exactly. Supporting your spouse will benefit him or her, but it will also bring some very nice rewards back to you. Everything is better, together. One plus one equals one. Be on my side, I’ll be on your side, baby. That’s what the man said. Of course, he said it right before he shot his baby, down by a watercourse of some sort.

But you get the idea.

**********

INJURIES

Houston
•Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff and labrum. Basically, doctors had to scrape and remove all the residual Cooper from Arias’shoulder joint, then completely re-attach the right arm to his body. They call this procedure Tommy John Rick Allen surgery.
•Geoff Blum (3B-SS, ex-Mgr.) – On the 15-day DL, he had surgery to remove loose bodies from his elbow. Loose bodies, yes. “Honey, what’s wrong with you this morning?” “I got loose bodies.” Doctors call this procedure Tommy John Fantasy Cabaret surgery.
•Jeff Fulchino (RHP) – Went on the 15-day DL with tendinitis in his elbow. I don’t know where the term “tendinitis” came from, or what it means, exactly; or what whatever it is used to be called before they started calling it tendinitis. Probably part of the all-encompassing Wrench™ family of syndromes and maladies, i. e., Fulchino is on the DL with a wrenched elbow.
•Tommy Manzella (SS) – Went on the 15-day DL with batting average anemia. He underwent OBP implant surgery at the Free Clinic over on Peese. Doctors call this procedure Tommy John The Three-Percenter Solution.
•Felipe Paulino (RHP) – Went on the 15-day DL, with shoulder tendinitis. He too may need a Cooper scrape procedure (see Alberto Arias.) Aye-yi-yi. That fucking tendinitis again. I think Paulino’s affliction is related more to the kitchen appliance group off illnesses than the Wrench™ family of illnesses. In other words, Paulino is on the DL because he’s all stove up.

Pittsburgh
•Several Guys – None of whom you’ve heard of. Or give a fuck about what is wrong with them. Well, you know what? What is wrong with you? Have you lost your sense of decency? Your humanity? Where THE FUCK do you get off not caring passionately about a bunch of injured, no-name Pirates? Heartless motherfuckers.

**********

Astros sweep the Pirates, 3-0.

THE WEATHER

**********

If I could choose
I’d calm this dawn
But the storm is me
Insensible and free

Now that you know
I’ve come here to go
You’re suddenly sad
You’ve been mine

". . . the filtered sunlight coming in and glinting off of the dark, chiseled visage of his hirsute naked chest. . . "

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 4

June 22-June 24, 2010

Giants (38-30) vs. Astros (26-44)

Minute Maid Park
501 Crawford Street
Houston, TX 77002

**********

After sweeping the Nacionalés and winning 2 of 3 at home over the FTCubs to kick off June, our Astros went out on the road. “Uh-oh,” some of us may have been thinking, as the not-so- mighty ‘Stros rolled into Denver to play the Rockies, a team that has seemingly always given them trouble. But they took three-of-four at Coors. Wow. Then, just about the time my mental turntable plopped the stylus down on Buffalo Springfield’s excellent debut LP (“Something’s happening here. . .” ), our boys sashayed into Gotham City and got fucking stomped.

No great shame in that, really; the Yankees are loaded this year, as usual. Sometimes watching the games felt like a spring exhibition game where a college team plays the pros, though. The Astros got swept and run out of town by the Yank-mes, but this is a little bit different version of the Bayou Spacemen than what we saw earlier this season. OK, not all that different, but a team now infused with enough resolve, I thought, that they might pick themselves up after the dusting in the Bronx and keep on playing some half-ass respectable baseball. So they went to KC and split the first two games with the Royals; and were well on their way to winning the third match when the lowly Royals rose up and scored five runs in their last two at-bats to secure a come-from-behind victory. No huge surprise there; but one felt sure, watching the reaction of the Astros players as that game got away from them, that the disheartening loss might start the Houston team on another long tailspin.

So they came home and got swept by the fucking Rangers who, I’m sorry, looked infinitely better and more polished than the hometown nine this past weekend. That makes the Astros record 1-8 since they left Colorado; and now here come the Giants, who have been playing medium-well of late, and have had two off days sandwiched around their just previous series in Toronto. So they can do pretty much whatever they want with their rotation. It looks like they decided to load the 12-gauge up with goose shot, or whatever caliber it is one uses to shoot fish in a barrel, as the Astros will be facing this series, in order, Tim Lincecum, Barry Zito, and (probably) Matt Cain. I am tired of being negative about it all, but the truth is, it is hard to see how the woebegone ‘Stros have much of a chance in this series.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Tuesday June 22, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Double Play Tuesday, sponsored by Powerade. Too complicated to explain, it is not worth your trouble, take my word for it.
Matchup: San Francisco – Tim Lincecum (7-2, 3.11) Lincecum has been terrific this season, but not super-terrific, which has some SF fans worried. It is fair to say he is walking more guys than usual, but that is about it. Anything beyond that is just nit-picking.
Houston – Roy Oswalt (5-8, 3.12) Oswalt keeps pitching great. It figures he’ll be up against possibly the best pitcher in the league for this one. He might well pitch another gem, and might earn himself another loss for his trouble, too.

Wednesday June 23, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None.
Matchup: San Francisco – Barry Zito (7-3, 3.13) Wow. More good pitching. Zito has been right there with Lincecum this season, giving the Giants a righty-lefty 1-2 punch in the rotation most other teams only dream about. Or have nightmares about.
Houston – Brett Myers (4-5, 3.34) I like the way Meyers has just gone out and done his job this year, without much fanfare or hubbub. He hasn’t been much luckier than Oswalt with the run support, but if he has misgivings about it, he’s kept it to himself.

Thursday June 24, 2010
Game Time: 1:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Nine Inning Lunch Break, sponsored by O’Reilly Auto Parts. For $40 you get a field box seat, and vouchers for $20 worth of MMPUS food; which translates roughly to a 3-4 soggy nachos, and a 10 oz. bottle of water.
Matchup: San Francisco – To Be Announced (0-0, 0.00) Thursday afternoon get-away game, I guess for the Giants benefit, ‘cause the Astros are just headed up the road to the Metrosexualplex after this one. Yep.
Houston – Wandy Rodriguez (3-10, 6.09) Wandy is well on his way to becoming Houston’s first ever 20-game loser. Whether he gets the chance to do so remains to be seen, but if he does. . . Ever heard the old baseball adage that a guy has to be a pretty good pitcher to lose 20 games? Well, not necessarily.

**********

There have been times when I’ve thought of you
When an old letter or picture brought you back into view
And I’ll recall what has passed and the things I’ve missed
After that trip to the beach
On your front porch, our first kiss

We would get messed up with all the girls and boys
All in love with each other and our drugs of choice
And I remember all those fucked-up times
Just like the books we learned
And all the words that rhymed

And Bootzilla was my main, main man
Just a bad-ass bass player in a funkadelic band
And on nights that were steamy and hot
I would take you out dancing
‘Til we got our rocks off

And I knew
Just looking at you
I knew that our dreams would all come true
And on top of it all
I’ve got the blues for Bootzilla, too

I can remember those crazy nights
When I would pick you up and you’d look just right
We’d smoke a joint and go see our latest favorite band
All obsessed with each other
Couldn’t see it getting out of hand

In restaurants full of losers and cops
We would do cocaine right off the table tops
We were high and wild and without concern
‘Cos we knew where to score
While all the cops got burned

There are some ghosts out there that still haunt me
And there are still demons out there that taunt me
Just like a bass line thumping through the latest hit song
I could feel it in my bones
But my mind was all wrong

But I knew
Just looking at you
I knew that our dreams would all come true
And on top of it all
I’ve got the blues for Bootzilla, too

You know, funk music just died, I guess
Like rock and roll and all the rest
Maybe it was killed by something like rap
Or go-go or hip-hop
Or something like that

And then you just softly slipped away
I turned around and you were gone as fast as night turns to day
Into that sea of sorrows you took our life raft
While I drown in a puddle
And the fat man laughs

It’s on nights like tonight that I’m thinking that
I wish that the earth was really flat
I’d write all the notes I could send
Go out and buy a speedboat
And blast right off the end

Out into the blue
Just thinking of you
I knew that our dreams would all come true
And on top of it all
I’ve got the blues for Bootzilla, too

**********

INJURIES

San Francisco
•Emmanuel Burriss (2B) – His left foot is broke and he’s out indefinitely
•Mark DeRosa (Ivy League INF) – Left wrist injury, may opt for surgery; out indefinitely
•Todd Wellemeyer (RHP) – Strained quadriceps; out indefinitely (the Giants medical staff is not real big on offering predictions for the future)

Houston
• Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after right rotator cuff surgery
• Bud Norris (RHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 28 with a bursitis and elbow tendinitis and a seriousy fucked-up ERA; since then he has been rehabbing in the minors – he makes his last rehab start on the first day of this series – but really, who cares? Is there anyone anxiously awaiting the return of another ho-hum starter with a 6+ ERA? It would be like waiting for the latest Journey or Foreigner LP to come out. The world is going to keep on spinning 1,000 miles per hour whether the album comes out or not, and most people won’t give a fuck, either way. It literally makes no difference.
• Jeff Fulchino (RHP) – Day-to-day. . . guess what? We’re all day-to-day. Fulchino has “elbow issues”, and “may get a cortisone shot.”
• Chris Sampson (RHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL biceps tendinitis, his return is imminent.

**********

“In the Bible Cain slew Abel
And east of Eden he was cast
You’re born into this life paying
For the sins of somebody else’s past”

 
With Father’s Day just past, there has been renewed emphasis on the subject of the special role baseball plays in the relationship between a boy and his dad. MLB’s recent ads have been slanted this way, for sure. They know a winning concept when they see it. For who can deny that baseball is often the secret formula that unlocks the doors existing between a man and his son, between a boy and his progenitor?

People tend to get overly sentimental about this. The movie Field Of Dreams – which was openly slanted toward sentiment, unlike the novel it is based on – is a good example of this. The novel, Shoeless Joe, was terrific; but almost entirely different in basic ways from the resulting movie, which I found pleasant, but not great. However, Field Of Dreams is useful in pointing out how some men feel about baseball, and their dads. Not me, but. . .

A son’s relationship with his father can be complicated, and sometimes not so pleasant, especially during adolescence and young adulthood. It doesn’t have to be, but that was my experience. My father was funny and easy-going on the surface, but was distant and hard to know when you got him up close. Also, he was the disciplinarian at home, even though he really wasn’t suited for the role. But he assumed it by necessity, and therefore represented repression to a son who was contrary by nature and at the time was trying to break free and establish his own identity. Further complications arose from big expectations projected onto me by him. But I am getting off the subject here. Simply put, a father-son relationship does not have to be overtly ambivalent, but sometimes it is.

The thing about baseball is, it can be a neutral ground in this conflict. A love for the game, passed on by a father to his son and nurtured by a mutual interest, can be a place of respite in an otherwise turbulent relationship at the time, and/or a way to resolve old conflicts later on, when both the son and his dad are presumably more mature and can look at their interactions with a greater sense of equanimity. Even if the father-son dynamic is not openly difficult, there is almost always some distance left between the two, I am not sure why. Baseball can be a way to bridge that distance, at least for a little while.

My relationship with my own sons is far from perfect, but not nearly as crazy as mine was with my dad, for many reasons. Our baseball relationship has been steady but not so intense, partly because our conflicts outside of baseball are not large, and also because I have consciously de-emphasized my own place in my kids’ baseball lives. We go to games and talk about baseball and I have tried to pass on to them the knowledge I have from playing from childhood through high school, but I have rarely formally coached them. This is again in reaction to personal experience, as my own father’s and my relationship, already tenuous in my teenage years, was almost destroyed forever by the two seasons he decided, against my tacit wishes, to be my Senior League coach.

For all the gauzy good feeling about baseball and paternal relationships, I have seen real ugliness in youth baseball. Even as kids, we used to make fun of the minority of the dads who would get all worked up about the games and yell and scream and stuff. Even if they were our own. We used to call them ‘railing dads’ because during games, instead of sitting in the stands with everyone else, they would group along the fence rails behind the first- and third-base lines, and mutter to each other and yell at the kids and coaches and umpires on the field. We thought they were fucking crazy; and we resolved to never be that way ourselves, when we grew up.

I have kept that resolution, though it has cost me. I think I have restrained my natural passion when it comes to my kids’ participation in youth sports, for fear of fucking up their childhoods and becoming a total dickhead, like those railing dads I remember so vividly.

But apparently, not everyone has kept the promises we made, as kids. I have seen a new generation of overbearing fathers at games, hovering over everything like a dark cloud at a picnic. And though I have managed to restrain myself, I have at times felt that ugly, creepy feeling that comes when you realize you are way too wrapped up in a kids game, probably because in some way you are trying to relive your own glory days vicariously through your children; or, even worse, you are depending on your child out there, standing in the outfield watching an airplane fly over instead of the action on the field. . . you are burdening your own sweet child with the task of redressing your failures in baseball, and making up for your own shortcomings at playing a game.

One other thing people tend to do when discussing baseball is over intellectualize it. Like I have been doing here, for practically the entire time. Because for all the heavy theorizing, the real pleasures of baseball are mostly simple and visceral and tactile. Father’s Day afternoon, my youngest son – who gave up organized baseball last season after completing his Little League eligibility, in order to concentrate on the electric guitar (with my blessing) – decided he and I should go to the schoolyard down the street and throw the baseball around. I still enjoy playing catch with him and/or his brother, even though I have a frayed rotator cuff now, and every time I throw the ball it feels like my arm is going along with it.

We gathered up some balls in the garage and our gloves and we walked to the schoolyard and stepped through the hole in the 8 ft. high chain-link fence surrounding the campus. My neighbor and I cut that entrance one night a few weeks ago. He wanted to try out an acetylene cutting torch he’d just bought.

Anyway, once my boy and I got to the schoolyard, we stood maybe ten yards apart and started throwing the ball to each other, in a smooth, easy motion. Once we got warm, and started throwing with some velocity, we heard the familiar sound of the ball popping the leather of our gloves. I imagined that, from a distance, it appeared we were engaging in a sort of reciprocal dance, a basic instinct to throw, and then catch. . . catch, and then throw. Just like it has been done for so many summers, and probably will be for many more.

My boy, who I love with all my heart, probably doesn’t understand me any more than I understood my old man, at least in some ways. But I think he understands how much I enjoy playing catch with him, and he at least gets a sense of the silent information that ball carries back and forth as we lob it to each other. And the best part about it is that by understanding the weight of meaning involved in the simple act of tossing a baseball back and forth, mostly tacitly, with the man who started the whole process that brought him into this world, he has taught me what it means. I didn’t know, beforehand. The son is the father to the man, as they say. I am so grateful to know it now; I only wish I had 35 years ago. I just assumed my dad didn’t want anything to do with me that required effort on his part, physical or emotional, so I never fucking asked him if he wanted to go play catch in the schoolyard, on Father’s Day or any other fucking day. If I had, maybe he would have said, “Okay.” And the world would have been changed in some fundamental way.

But that did not happen, and it is much too late for regrets. I prefer to dwell on the tableu now in front of us. Just a boy and his dad, standing out in the late afternoon sun on the yellow-green grass of a schoolyard, tossing a ball back and forth and occasionally talking, and laughing. There is an easiness between them that cannot be faked, and cannot be denied. They are sharing the simple joy of throw-and-catch, of mindless banter, and of spending some time together, however brief, out in the sweet sunshine.

**********

Astros get swept by the Giants, 0-3.

THE WEATHER

**********

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 3

May 31-June 3, 2010

Nationals (25-26) vs. Astros (17-33)

Minute Maid Park
501 Crawford Street
Houston, TX 77002

**********

MEMORIAL DAY MUSINGS. The 2010 Memorial Day celebration features an afternoon series-opener between the young-ish and ascending Washington Nationals, and your old-ish and circling-the-drain Houston Astros. Contain yourselves, people. However, this series is less meaningless that it normally would be, mostly because of the Nats, née Senators, who are reportedly emerging as a truly interesting team to watch.

Personally, I am glad the Nationals are coming to town, as I haven’t seen them yet this year, and I want to know what all the hoo-ha (relatively speaking) is about. Washington has cobbled together a collection of talented vagabonds (Adam Dunn), once-greats (Pudge Rodriguez – currently on the DL – and Livan Hernandez), useful plodders (Josh Willingham), emerging stars (Ryan Zimmerman), and exciting newcomers (Nyjer Morgan and Stephen Strasburg, among others) into a competitive and interesting team. (OK, I jumped the gun on Strasburg, but he is the first thing everyone brings up when the subject is the Washington Nationals. . . Strasburg is the pitching wunderkind currently shutting down minor league offenses on his way to an almost sure call-up later this season. . . His minor league record in his debut season, so far: 6-1, 0.99 ERA, 22 hits and 54 strikeouts in 45+ innings through 9 starts in AA and AAA. . . There was some speculation Strasburg might get his first major league start against the Astros in this series, but insider wisdom now has his debut pushed back to the June 8-10 set vs. the Pirates. . . The Astros, or the Pirates, hmmm. . . The Nationals apparently want to optimize the youngster’s chances at initial success.) One of the joys of being a baseball fan generally is seeing each season which team or teams one totally did not expect to do anything emerge as something other than a running joke or a perpetual also-ran. This season, for me, it’s the Nationals. Maybe one season, in the distant future, it’ll be the Astros.

Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this Monday’s game whilst meanwhile in the midst of some serious gluttony, perverse behavior, no doubt excessive drunkenness, and (hopefully) some stimulating voyeurism. In other words, I’ll try and keep track of the Astros game while also participating enthusiastically in my neighborhood’s annual Memorial Day block party.

This friendly holiday get-together, which started off 18 years ago as six young families on my street meeting in someone’s backyard to barbecue, drink, and shoot fireworks, has by now grown to include three contiguous city blocks, with a concomitant increase and variation in the shenanigans involved when a whole lot of ‘grown-up’ friends get together and get sloppy drunk and drop some of their inhibitions. At our confab a few years back, as reported here, my neighbor’s usually shy and demure wife got tanked up on tequila, and/or repressed something-or-other, and suddenly jumped up in front of 30 or so of us and ripped off her shirt, revealing some really decent (as I recall) All-American middle-aged suburban housewife breastesses. Last year, I think it was, another couple we know got into a loud, beer-fueled, mid-party public argument, which culminated with the wife threatening to engage in a mega-dalliance that evening with whichever neighborhood guy or guys would step up to the plate, so to speak; all in the name of a sort of revenge-fuck scenario. I, of course, was superficially appalled at this loss of public decorum – I was standing right next to my wife and a couple of her friends when this scene broke out – and I never found out for sure, a.) if she was serious, and b.) if so, who took her up on her threat/promise/offer. Oh, I heard rumors afterward, but I don’t truck in salient gossip and rumors :sniff:  Frankly, I doubt anything actually came of it. Usually these drunken encounters are laughed off for the next few days, and forgot (mostly) within a week or so. Until the next party, that is.

But, anyway, amidst all this Peyton Place-ish fun, I’ll be keeping an eye on the Astros game. Partly to see the Nationals for myself, yes. But also because, as tempting as it is, I do not want to semi-ignore the 2010 Astros and let this season get by me. As one gets older, one realizes how quickly time can slip by, and how the people or things one really loves can get away, especially if they are ignored or taken for granted. As the lady once said, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. I don’t want that to happen to me, not this year or any year, not with the Astros. And anyway, a team as bad as this version of the ‘Stros can be as interesting to watch as a successful outfit, if you look at it in a certain way. Somewhere down the line, three or five or seven years from now, when our team is back in the thick of things, we’ll perhaps be able to look back at 2010 and say, there is where the turnaround began. That is when the team bottomed out and finally started to do the things it took to get them back among the elite. I want to be able to clearly remember these bad times, which will make the good times even sweeter, when they come. It is not the same if I have to look it up on Baseball Reference or somewhere, because I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Monday May 31, 2010
Game Time: 1:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Nine Inning Lunch Break, sponsored by O’Reilly Auto Parts. For $40 you get a field box seat, and vouchers for $20 worth of MMPUS food; which translates roughly to a 6-inch overcooked hot dog, and a 10 oz. bottle of water.
Matchup: Washington – Luis Atilano (4-1, 4.82) Atilano is a kind of scatter-armed right-hander who is usually gone by the middle innings because of a high pitch count. He did beat Tim Lincecum in his last start – well, he left after 5 1/3 innings on a day Lincecum wasn’t in top form, and his bullpen held the lead for him. 2010 Run Support: 4.86 per start.
Houston – Roy Oswalt (3-6, 2.35) Expect Oswalt to pitch anywhere from quite well to exellent, and to either get a no-decision, or pick up his seventh loss. 2010 Run Support: 2.30 per start.

Tuesday June 1, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Double Play Tuesday, sponsored by Powerade. Too complicated to explain, it is not worth your trouble, take my word for it.
Matchup: Washington – Craig Stammen (1-2, 5.60) Stammen is the leading candidate for demotion from the rotation when Stephen Strasburg gets called up. He did pitch well in his most recent start, versus the Giants. 2010 Run Support: 4.30 per start.
Houston – Brett Myers (3-3, 3.22) Meyers continues to be solid this year, and while he has been treated more kindly by factors out of his control than Oswalt has this season, he probably deserves a better W-L record than he has. That’s life, I guess. 2010 Run Support: 4.20 per start.

Wednesday June 2, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None
Matchup: Washington – John Lannan (2-2, 5.01) Lannan is one of those guys who has looked like he is about to put it all together and become a top notch starting pitcher for awhile now. He is still only 25. His problems to date have mostly centered around arm injuries, but that seems to be behind the lefty now. He has pitched really well in his last four starts, and appears to be ascendant. 2010 Run Support: 4.70 per start.
Houston – Wandy Rodriguez (2-7, 5.37) Among all the things that have gone wrong for the Astros in 2010, the decline and fall of Wandy is one of the more troubling. He looks less like the composed and precise Wandy of the past few seasons and more like the confused and disorganized Wandy of earlier years more and more with each start. He got hammered last time out in Cincy, getting knocked out early and pushing the already at-the-breaking-point bullpen closer to the, well, to the breaking point. 2010 Run Support: 3.10 per start.

Thursday June 3, 2010
Game Time: 1:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Nine Inning Lunch Break again, brought back by popular demand indifference. Whoo-ha!
Matchup: Washington – Walter “The Big Train” Johnson (417-279, 2.17) The Nationals rotation is all fucked up at this point, so manager Jim Riggleman has Johnson pitching in a pinch. Even though The Big Train has been dead now for 65 years, Riggs says he still has something left on his fastball, and most observers give the admittedly long-moldering Johnson a better than even chance of shutting down the Astros offense.
Houston – Mark “The Thermonuclear Hothead” Lemongello (21-29, 3.65) After having witnessed Brian Moehler’s recent ‘emergency start’ in lieu of Bud Norris, it looks like Astros manager Brad Mills will give the nod to Lemongello to take the ball for this one. The erratic and irrational Lemongello, who tore his Astros uni to shreds after one bad start, and bit his own shoulder after another, will need a work-release assignment from whichever prison he is likely a resident of these days to be able to pitch in the game. I always thought Lemongello should’ve done something creative with his last name, like fellow Jersey-ite John Bongiovi. Le Mon Jello, yeah, that’s it, sounds kinda French.

**********

FORTUNATE SON. I walked out of my front door this morning, with the intention of finding a suitable place in my front yard to plant my American flag.

My flag isn’t big or fancy or anything – three feet by five feet, I think, and affixed to a homemade pully system I welded to an eight foot, 2” metal pipe several years ago. At the time I wanted to show my boys, who were little then, how to properly raise and lower a flag. I wasn’t trying to overtly force reverence for the flag or patriotism on them. That would have been pointless, as it always is. I just thought it might have been useful to them in the future to know flag-raising and -lowering decorum. Which, I guess it was, I don’t really know. At any rate, that flag evolved into the one I reflexively jam into the front yard for the “big” holidays – Memorial Day, 4th of July, Veteran’s Day, etc. I don’t even know for sure why I do this, really.

I have never been a flag-waver, and to be honest, I am always a bit uncomfortable around people who are. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not for me. I do not think one has to be overt about it to be deeply patriotic. Just because I tune out Kate Smith and her successors at the ballpark every time that 100-year-old song that means almost nothing to anyone is played does not mean I do not have deep feelings about the country and the men who have served it, and/or deep misgivings about 9-11, the immediate aftermath of which is when the God Bless America tradition at the ballpark started, I believe. Love the country, HATE the song.

I got into a violent argument once about the Lee Greenwood song, God Bless The USA. It is, I argued, a flagrant and smarmier rip-off of the already smarmy God Bless America, written and sung by a talentless hack; the lyrics are actually negative and defeatist (“at least I know I’m free” At least?); all it really adds up to is Lee Greenwood’s bank account gets fatter (through royalties) every time there is a national tragedy and hundreds of citizens are killed and that piece of shit song gets dragged out, again. I got punched right in the chest for my trouble on that one.

I don’t know why I react so negatively to coercive patriotism/nationalism. I do know I wasn’t taught to be that way. My parents weren’t subversives at all; in fact my maternal grandfather, my mother’s father, was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and one of the most overtly patriotic people I’ve ever met. At any rate, the reaction I have isn’t even a thinking process; it is visceral and basic, like being repulsed by spiders, or a bad odor.

To be honest, I think I just react negatively to people wanting to decide for me what I must believe in, or how I should feel, to qualify for whatever their concept of what a ‘real American’ is. But, I don’t mean to make too big a deal of this, it is nothing most of the time. I don’t hold my ears or make faces whenever God Bless America is cued up at a ballgame, I just tune it out. As long as they leave me alone, I don’t care what anyone else wants to feel about it.

I do put the flag out on Memorial Day, though. Just because I don’t buy into the cookie-cutter definition of what patriotism is does not mean I do not want to honor the guys who died fighting in our wars. I absolutely do; and, interestingly, from some of what I’ve read, a great many of those guys didn’t buy into any pat definition of patriotism, either. Whatever they believed when they enlisted (if they did), many who survived say that when the heat was on, they weren’t thinking about preserving our inalienable rights, or defending big business or the American Way or anything like that. All they were really fighting for was the buddy next to them in the foxhole, or the guys in their unit, whatever. When they were being shot at, history’s big picture meant little to them, and patent bromides about the glory of dying for those back home meant nothing. That stuff was mostly written by guys who never were shot at, anyway; who never saw action at all.

Those guys in the trenches and foxholes and rice paddys, the one’s who did not get to come home, the one’s who we honor on this day – they were likely part of an arbitrarily thrown together group, made up of men from all over, all colors and ethnic backgrounds and beliefs. And whatever their initial misgivings may have been, they put them aside and banded together and fought to the death for each other; and, as a consequence, for us. Which is as it should be, I think. Fuck the phony patriotic bullshit. A bunch of very different people coming together and fighting a common enemy to the death, for our benefit, side by side. . . if that does not epitomize what we believe America is really all about, then what the fuck does, I ask you? I’m planting the flag in my lawn for those guys, all those guys; and despite all the hedonistic dissolution the Memorial Day holiday brings and has come to represent in our culture, I will be thinking of them, and what they did and how they ended up, all the way up to when I drain my last brewski of the day. Thanks to you all, the beer sure is good. You can rest in peace.

That’s just me, showing my patriotism. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it, but I hope all the dead guys understand.

And there’s winners and there’s losers
But it ain’t no big deal
‘Cause the simple man, baby, pays for the thrills, the bills
The pills that kill

**********

INJURIES

Washington
•A whole shitload of guys you’ve never heard of – and who I don’t feel like listing here. The highlights are Pudge Rodriguez (bad back, out until late next week) and Jason Marquis, who has bone chips in his pitching elbow and is awaiting surgery

Houston
• Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after right rotator cuff surgery
• Bud Norris (RHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 28 with a bursitis and elbow tendinitis and a seriousy fucked-up ERA

**********

ALL ALONE IN THE END ZONE. It is easy to bitch and moan about the 2010 Houston Astros – I’ve done so myself, believe it or not, a few times here and there lately. But of course, the better part of me knows that sometimes in life you don’t get exactly what you were hoping for, and sitting around whining about what you did end up with really isn’t a viable option. You just have to go with what you’ve got. Sure, the Astros offense this season resembles a giant slice of Swiss cheese, and the starting rotation looks like the Maginot Line after the Germans and anyone else who wanted to march past/around/through it were done. Too bad, so sad, that is what we have for this season. So we just have to show up with it, every damn day, and hope for the best.

For some reason, thinking about this (and with Craig’s recent excellent recounting of his high school track career in mind, also) I was reminded of something that happened back when I was in high school. After football ended in the fall of my senior year, and before baseball practice started in the spring, all the inactive athletes/baseball players were dumped into what we called “rag PE”, a 4th period gym class which was basically made up of all the kids not participating in any school sport, or ‘extracurricular activity,’ as they called it back then. Some of the kids in the class had some undeveloped talent, but were just not inclined to play organized sports; but by far most were true non-athletes. When the rest of us were put into that class, the coaches pretty much left us to our own devices. I guess they figured, like in a prison, the alpha figures would emerge and run things, and as long as there wasn’t a riot or a lot of illicit homosexual sex, we would mostly be left alone.

Sure enough, right away, the class divided itself into two groups. One, led by one of my best friends, a guy who lived down the street from me named Suarez, went off to an open field behind the auto shop and started playing some game they had made up and that appeared, from a distance, to be a mix of American football, rugby, soccer, and maybe Greco-Roman wrestling. I played with them for a couple of weeks, but I never could figure out the rules. I think they were made up on the fly. It was a cool game and all, but for whatever reason I just couldn’t get into it. Eventually, I drifted over to the other group.

That group had separated into two large teams, maybe 25-30 people on each, evenly mixed with athletes (jocks, in the parlance), and non-athletes (stoners, brains, hoods, straights/narcs, etc.) They played a big touch football game on the practice field next to the boys gym every day. The rules were that no athlete could do anything except stand around on the line and bullshit during the plays. Only the non-athletes were allowed to man the “skill” positions, which in this game meant wide receiver, mainly. However, myself and a pretty good curveball pitcher we called ‘Montrose’ (because he wore a Ronnie Montrose T-shirt every third school day) were designated as QB and nominal leader of each team, the thinking being no play would ever be completed or even be got off if the QBs were stoners, or brains. The challenge for Montrose and I was to see which of us could get the most out of our mostly unskilled and highly disorganized charges, and win the game each day.

It was an all-pass game, three alligator rush, three completes for a first down. On offense, I would stand back in a deep shotgun formation, deploy my twenty or so eligible split ends and flankers, call the signals, and then start scrambling around like hell, because no one ever counted all the way to three alligators. I’d be looking with some expediency for an open guy, any open guy, on my team, who I thought might have an outside chance at catching the ball if I threw it his way.

I don’t know how the kids on my team felt about me or those games, but I had a great time playing with them. Right away I found out that a skinny, long-haired, braces-wearing sophomore stoner named Derek had hands sticky like glue (or maybe THC resin), and would catch just about everything I threw his way. He was a friend of my brother’s, which is the only reason I threw the ball to him in the first place. But when I realized how reliable he was, he became my go-to guy, my clutch receiver, sort of my Fred Biletnikoff, I guess. He rarely let me down. There were a few other kids like that, ones with no discernable athletic tendencies who, when they actually got involved in the game, surprised us all (and maybe themselves) with their latent touch football skillz.

My favorite day of that whole experience, we had played almost to the end of the period and were behind a few points, and I knew we needed a really big play to pull that day’s contest out. I thought about my man Derek, but there were problems with that choice. First of all, he wasn’t real fast, and he wasn’t inclined to run very much anyway (most of his receptions were on three to five yard dump passes I threw to him when I was being chased all over hell and back by, like, twenty defensive linemen.) Plus, even the spastics non-athletes on the opposing team eventually figured out Derek was my favorite receiver, and he was octuple-teamed on many plays. So sending him deep then wasn’t a really good option. I considered my other resources, such as they were, and finally settled on a guy we called Switchblade, a vaguely athletic looking ‘hood’ who was a junior, I think, although he sported a moustache and full beard.

I told Switchblade to line up on the right side and run straight up the field, and I’d hit him. I told the rest of the guys to run around and look for an open spot, in case I had to check down on the play. We all exchanged a fist bump and then broke the huddle and lined up. On the snap I rolled right, and noticed right away the guys on the D-line had made no pretense of counting alligators at all this time, and were coming after me. I looked for Switchblade, but under pressure he’d fucked up his pattern completely, and had run about a 15-yard out, which wouldn’t have done us much good at that point, even if by some miracle I was able to deliver the ball somewhere in his vicinity, and he caught it. I checked for Derek. He’d actually run a fairly deep pattern up the middle, but was heavily covered by seven or eight guys, plus I noticed my counterpart Montrose, playing free safety for his team, had started drifting over in Derek’s direction. Then I saw, all the way across on the left sideline, one of my guys streaking straight up the field, wholly uncovered. It was a kid we called T-Shirt.

In those days, we wore school-issued jockstraps and grey flannel gym shorts to PE. That was it – no shoes, no shirt, nothing else. There was this one kid in the class, though, whose fundamental religious beliefs did not allow him to run around that scantily-clad in public, even if just at PE, so he wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt out there every day. T-Shirt was very pale, about 5′ 4″, and he couldn’t have weighed more than 90 lbs. The whole time I was in that class, I’d never heard the kid say a word, to me or anyone else. He was on my team, but I’d never even thrown him a ball. But I didn’t have a lot of other options right then; I was nearing the right sideline, and the other team’s rushers were closing in. So I checked to see if T-Shirt was looking back my way, which he wasn’t. I let it fly, anyway, right before three or four guys on the other side grabbed me by the stretched-out waistband of my shorts and pulled them (and me) down.

That pass seemed like it went 50 yards in the air, but it was probably more like 25 or 30 (I couldn’t throw a pass 50 yards.) I sat there on the ground with the guys who’d “sacked” me, and watched the rest of the play. As the ball got nearer to T-Shirt, I realized I’d led him pretty well, and if he saw it he’d at least have a shot at catching the perfectly spiraling ball, a very long shot, but. . . At almost the same time, it occurred to me a regulation-size football, coming from that far and high, point-down, might kill him if he didn’t catch it.

I think everyone on the field that day was watching as the ball approached T-Shirt, most of us expecting a negative outcome. T-Shirt finally looked back, at the last minute, and then reached up for the ball on about the five-yard line. The force of it knocked him over, and he tumbled into the end zone. I couldn’t see what happened to the ball from where I was. Then I saw T-Shirt get up slowly, holding the ball under one arm, and smiling big. Everybody on both teams started jumping up and down and running toward him, and some were chanting “T-Shirt, T-Shirt. . . ” He tried to act all nonchalant and all, but no way.

I don’t know what ever happened to T-Shirt, what became of him after high school. Wherever he is, I’ll bet he remembers making that catch. He should, it was one of the best receptions I have ever seen, by anyone, anywhere. I am guessing that day was probably one of T-Shirt’s better ones. I know I still remember it very clearly, because it was definitely one of mine.

You know, man, when I was a young man in high school
You believe it or not?
I wanted to play football for the coach

And all those older guys
They said he was mean and cruel, but you know
I wanted to play football for the coach

They said I was too little and too lightweight to play linebacker
So I’m playing right end
But I wanted to play football for the coach
I had to play football for the coach

Because, you know some day, man
You gotta stand up straight
Unless you’re gonna fall
Then you’re going to die

Astros lose the series, 1-3.

THE WEATHER

**********

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 2

May 14-16, 2010

Astros (13-21) vs. Giants (18-15)

AT & T Park
24 Willie Mays Plaza
San Francisco, CA 94107

**********

The 2010 Astros ended their latest abysmal stretch (1-12 from April 27 to May 9) by sweeping the Cardinals in St. Louis this week, which is pretty funny.  The BFiBs, who’d been cruising along in first place along with their team until the Sad Sacks hit town, are probably now having a little doubt enter the picture.  Wonderful.  Remember, the Astros ended their season-opening 1-8 skid by going to Chicago and taking 2-of-3 from the FTCubbies in front of the home folks.  If this is going to be as bad a season as I supect, beating up on the FTCubs and Co-ardinals semi-regularly is some consolation.  Probably just God’s way of keeping some over-obsessive fans from jumping off the Loop 610 ship channel bridge.

Anyway, God loves me.  I know this, for one thing, because every once in awhile he gets really pissed off at my antics, and starts throwing his weight around in my direction.  If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother, right?  But I’ll get to that.

I know I’ve said it here more than a few times, but the fact the Astros are bad this year does not change my allegiance or how I feel about them.  I’ve said this so much, especially recently, I think maybe the other me has said it here a few times, too.  The other me.  My ghost twin, my spiritual wraith.  The guy who walks around looking like me and sounding like me but isn’t me, exactly.  My doppelgänger, I mean.

I’ve only ever seen my doppelgänger once.  I’ve come across evidence of him many times; people will tell me I did something at a party or in a bar somewhere, and I can’t remember doing it at all, or even being at the party or in the bar they speak of.  Then I’ll remember You Know Who.

My suspicions were confirmed one night when a bunch of us were staying up at our place in Tyler Co., in the Big Thicket.  I decided to walk down and close the front gate for the night, around 9:00 p.m. or so.  The walk to the gate is roughly a quarter mile.  Most of it is through open pasture, but the last 100 yards or so is down a driveway through thick woods that shield our house and outbuildings from vision, and buffer sound from the farm road that runs in front of our place.  A half moon was out, and the night was clear.  I had a flashlight with me, for going through the woods, but my eyes had adjusted and I was walking through the pasture without it.  I kept sensing something was following me or watching me, and I stopped three or four times to watch and listen, but I did not see or hear anything.  I finally decided it was the stopping that was messing things up, so the next time I felt like something was there, I kept walking, but swiveled my head around.

And that’s when I saw myself.  It was me, exactly, walking along beside myself across that pasture, maybe ten feet apart.  There I was.  Wow! Same gait and everything, left hand shoved into the top of the jeans pocket,shoulder-length hair swinging back and forth with each step.  It was uncanny.  I looked myself in the eye, and some sort of silent communication passed between me.  The Germans, who came up with the concept of  it, felt it was extremely bad luck to see one’s doppelgänger, it supposedly foretold much trouble, even death.  But seeing me walking along beside myself that night gave me a strange feeling of comfort.  Of ease.  It was good to know there was another me out there, with another agenda entirely, but with my best interests at heart.  I was thinking about this when I realized the apparition was gone, and so I went on down and closed the gate and then trudged slowly back up to the house.

I should say by way of disclosure I’d been drinking some that day and night, plus one of my acquaintances had just introduced me to the wonderfulness of Seconal.  So there is that.  That stuff didn’t normally make me hallucinate, though, and my vision that night seemed very real.  I laugh out loud at all paranormal jibber-jabber, ancient aliens and shit like that; the existence of my doppelgänger is the one exception.  And my doppelgänger thinks the Astros suck this season, big time.  But he is still an Astros fan, through and through.  He has said as much here, several times.

(excerpted from Me And My Doppelgänger, by F. Bestertester)

We’ve met a lot of great men who weren’t so great
We’ve met modern day saviors who couldn’t even stop the rain
We’ve heard the word of God from a surface-to-air missle
And felt the hand of Allah from a hijacked plane

We’ve seen the fire in the sky in the morning light
We’ve seen the buildings tumble into the maw of the city
And when the dust cleared and there was nothing left
We saw the sun setting down on the horizon so pretty

Me and my doppelgänger, we think alike, you know
Wherever I wander, that’s where he goes
We don’t take no crap, we don’t pay no mind
We just thank sweet Jesus for the sweet sunshine.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Friday May 14, 2010
Game Time: 9:15 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None
Matchup:  Houston – Felipé Paulino (0-5, 4.67)  ‘Bad Luck’ Paulino, although he brings some of it on himself.  The Big Dominican seems close at times to breaking through, but perhaps he never will.
San Francisco – Todd Wellmeyer (1-3, 5.97)  Suck-ass former FTCub.  The polar opposite of Lincecum and Cain.  How the hell is he in this rotation?

Saturday May 15, 2010
Game Time: 3:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FOX
Promotion: None
Matchup:  Houston – Roy Oswalt (2-4, 2.63)  Roy has pitched great this season.  He doesn’t have much to show for it, but then, he’s on a shitty team.
San Francisco – Tim Lincecum (4-0, 1.86)  What can one say?  Steven Strasberg, Schmeven Schmassberg. . . Lincecum is the best pitcher in baseball, until someone comes up and proves otherwise.

Sunday May 16, 2010
Game Time: 3:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Giants Rally Scarf — I don’t know, I thought the days of blankets and parkas at Giants games ended when they moved out of Candlestick all those years ago.  But if you live in S.F., and you want to wear a woolen scarf to a baseball game, who am I to say different?
Matchup:  Houston – Brett Myers (2-2, 3.52)  Myers has been a nice surprise to this point, he has given the Astros some innings and has been reliable.
San Francisco – Barry Zito (5-1, 1.90)  Looks like Zito is all the way back from whatever was afflicting him the last three seasons.  He had a bit of a setback in his last start, walking seven Padres in five innings and picking up his first loss of the season.  He’s already beaten the Astros this year, pitching six shutout innings the first week of the season.

**********

Like any Astros fan over 25 years old, I’ve known plenty of ‘off’ years.  The Astros lost some, and then lost a lot.  But it always seemed a benign kind of losing.  The team often seemed just this far from turning some corner, and improving markedly.  Hope, justified or not, will sustain a fan, for a long, long time.

But this year seems different.  This year the losing is often jarring.  Most nights, the team has no hope.  The offense is so abysmal, once they give up two or three runs, a bad feeling begins to set in.  But I think what really scares me is not what will happen this year – the team may not win 60 games – but rather, what comes after that.  It remains to be seen what will transpire the rest of this season, but if there ever was a time to dump veterans and salary and start the rebuilding process in earnest, this is it.  If nothing like that takes place this season, well, when will it?  Ever?

I know the Astros are a really bad team this year.  I think a lot of us suspected they would be before the season even began.  But this bad?  This horrifyingly, scarifyingly bad?  These soul-destroying eight- and nine-game losing streaks, seeming to come as regularly as plagues now?  Are winning two-of-their-last-thirteen streaks what we are in for all this season long?  I shudder to think about it, and it keeps me from sleeping most nights.  And when I do. . .

I had a dream last week that fucked with my mind entirely, and left a deep psychic scar that I suspect will never really heal.  Oh, it’ll scab over eventually, but instead of leaving behind a smooth surface afterward, I’ll instead be left with a large, ugly cicatrix on the heart of my soul.  Until the end of time.  For – fucking – ever.

In my dream, God sent an angel down to find me.  The poor bastard who got the assignment had to look for awhile.   My wife had no idea where I was, she rarely does; and I wasn’t anywhere the angel – let’s call him Nate – surmised I might be.  Nate looked everywhere and finally, around midnight, he found me commiserating in a little bar off of Concord in the north end, called Quan’s.  Just a slip of a bar, but dark and well-patronized; it is surrounded by an large, empty lot, on one of the busier streets in that part of town.  The owner of Quan’s is a guy I used to run around with some, back in the old days.  He works for the city now, and he got a good deal on the building his bar is in, and the land; to be honest, I think he had some insider information on it being foreclosed on or whatever you call it when the city puts a lien on your property because you owe them money for mowing your lot because you wouldn’t mow it yourself and the grass and weeds eventually got so high someone with some pull decided it was an eyesore or worse and sent out a city crew to take care of the job and then sent you the bill.  Only you didn’t pay it because you didn’t take it seriously or you couldn’t afford it or you were so into this Vietnamese chick you met at Cinco’s a few weeks ago that you’ve been letting all your business slip.  So now the city is eyeballing your property, and you decide, fuck it, it’s just a dumpy little building on a weedy lot in one of the less desirable parts of town, it was a pain in the ass to keep up anyway, ever since the wife’s uncle died and left it to you.  They can fucking have it.  Then you drive by a month or two later and see the lot looking all neat and trimmed, and the building you used to store your extra shit in all spruced up and repainted, with new burglar bars all around.  “Monday Night Football, Free pool and set ups all week” the marquee sign out front says.  “Goddamn.  They turned my storage shed into a fucking bar.”

My buddy had just slid another bourbon across to me when this angel, Nate, put his hand, or wing, whatever, on my shoulder.  It startled me.  “What the f—“, I half spun around, forming a fist with my right hand, which had been resting in the pocket of the light jacket I was wearing.  I grabbed my keys, which were in the pocket, too, and had several of the longer ones sticking out of the slots between my fingers.  A cop showed me that once.  We were coming out of a bar on a dark street in Salt Lake City, when three seedy looking fuckers started walking toward us.  My friend, who was in plain clothes and unarmed (we were at a convention), told me to grab my keys and arrange them in my fist.  He said a punch from something like that can really fuck a person up, at least buying you enough time to get away relatively unscathed.  I never forgot it.

So, anyway, I spun on this Nate character, ready to deck him with my house keys and then hightail it the fuck out of there (by some socio-economic criteria, I was vastly outnumbered in that bar.)  But, something stopped me.  It was my keys, getting caught in the fabric of my pocket.  That was just enough time for the angel to pin my arm with his other, um, wing, precluding me from punching the heavenly messenger right between the eyes.

“What?”  “What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.   He just smiled, and then cleaved me to him; and the next thing I knew, we were flying over the city, at night, maybe 75 feet up, and this guy Nate was busy pointing out places where I’d committed one atrocity or another over the years.

You know, when you live somewhere long enough, you start losing your geographic perspective of the place.  Certain locations or parts of town begin to lose geographic meaning, as they take on more symbolic overtones.  It was weird to realize, flying around that night with Nate, that this whole vast life I imagined I’d lived over the last thirty years or so, the wide swath I always fancied I’d cut, all of it mostly took place in a roughly 10 to 12 square block area, in a gritty refinery town in southeastern-most Texas.

As the messenger from God was methodically reading off to me the litany of sins, major and minor, I’d committed over the years, I’m afraid my extreme general disinterest in that subject betrayed itself, and I yawned.  This really pissed Nate off.  He threw down the tablet or PDA or whatever it was he was reading from and said, “Look.  Is this a big fucking joke to you?  Do you think you can just do whatever the fuck you want for years and years and suffer no consequences?”  I quietly pointed out to him that this was pretty much what I had been doing over the last many years, so why wouldn’t I think that?

He was still pretty agitated.  “Well, we’re gonna fix your little red wagon, fucker!  We’re gonna make your favorite team SUCK!”  Nate went on to inform me that, except for a blanket condemnation of the Cubs and their nitwit fans leveled many years ago, mostly on general principles, God did not normally make it a habit to curse sports teams.  But I had been so wanton and gleeful in committing my transgressions over the years, and so blithe in mostly dodging the consequences, that special measures were being taken.  The Astros are totally fucked for 2010, Nate said, and nothing Drayton or Pam or Ed Wade or any other mortal did can change that.  “This is the Word of the Lord,” Nate said.  He looked at me, as if waiting for a response, but I just shrugged my shoulders and flipped the hair back out of my eyes.  All I could think about was the Astros are fucking terrible, down by law, by a decree straight from heaven.

And apparently, it is all my fault.

I want to sincerely apologize to everyone here and not here for this.  Really, had I known the consequences I might’ve done some things differently.  Maybe.  I asked the angel about the years beyond this one.  “It depends,” he said sagely.  “On what?  On whether I clean up my act?”  “Oh, that, sure; but also on whether the kids down in Corpus Christi and Lexington and Lancaster develop quickly enough.”  I thought about that for a moment, and then I looked back up.  He was gone.

I was left standing in the dark asphalt parking lot in front of Quan’s, the traffic meanwhile whizzing by on Concord Road.  I thought about going home then, calling it a night, maybe changing some things.  On the other hand, I had it on good authority, actually the best authority, that this season is fucked anyway, no matter what.   So I am pretty much operating with impunity now, as I see it.  I cannot make things any worse.  So, I turned and headed back into the dark bar.  The cigarette smoke and the bourbon smell was mingling together, and they rushed up to meet me as I walked back in, right as my buddy was telling me to sit back down, and have a few more.

So I did.

**********

INJURIES

Houston
•Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after right rotator cuff surgery

•Tim Byrdak (LHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 3 with a strained hamstring

San Francisco
•Mark DeRosa (INF) – Day to day with numbness in his left hand

•Bengie Molina (C) – Day to day with a tight hamstring

•Edgar Renteria (SS) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 7 with a strained right groin.  I used to make fun of strained groins, but now I have one.  Not so funny.

•Freddy Sanchez (2B) – Day to day with a strained right shoulder

**********

My cousin Fred is pretty fucking big.

He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, tops.  And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all.  He is just one of those people who exude bigness.  When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.

Fred is just plain big, in some ways.  His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive.  According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who is crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/dick size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time.  Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.

Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids.  Not as close as brothers – we didn’t spend enough time together for that – but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are.  Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me.  He is about my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.

One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin.  Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred.  It was probably Spring Break, I know we were 18 or so.  One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too.  Along the way, Fred OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin.  No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on.  At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state.  “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party?”  “How many beers do you think he had?”  “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself, that would be kind of nasty.”  Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head.  It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room.  But Fred hardly stirred.  A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven.  Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredward, or sometimes Freddy if I was in a rush.  But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead.  He seemed to like the nickname all right.  Not that it mattered, we would’ve called him that regardless.

Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean.  That was an early spring night around that same time when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, and a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke.  If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow.  At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours.  The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality.  I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all.  People who were there still talk about it wistfully.  Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand.  Meanwhile, Fredward went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d see in an army surplus store.  I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did.  Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck.  He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such.  Conversation starter.  Fred was always thinking ahead like that.

I was with him the day his sister died.  She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home.  She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on.  And probably a majority of everyone else on that highway that day.  Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically.  We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did.  When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first.  We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere.  We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock.  But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass 442 her friend had been driving, we knew what had happened.  I don’t know my immediate reaction, I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated.  So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass.  Even though they were essentially D.O.A., Fred’s sister and another girl were life-flighted to UTMB.  So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston.  By the time we got there, his sis was long gone.  I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened.  We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional, but Fred’s voice never broke.  I admired him a lot for that.  His little sister has been gone now 31 years, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly.  Too much, too soon.

Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean.  He’s a civil engineer.  We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call.  Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by.  I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?”  Yes, I told him, maybe worse.  That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong.  But, he can see it all the way from fucking South Carolina.  Fuck.

While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night.  He laughed and said some of it is in the pitchers mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown.  The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that.  What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting.  Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.

Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remembered her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad.  I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamt up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.

But I didn’t dream her up, and I feel like I will see her again someday.  On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes, as we stand together there on the beach.  I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh.  Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio.  I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves.  The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.  Yes.  From my dreams to God’s ears.

No one hears his lonely sighs
There are no blankets where he lies
In all his deepest dreams he flies
With sweet Melissa

**********

Astros get swept by the Giants, 0-3.

THE WEATHER

**********

Lady census taker
Come on in and check me out
Sit down here beside me
And tell me what it’s all about

You won’t mind if I feel your thigh?
Mark it down, I’m just that kind of guy
I’m in love with you and I don’t know why
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
This must be my lucky year
I didn’t mail back my survey
Just so they would send you here

You’ve got those twitchy eyes
The kind that mesmerize
Bet you’ve counted lots of guys
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
It’s great that you’re getting paid
Though I didn’t realize the feds
Were hiring meth heads these days

Oh, you’re probably a tweaker, but I don’t care
I dig sunken cheeks and long, stringy hair
And that chipped front tooth looks so debonair
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
You make this full-time cynic hot
The way you hold that clipboard up to your chest
It shows me just what you got

I don’t know if you counted all my children and cars
Or how many nights I spend alone in bars
But I’ll bet you remember our little trip to the stars
Lady census taker.

**********