Rockies (7-8) at Astros (6-11)

Minute Maid Park
501 Crawford St.
Houston, TX 77002

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The Colorado Rockies have been around 15 years now, which is kind of hard for me to believe. I still think of them as an expansion franchise. For some reason, I recall the 1992 expansion draft of the Rockies and the Florida Marlins – who are also beginning their 16th campaign – very clearly. I particularly remember laughing out loud when the Rockies selected Butch Henry and Willie Blair off of the Astros roster (and the Marlins took Ryan Bowen.) As far as the Astros went, that was addition by subtraction, to my mind.

By their fifth season, of course, the Marlins were World Champions; a feat they repeated six years later. Meanwhile the Rockies bumbled along, trying to figure out what sort of team they needed to play in the thin air of Denver and the therefore extremely spacious environs of Mile High Stadium and then Coors Field. They tried loading the team with fat (Dante Bichette) and often obnoxious (Bichette, Larry Walker) sluggers. They tried overpaying for pitchers – Darryl Kile and Mike Hampton being at the head of a long list of those. When Craig Biggio was a free agent after 1995, they reportedly were close to signing him. But none of it worked.

The Rockies finally decided to start steaming baseballs used at home, and build a team that was capable of winning away from home, and last season they made a memorable run through the playoffs and went all the way to the World Series, for the first time. Where they were promptly dispatched by the Red Sox, four games to zero. Which sounds kind of familiar.

The Rockies success in 2007 was apparently so unlikely that no pundit predicted they would successfully defend their pennant in ’08. That sounds kind of familiar, too; they come into town this Friday at 7-8 and dragging up at the bottom of their not-so-great division, just like the Astros.

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• Game 1: Friday April 18, 2008 – 7:05 p.m. CDT (FSN)

• Game 2: Saturday April 19, 2008 – 6:05 p.m. CDT (FSN)

• Game 3: Sunday April 20, 2008 – 1:05 p.m. CDT (my little pony)

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I will watch these games intently, but I almost hate to anymore, or anything else on TV, for that matter. One cannot turn the 55″ flat screen high definition set on these days without coming across 1 or 2 or 15 ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, stuff to make your dick grow bigger and longer, moving testimonials about flare-ups of explosive diarrhea, dentures falling out, etc. Jesus Christ, whatever happened to personal discretion, and/or tact?

Mark Raup made this excellent point a year or so ago somewhere in the TZ, but I’ll reiterate it here – the people responsible for the Viva! Viagra! ad campaign in particular should be summarily drawn and quartered. Then shot. Then castrated; and finally, beheaded. Goddamn it, I hate those commercials.

I’ve got nothing against the product, per se; and if you cannot get it up, you have my sympathy. And if I couldn’t get it up, I’d take the stuff, too (and when I had my four-hour-long erection, I’d call a doctor, just like they say to. . . only after I called everybody else I have ever known, and the Channel 6 news, too. . . “Goddamn, you gotta come over here and look at this thing! Viva Viagra!”) But it just seems wrong that a bunch of limp dicks sitting around in a fake recording studio singing a cheesy ditty about the little blue pill, copped from a hit song from a movie – one of The King’s movies, too – should be so goddamned cocky about it all. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Gonna get home to my darlin’ and. . . Yeah, but only after you have to take a pill just to get it up, asswipe. Goddamn you and your fucked up song, and your flaccid little smiles, you fucking eunuchs. Go straight to hell, all of you.

And it is not only that. Former rock and roll songs are now used to market hemorrhoid ointments, denture glue, a clearinghouse for information on Crohn’s disease (“An intestinal flare up made me miss my own wedding”), and so on. I really hate this kind of marketing. Not that it matters. But listen up, you TV fucks, if you don’t stop it for my sake, think of the children. Remember how embarrassing it was as a kid to be watching TV with your mom and dad and have a feminine hygiene commercial come on? That is about as racy as it got back then, and even those were few and far between. Today’s kid, sitting around watching with his/her parents, has to endure one disgusting, embarrassing commercial after another. If it isn’t a product to help dad get an erection or grow “that certain part of the male anatomy”, it is mom coming on about pleasurable condoms or heated K-Y jelly. Listen up, TV assholes. It is not any different now than it was then – kids do not want to be made to think about mom and dad doin’ it, or to think of them in any sexual way at all. So keep all your fucking ads in the back of “men’s” magazines, where they fucking belong. And off of my fucking television, especially during the fucking games.

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Pitching Matchups

Friday
LHP Franklin Morales (0-1, 6.30) vs. RHP E.A. Robinson (1859-1935)

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before:
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”

Saturday
RHP Aaron Cook (1-1, 3.79) vs. LHP S.V. Benét (1898-1943)

When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
the phantom deer arise,
and all lost, wild America
is burning in their eyes.

Sunday
RHP Ubaldo Jimenez (1-2, 4.60) vs. RHP Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Fun Facts
The names of the 25 players on the Rockies active roster contain a total of 102 vowels and 185 consonants, for a .551 vowel-to-consonant ratio. The Astros have a total of 105 vowels and 175 consonants, for a .600 V-T-C. Their superiority in this particular metric could give the Astros a decided edge in this series. . . After getting off to a horrendous start this season (3-fo-21, .143), former Astro Willy Taveras as found his stroke of late; in his last five games, Willy T. is 7-for-21, .333. . . The Rockies are hitting .235 as a team, with an ERA of 4.86.

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The Astros are back home after a brief three-day road trip, including a semi-disastrous and nearly soul-shattering loss in the first game of the series in Philly. The team bounced back the next night on a Roy Oswalt gem, but then got keelhauled on getaway day. They are looking to come home and begin turning things around for this season. The starting pitching has looked pretty good for the most part, and the offense seems close to really clicking. On the other hand, after this series the ‘Stros have a quick two-game reprise with the Padres, then it is back out on the road again, against some pretty good and/or hot teams. This could turn out to be an ugly April.

I knew an April once; but she wasn’t ugly at all, at all. No sir. But that is another story.

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Injuries

Colorado – Luis Vizcaino (RHP), strained shoulder; Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (Wimpy Singer/Songwriter), water on the knee, the brain, and elsewhere; Jason Hirsch (RHP), the weight of expectations.

Houston – Ty Wigginton (3B), broken thumb; Kazuo Matsui (2B), men’s troubles; Felipe Paulino (RHP), pinched nerve.

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As noted in Astros Connection/Orange Whoopass/Spikes ‘n’ Stars demigod Andy Zipp’s latest column, Spikes ‘n’ Stars is going on the air. We’re bad, we’re nationwide.

Well, maybe not nationwide – I can only pick up AM 1560 in Beaumont, for instance, if there are no clouds between here and Houston at all. But still, how cool is that? You’ll now not only be able to read your favorite S’n’S personalities, now you’ll be able to hear them, too.

To tell the truth, I had this idea before. I had a pirate internet station up and running for several months last year, with the idea that once I really got the thing going, I’d approach the administrators of this site and ask if we could forge some sort of affiliation. I had something in mind like the Elvis Costello Hour Monday nights at 7:00, followed by The Noe Show, thirty minutes of our esteemed lead pope waxing loquacious on all things baseball, and not. Similar shows for other leading lights at the site, with kick ass music, new and classic, mixed in. Guest dj’s, etc.

Unfortunately, it takes way more attention and energy than I have available to devote to it to run an internet radio station, if you want to run it right. It takes time, too. So I eventually let the thing die before I ever got it to the point where it was worthy of S’n’S consideration. I had some fun with it, though. I once did three hours of Led Zeppelin songs alternating with classics by Frank Sinatra (it really worked well, more so than one might think.) I had ‘Stones A-Z Weekend every weekend. But the best part was the occasional e-mail I would get from someone who stumbled across the web casts. One guy in Minnesota would e-mail every week and request The Leningrad Cowboys‘ version of “Sweet Home Alabama”, for which I am grateful. There was a girl in Florida who thanked me for playing the Pat Travers Band’s “Crash And Burn” once. She said she hadn’t heard it since high school and it brought back fond memories and hey, what did I look like? Would I like to trade pictures? Maybe get together on-line and see how it went?

You know, I’ve never had much use for Canadians – save for Neil Young – but Pat Travers really got this girl’s engine running. Make a note of that, fellas. In the end, I demurred, of course; for many reasons, some of which you can probably guess. But here is my point – once Zipp goes on the air on a regular basis, sooner or later he is going to acquire some groupies. Think about that for a moment.

I just cannot wait to see what they turn out to be like.

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Astros win the series, 3-0.

Tous nos adversaires sont les pénis flasques,
et nous les battrons.

You may follow the game action as it unfolds in the Game Zone.

 
And I feel the blues are coming down like rain
My feelings are so complicated I
Wish I could explain.