Royals @ Astros, June 23-25, 2009

SEASONS IN HELL Vol. I, No. 4
Royals (29-39) @ Astros (32-35)

Tuesday 7:05 p.m. CDT FOX-Houston
Wednesday 7:05 p.m. CDT FOX-Houston
Thursday 1:05 p.m. CDT FOX-Houston

In the Battle of the Wal-Mart Titans, in this corner we have David Glass’ Kansas City Royals, a once proud franchise that has basically been run into the ground since Glass purchased them back in 2000 for a cool $96 million; and in this corner is Drayton McLane’s entry, your very own Houston Astros, who somehow or another keep winning series and, if they do not watch out, may actually find themselves on the verge of being in contention for one of the four or five wild card spots still open for the playoffs, or however it is MLB does it now.

To be fair, the Royals had been floundering for a decade before Glass bought them; but you could say nothing he has done since has turned out for the good. There is some talk that since Glass has now finally agreed to keep himself and his son out of the daily operations, and hired in Dayton Moore, a John Schuerholz protégé, to be GM, things are turning around in KC. Maybe, but there are no obvious signs of it yet.

Meantime, the Astros keep bumping along, some would say despite their management. They are still destined to finish no better than fourth in their division, but so far this month (12-8 overall) they have taken three of four from Colorado, and two of three from Pittsburgh and Chicago at home, and two of three from both Arizona and Minnesota on the road. Oh yeah, somewhere in there they allegedly played a series in Arlington and lost three of four, but I digest. Also, Fuck the Rangers.

Anyway, I am always glad when the team does better than expected, by the experts and also by me. They have enough quality parts still firing most of the time, and it may eventually carry them to a .500 finish at least, which would have been a long-shot at the beginning of the season.

Personally, I have remained strangely unmoved by the recent relative success, and I am not sure why. But really, my personal Sturm und Drang is not fodder for discussion here, in a Series Preview, after all.

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Tuesday June 23 (7:05 p.m.)
Houston — Russ Ortiz (3-2, 3.60)
Despite being 6′ 1″ and 215 lbs. (in your program, anyway), Ortiz was apparently invisible to Cecil Cooper for a good bit of this season. Ortiz to his credit pitched well in long relief, but he was signed to be a starter, he has been a starter, he is a starter. On a team having “problems” with starting pitching. Now he is in the rotation meaning, if nothing else, someone like Brandon Backe is not (hopefully).

Kansas City — Zack Grienke (8-3, 1.96)
The Royal Pain. Grienke got off to an unbelievable start, but since the end of May, he has appeared to be mortal (4 GS, 26 IP, 31 H, 0-2, 5.19 ERA). The ace of the Royals staff, by far.

Wednesday June 24 (7:05 p.m.)
Houston — Roy Oswalt (3-4, 4.48)
Who knows what’s up with Roy-O this season? I still think he will come on strong the second half. His loss against Minnesota was still encouraging. I’m grasping at straws. For the Astros to achieve anything of consequence this season, Roy has to get himself together.

Kansas City — Luke Hochevar (2-3, 6.61)
Stylish right-hander, Jesus Christ he’s tall. Sort of the Royals version of Brian Moehler – good game, bad game, good game, bad game. . . last time out he got carpet-bombed by the D-Backs, so. . .

Thursday June 25 (1:05 p.m.)
Houston — Brian Moehler (4-4, 6.43)
Not-so-stylish right-hander, he’s kinda tall, but sort of dumpy looking. Sort of the Astros version of Luke Hochevar – good game, bad game, good game, bad game. . . last time out he beat the Twins, so. . .

Kansas City — Brian Bannister (5-4, 3.89)
Big right-hander out of SoCal. He’s been on an upswing – last three starts: (21 IP, 16 H, 1-1..29)

INJURIES
Houston – Geoff Blum (strained left hamstring), 15-day DL, returns early July, I had a football coach in high school who swore the ridiculously tall heels on the stylish shoes we sometimes wore (hey, this was the 1970s) would “shorten” our hamstrings, making them more susceptible to strains and tears; Aaron Boone (heart condition), 60-day DL, 2010, or Sept. 2009 (he says), joke all you want, I’ll bet Boone is damn glad he took that physical this spring; Doug Brocail (strained left hamstring), 15-day DL, early July maybe, He’s a good guy, and a (usually) effective reliever when healthy, but Brocail has got to be approaching the record for Most Days Spent On DL, Career; Mike Hampton (tender groin), 15-day DL, late June, First of all, everyone’s groin is tender, also, if you’ve seen pictures of some of his recent dates, you might better understand this injury; Felipé Paulino (strained right groin), 15-day DL, late June, I haven’t seen pictures of Paulino’s dates, maybe he strained his groin trying to karate kick the life size cut-out of Cecil Cooper he keeps in the corner of his apartment.

Kansas City – Mike Aviles (SS) (strained right forearm), 15-day DL, late June, maybe – He hasn’t had a date in quite awhile, thus possibly giving insight into the cause of his injury; John Buck (C) (herniation in lower back), it is unknown when he will return – Former Astros prospect is effective when he plays, not so much when he sits, Miguel Olivo’s got the job now, anyway; Coco Crisp (OF) (right rotator cuff strain), late June, maybe, could need surgery – Hurt his arm trying to heft a large spoonful of chocolaty-good breakfast cereal mouthward; Alex Gordon (3B) (labral cartilege tear in right hip), 15-day DL, mid-season – I don’t know what this injury is, exactly, but goddamn, it sounds painful; Sidney Ponson (RHP) (suet buildup, gout, sloth, rickets, scurvy) 15-day DL, early July, maybe – It’s okay, Sir Sid, drink some more grog to assuage the pain, avast; Robinson Tejeda (RHP) (right rotator cuff tendinitis) late June just activated (thx High Mileage) – Fireballing RHP who strikes ‘em out in droves and is wild as hell, one Royal I would like to have watched, why is it a tendon? but the affliction is tendinitis? I never got that; Doug Waechter (RHP) (strained left oblique), 15-day DL, unknown return – Doug Waechter/Went to see the doctor/Who said, “Not again this week/Of your fucked-up physique/The worst is your oblique”

**********

One time, a well-meaning if presumptuous friend-of-a-friend set me up on a blind date with some girl she knew. I was a still a happy, free-range bachelor back then, and I was extremely dubious about being ‘set up’ at all, I only finally agreed to it because we would be double-dating with some other friends, who were ‘connected’ and were going to get us into an exclusive political get-together thing I couldn’t have got into otherwise – I didn’t have the right sort of bonafides to get invited to that little soirée on my own. I was at the time a sort of a neophyte political operative, which is another story. I guessed my date would be homely, and/or painfully shy and introspective – that was my low opinion of blind dates – but taking her out would be my ticket into this political thing, something of a coup for me at the time. So I said OK.

I picked the girl up at her place and was pleased to see she was actually quite pretty; and on the way to the event, making small talk in the car, I gathered she was not a shrinking violet, either. Well, I figured, if nothing else I could take care of my business at the party – I touched the envelope full of cash in my inside coat pocket – and then we could just drink and talk and enjoy the evening, maybe even hit it off.

The party was a barbecue-and-beer bash, a fundraiser deal where slumming rich Republicans (and a few turncoat Demos) dressed down and acted like members of the proletariat, or tried to. . . meanwhile, deals were being made all over the place. ‘Handshake’ deals, you know? Fists full of dollars. There were several other guys in the room in the same profession I was, more or less; those guys were balling the jack, man, button-holing politicians, glad-handing judges and civil administrators, and greasing the palms of local power brokers and decision makers, county commissioners and members of the zoning board and the like. Some of those guys moved about the room with ease, they did this stuff all the time. But I was still fairly new at it, and this was a high stakes deal to me. I had $40,000 in cash in an envelope, with specific instructions on what I was to do with it. Gosh. Jefferson County politics, at least in those days. . . anyway, after an hour or so of watching and maneuvering for a position in these machinations, I got hungry and went over to sample some of the catered beef brisket and spare ribs and sausage, being served out of fancy silver steamware by guys in toques and white coats; I noticed my date was drinking beer and in an animated conversation with a few people she apparently knew. After I had disbursed the cash and otherwise had taken care of what I had gone to the party to do, the whole get-together seemed stupid and boring; a bunch of people I wouldn’t have spent five minutes with otherwise, half-lit and prattling on about their golf game or their mistress or the new addition to the mansion-ette. So my date and I decided to get out of there and retire to a little bar she knew about, a dive in a shopping strip off of the Interstate. She said it was dark, served cheap drinks, and had a decent live band. That was all I needed to hear.

When we got to the place we ran into some mutual friends right away, and settled down at a table and started ordering rounds of drinks. I was thinking my blind date was turning out a lot better than I had expected. She was getting a little loud, and tipsy, but in a good way – funny and endearing instead of irritating and obnoxious. The cover band was playing contemporary stuff, and they were okay, not great; every once in awhile they would mix in something danceable. We were having fun, I was laughing at and with my date, and noticed I was beginning to get a little bombed, as well. I was talking to another friend for a few minutes when I heard a commotion over up in front of the dance floor, and we turned around in time to see my date get up on the stage with the bar band, crawling up the riser in her heels and evening dress.

Someone had handed her a pair of maracas, those painted Mexican gourd things with seeds or something in them, and my date was dancing around on the stage, shaking her maracas, while the band played some song. It was pretty funny, not a bad performance at all. It got a great response from the audience.

By the way, this girl was reasonably well-endowed you could call it, and after that night, “shaking her maracas” became a euphemism among the smart set (okay, among me and my dumbass friends) for a woman with nice breasts on public display. Of course it did. “She’s really shaking her maracas tonight, man.” In fact, maracas was eventually added to the long lexicon of terms we used to identify parts of the female anatomy. “Lisa’s got some chop (a nice ass), man.” “Yeah, but did you see the maracas on her friend?”

By the time we left the bar, both my date and I were pretty fucking wasted, and silly happy. She was starting to say some crazy shit, though, just drunken stream-of-unconsciousness stuff, and I figured it was time to take her home. It was when we were sitting at a stoplight on Dowlen Road – the ‘main drag’ at the time – that she decided to roll down all the windows and open the moon roof of my Camaro and start singing The Cars “Dangerous Type” at the top of her vocal ran, um, lungs. The song must have come on the radio, I don’t know. Anyway, it caused a bit of a stir there at the light, because even at 2:30 in the morning there were a lot of cars at the intersection, enjoying my girl’s musical talents. Several followed us for awhile down the road after the light changed, honking and weaving around in my rear view mirror.

“She’s a lot like you, the dangerous type. . . “

Depending on the situation, an outburst like that one (and/or the maraca incident) could have been really off-putting, a deal-breaker. Speaking generally, I tend to admire reticence in drunks. But my date’s antics only made me like her more, I noticed. In fact, by that late hour, and several sheets to the wind, I realized I was starting to like her a lot, very, very much. She must have liked me, too. When we got to her townhouse, we went straight upstairs.

I am not proud of everything I did in my youth. I don’t know how many nights ended up with me in some advanced state of intoxication, driving home some girl even drunker than I was. A fair amount of them; and a few times I even found myself coming awake the next morning in some bed somewhere, trying to figure out where the fuck I was and what-all happened the night before.

One thing that made this time different was the girl woke up when I did, the both of us all tangled up in the sheets and each other; instead of an intense desire to flee, I realized I wanted to stay and lay there with her for awhile. I did, for quite awhile actually. There was not a lot of conversation. The silence was not uncomfortable, however. People worry about what to talk about with someone new, but being able to be with someone in a comfortable silence, just laying together there with our thoughts and without the need to pointlessly verbalize, I took that for a good sign. We had already established a level of unspoken communication, a closeness, maybe a trust even, that usually only comes after a time, if at all. Thinking about that gave me a warm feeling. Laying together there, me staring intently at the painted texture on the drywall ceiling; I thought maybe I had stumbled onto something.

I looked over at this pretty girl, who was looking back at me. She propped herself up on an elbow, smiled at me, and told me that she was going to marry me.

And she did.

********

I didn’t choose my favorite team anymore than I chose the woman I would marry. They chose me. Given the results of some of my choices over the years, it is just as well. In fact, all in all, I would say I have been fabulously lucky, on both counts.

When I was young, all the older, “in the know” kids in the neighborhood followed and talked about the Astros all the time, and those kids were cool and I wanted to be cool and be like them and be accepted by them, so I learned to follow the Astros, too, after a time. Thank goodness for that. My years of following the ‘Stros have not always been a lot of fun on a certain level, but always a pleasure otherwise. The team did not always win, a lot of the time it did not. That was disappointing, but then again, not really. I just love to watch the games, man; to follow the team and think about its chances and fret about its shortcomings, and to follow all of baseball and individual teams and players as an ancillary aspect of following the Astros. I love to dip back into the history of baseball, and realize what a tangled web this game does weave. I love to just get lost in it sometimes, try to make sense of it other times, I always revel in it. Such a wonderful thing to have latched onto at such an early age, and all by chance and an accident of geography.

I don’t think much about what could have been, when it comes to my favorite team, or to my luck in marriage. What if I’d followed my instinct and refused to go on a blind date that night so long ago? I might have ended up married to some promiscuous slut from out of the trailer parks of Lumberton who started gaining weight about three seconds after we said “I do” and ended up being a fat-ass cheating chain-smoking beer-swilling bitch that I hated and didn’t even want to go home to. What if I’d subconsciously followed my mother’s genetic line and somehow ended up as a Pirate fan, like many of my long-suffering aunts and uncles and cousins in Western PA? A fate nearly worse than death, that would have been; probably as agonizing as a slow death. Worse than marrying a fat chick from Lumberton, even.

Sometimes it is best to just thank one’s lucky stars, and move on.

********

I was sitting in the Liberty Lunch, pretty fucked up already, nursing a squat 12oz. bottle of Red Stripe beer that was rapidly getting tepid. I didn’t even like Red Stripe, but I was drinking one. The bottle was sweating, and every time I grabbed it I could feel the beer inside getting warmer. It was humid as hell. Back then, Liberty Lunch had no roof on it, and as I stretched out at the table, trying to un-kink some of the muscles in my back and legs, I found myself gazing up at the firmament, spread out above me like a big black tarpaulin with a bunch of little holes poked in it, letting light through. That in turn reminded me of an old Bruce Cockburn lyric about kicking the darkness “‘til it bleeds daylight.” I was very much in the darkness then, figuratively and literally; but to that point I hadn’t been doing much kicking. In truth, at times I felt as if I were sinking fast, like a stone.

As a distraction from my thoughts, I turned and watched two lesbians do the bump and grind with each other on the dance floor, just off to my right. They were moving to the music of the local reggae band up on stage, doing a lame cover of “Get Up, Stand Up”. I had been mesmerized by the band for awhile; mainly by the lead singer, who was about 5′ 7″ and had long, unkempt white-boy dreadlocks down to his knees, almost. As he sang he prowled the small stage, swinging his hair around for effect. It was interesting for about five minutes.

Anyway, these girls dancing next to me were real lesbians, not the kind one saw in R-rated movies, all soft and pretty and desirable. Like a lot of guys, I found those sort of cinematic depictions of otherwise normal hetero girls suddenly overtaken with the compulsion to do each other to be pleasantly compelling, in their way. But these girls weren’t anything like those. Nope. These were the real thing, going at it in earnest, and I realized the whole thing up close like that was the opposite of titillating to me. I eventually had to look away.

I left the bar pretty soon after that, stumbling down 2nd Street into the darkness, without much of an idea of where to go or what to do next. It would be a couple more years before I did get some kind of idea about that, but that is not really the point. The thing is, I learned something that night; or had something re-enforced I knew already. That is, sometimes things that look real good from a distance or from an obscured or distorted viewpoint, don’t look so great when you see them clearly and up close. Myself, I had been following a dream I had for years, a dream of living high and wild and more-or-less outside the rules. It was really a dream of being free, or at least what my idea of free was at the time. I had taken just about every wrong turn one could take in pursuit of my dream, and now here I was. This is what my dream had led to, up close. . . me being high and stupid drunk on a dark street in Austin, with no place I really wanted to go, nothing I really wanted to do, no one I could really go see and tell my troubles to.

I think it was around then that it occurred to me, I might want to start looking for some other dream to follow.

********

I have been going through a bit of a crisis lately. Not so much a crisis of confidence, more like a crisis of faith. I have finally admitted to myself something that has been going on for awhile – I have been losing interest in the Astros, the only team I have ever really cared about.

I cannot put my finger on exactly why this is happening. It is tempting to look for places to put blame. Baseball? The numbingly boring ‘offensive explosion’ years 1993-2004, fueled by (we now know) steroids and HGH and whatever else consumed by many of the era’s greatest players, were too much for even a long-time serious fan to recover from. The Astros?  They don’t have a farm system, Wade is an idiot, the owner is a tightwad only interested in AIS, blah, blah, blah. Society in General?  Going to hell in a hand basket, going downhill on roller skates, falling apart like a house of cards, etc.

Just because someone grows up and grows older does not necessarily mean that person learns much along the way. I am a good example of that, I make a lot of the same stupid-ass mistakes I made at 5, and 15, and 25, and so on. But one thing I have picked up along the way; anytime I am tempted to channel blame outward for some problem or difficulty, I need to think again, and search myself. I have found that often the ugliness I am so ready to project onto something or someone else is really coming from inside of me somewhere.

So the past weeks I have been soul-searching. Why don’t I watch the games as intently as I used to? Why don’t I follow the team day-to-day? Why have I been losing my grip on baseball generally, only retaining an obvious passion for the game of twenty, thirty, forty years ago?

The answers I have come up with are not all that interesting to anyone but myself.

As far as losing interest in today’s baseball in general, I will say I think all the coverage now makes it harder for me to follow along. I grew up in a pre-cable/ESPN/USA Today/internet world, where there was one game on television a week, you found out the scores by reading the next morning’s sports page (or the next morning’s, if the game was on the West Coast), found out what your favorite players did by scouring the box scores, you only saw statistics (batting average, HRs, RBIs and little else) on Sundays, and only then as much as there was room left in the columns after all the other crap about hunting and fishing was inserted. Most of my favorite players as a kid I only knew from baseball cards, from radio broadcasts, maybe from a wayward appearance on the Game of the Week or an All Star Game broadcast. It was a real effort to follow the game then, but it did not seem like one; and I feel like I saw it all more clearly than I do now. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, having anything I could want to know instantly accessible makes it more difficult for me to connect to the overall picture. I love having all these things we have now – I certainly would not want to go back – but it is just a distraction a lot of the time.

As far as losing interest in the Astros, that is a more complicated question, but one easier to solve, I think. Partly, it is the same things that have made paying attention to baseball more difficult. But I also think that somewhere along the way in the last ten years or so I lost focus and became a lazy-ass fan. Not as bad as some of the laggard fuckwads one sees at MMPUS and hears on the call-in shows, but lazy nonetheless. I have almost quit this great gig because of my inner malaise, even almost walked away from this place altogether. What saved me, what kept me from making another stupid fucking decision like so many I have made in the past, is that at my core, I am a fan. A real fan, not a come-lately or a dilettante. There is no way around it, I cannot change what I am. In order to achieve inner peace, I have to get back to the fan I used to be, my inner being compels me to. And I know now what I have to do to get myself back to where I need to be. I have realized it is time for me to find a different dream to follow.

Also, Fuck the Cubs.

********

I have tried to think how it was I became such a serious fan, a fan to the core. I cannot, really. I hoped to be able to remember a point in my early childhood when I started playing with a ball and bat or realized I really liked the game, but my memory is limited.

I am in possession of a picture, pretty valuable to me now, a snapshot in time; of my young-looking father underhanding a wiffle ball to me while I take a wild swing at it with a plastic bat. I can tell the photo was taken in the backyard of the first house we lived in; it was still new then, I can see the red orange-ish sand mixed in with the St. Augustine in the yard, and the green plank siding on the back of the house. I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old in the photo. When I tried to remember back to the origins of my interest in baseball, I could only remember – even hazily – back to about age 5 or 6, maybe. Then my memories would blur and fade into the dark place beyond the boundary of my memory, back to the time before I can remember. They faded into my own pre-historic time, as foreign and unknowable to me as the Pleistocene Era. But I have this picture, this proof that I was playing at baseball, even back before I can remember. To know what my original impressions or motivations were is impossible, but knowing I was learning to play so long ago is comforting to me now. So is the idea that my dad was part of my learning.

I do not have many heart-warming memories vis-à-vis baseball and my father.

He was a fan. A couple of summers while in college he did recreations of minor league games on radio, and he knew the players of the ‘40s and ‘50s so well, I felt I could almost see them when he would describe them to me. He took us to games in the Dome fairly regularly, and let me watch the Saturday national broadcasts with him.

But we had a less than ideal relationship, my father and I, from beginning to end. I never figured him out, and I am pretty sure he never did me, either. By the time he died a couple of years ago, we hadn’t lived in the same town in twenty years or had any kind of meaningful conversation in almost twice that.

My father grew up in an in-between generation, too young to be part of the “Greatest Generation” and too old to be a Baby Boomer. Call it the “Mad Men” generation. He had these odd values I never quite got. He would never talk about Korea, for instance, though it obviously made an impression on him. “You just don’t talk about that stuff,” he’d say. He had a really traumatic childhood that he never spoke of, either. He was usually pleasant, but always, always kept his distance. In his value system, the mom stayed home and raised the kids, the dad went to work and made the money, went out and did his drinking or gambling or womanizing or whatever, then came home and was just there. But not really there.

I don’t think my father had a lot to do with my developing a love for baseball as a child. He wasn’t the type to go play catch in the schoolyard. I was just lucky that I lived in a place and time where many parents took interest in a kid, and if you showed an inclination or some talent for the game, they were happy to help you along. That is what happened to me. I cannot remember exactly, but I am pretty sure I started hanging around the edges of some games the older kids in the neighborhood played, then maybe one day they were short a man and let me play. And maybe I showed them I could play a little, so I got to keep playing. I know in that neighborhood, that is all we did, all summer – played baseball or some variation of it, all day long, for years before we were even old enough to play Little League. I am pretty sure my baseball inspiration came somewhere in there, it may have been something as simple as being able to play in the older kids’ game and feeling like I belonged. Who knows?

While I am not sure where the germ of my lifelong fascination with and love for the game of baseball came from, I am pretty sure I know where it did not come from. On the other hand, maybe swinging wildly (a swing I still have, by the way) at a plastic ball my dad had lobbed to me as a small kid was part of my development, too. Fathers Day has just passed, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I will say, in case the old man is somewhere out there reading this. . . I am not going to bullshit you with any smarmy sentiments. It would be fake and hypocritical and he would fucking hate that. So I’ll just say I think I understand a little better now, maybe.

That’s something.

********

Astros win the series, 2-1.

“To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe only the truth.” – Voltaire

THE WEATHER
from award-winning meteorologist Al Sleet

“Heyyy, baby, what’s happenin’? Que pasa. Que, what you call your pasa.

“Al Sleet here, your hippy dippy weatherman, with all the hippy dippy weather, man. Brought to you by Parsons Pest Control.

“Do you have termites, water bugs and roaches? Well, Parsons will help you get rid of the termites and water bugs, and help you smoke the roaches.

“The temperature at the airport is 88 degrees, which is stupid, man, ‘cos I don’t know anybody who lives at the airport. Now, if you’ll take a look at our national weather map. . . you’ll see that we don’t have one. So try to picture last night’s map in your mind. Remember all the letters and lines, and all them little numbers. The weather is dominated by a large Canadian low, which is not to be confused with a Mexican high. . .

“Tonight’s forecast – dark. Continued dark tonight, turning to partly light in the morning. . . looking ahead, the weather will continue to change, on and off, for a long, long time, man.”

********