The current claim is that Dick feels it's his responsibility to represent the pulse of the community. Even when the community is a bunch of douchenozzles.
And I might add this for the vast SnS audience to consider:
Houston has been struggling for many years to become a baseball town. We have only 40 years of major league baseball to fall back on and it's been a journey to get to the point of saying we're on the cusp of being a baseball town. I forget where I read this column, but it was about the Tampa Rays. Tampa is enjoying the new found success of being a good club that is actually contending right now in the AL East, what is considered the toughest division in the majors. The article though was about the lack of attendance to the ballpark for the good young exciting Rays. Good team, winning, success... bad attendance. See, in a baseball town, the "good team, winning, success" would equal good attendence. In a GREAT baseball town, even the lack of success would probably still mean good attendence (not great, just good). Even the young Florida Marlins, winners of two world series and now with a good young team that is leading the NL East, attendance is hard to come by.
So it is my contention that what makes a town, a city a good baseball town/city is time. Along the way it helps to have success... of any kind. But time builds relationship between fan and club. It takes at least two generations of following a club to make them "my club". The Houston Astros are on the verge of that very thing, drawing more and more of the "my Astros" fans and when the next generation comes along... look out! But along the way, the bumps in the road with all the attention the club is now getting, comes a woeful lack of understanding for the game itself. See, the Houston Rockets have a simpler game to follow and thus the generation of fans following the only major league organization to bring a championship (two actually, ahum... sorry about that Dynamo and Aeros... I'm talking big three major sports here) to this town/city, can easily crowd fansites and talk radio and speak about "trading McGrady" or "get Mike Miller" almost without being entirely off base. Of course, the Texans have it easier even than the Rockets in terms of fans because Houston and the entire freaking state of Texas is football crazy. They all live for football and can tell you by and large what is the need for the team, even if it's a left tackle or a pulling guard (two things I have no clue about nor would be able to tell you the difference).
So with this growth comes the growing pains for the fandom of baseball and the Astros, two things that could be considered two distinct items. I can't complain about this growth, just learn to deal with it in terms of fandom because if a majority of my so-called baseball loving fan brethren of the Astros go to a game to do the wave, watch the cap races, enjoy the nachos and hope to heck to see 15 homeruns hit by the hometown nine and for Oswalt to record 27 strikeouts... in a row... then who am I to say that they're wrong? Nobody, that's who. But you can't dummy down this game either. You can only inform and dialogue with those of like mine I suppose.
One day, those scary neighbors who talk to you over the fence about "the Astros problems are that they don't get a catcher who can hit over 300 and hit 40 homeruns... like Pete Rose did for Cincy!", will indeed grow up with more understanding and appreciation for the game. At least Footer has the patience to answer them and inform... we've got that much going for all of us!
