June ate the Legends alive. There wasn’t too much good about the month that ended with the Legends finishing the first half of the season with the worst record in the Sally League.Read More
Distractions A-Plenty
This week in Astros’ baseball has been so horrific, so remarkably putrid, it’s almost beyond words. I haven’t checked the Chronicle or Astros.com today, but I fully expect to see some perspective pieces soon…the kind that make you realize that baseball is just a game and in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean all that much. Like the one about the transgendered left-handed midget albino eskimo kid fighting against the odds to get grass to grow on the Tundra just to honor the memory of his parents who were killed when a truck full of rancid blubber caught fire while they were trying to get him to a try-out for the Mat-Su Miners. When you read about all of the issues kids like that have, how can you be upset that Wesley Wright grooved a couple of meatballs to the Yankees sunday? This is what we call a distraction.
For instance, you might not notice that the paragraph you just read doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense after seeing this:
So Much For a Homestand…
The last time we spoke (I missed you too), the Astros were coming off a week where they has gone 1-5 against the Cardinals and the Brewers. So in that respect, a 2-4 week is an improvement. That may be the only way to take anything good out of the recent on field product. Everything else about the week has been an epic, well, to use the vernacular of the internets…
Katy Feeney Can Kiss My Ass
The problem with promising something to people is they start noticing when you don’t deliver whatever it was you promised. I have enough trouble squeezing out more than two of these a year, so jumping to a couple a month was going to be more difficult than watching Top Chef and not hoping that Padma Lakshmi’s clothes are going to fall off during Restaurant Wars.
Notes on the Nature of Competition from a Non-Athlete
Submitted by Joey Trum
My dad didn’t like baseball while I was growing up. It being the 80’s and him being a very 80’s type of businessman (Porsche driving, polo wearing, Reagan-loving Houstonian), he was more attuned to the growing white-collar hipness of the NBA than the old-fashioned nuance offered by MLB. Sure, he was an Astro bandwagon jumper in ’86 like everybody else, but overall he had a certain disdain for the sport that I’ve never understood. And the result of this disdain that is most relevant to this story is that I grew up playing basketball. Not just playing basketball, but absorbing everything about it. I was one of those kids who routinely stayed up late to watch random Big West teams complete ESPN’s Big Monday college basketball triple header, who went to the half-full Summit at every opportunity to watch the parade of lackluster complements to Akeem the Dream. I went to Pat Foster’s Cougar basketball camp 4 years in a row, and even went to the one at Rice a couple of times (Tommy Suitts?).Read More
The 27th Out
“Baseball is a cruel game.” I have heard that venerable adage my entire life as a baseball player, coach and fan. Usually the statement is spoken as a universal truth by a losing manager or coach or by a player who did not succeed when success mattered most. I considered the phrase to be a method to avoid acceptance of personal failure: if baseball indeed is cruel, then the Game must have caused the bad result, not any personal failure by team or player. For me, baseball seemed to be a simple game with no inherent cruelty: get 27 outs and score more runs than the other team. One of the defining moments of my baseball life caused me to reflect, however, on heart-breaking events inextricably interwoven with the 27th out and to wonder if there is truth to the adage that the Game itself is cruel.Read More