Pirates @ Astros - Long Slide (For An Out)

[strosrays]

Pirates Look At 40


Pirates (65-81) at Astros (63-83)
Minute Maid Park, 501 Crawford St., Houston, TX  77002
a/k/a “The Wal-Mart at Union Station" 

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▪Friday, September 14 (7:05 p.m. CDT) – FSN

▪Saturday, September 15 (6:05 p.m. CDT) – KNWS (Kick-ass Nineteen Watt Signal)

▪Sunday, September 16 (1:05 p.m. CDT) – FSN



Ahoy and Avast, the Pirates Suck Ass (ah, but so too the hometown Astros)

Now is the silly time of the season for also-rans like the Astros and the Pirates.  They can expand their rosters to up to forty players each, and there are so many farmhands wandering around, you wonder how they can all fit on the bench during games.  The Astros and Pirates have a lot in common these days, it seems.  They have similar records this season, and one or the other will finish in the NL Central cellar.  Their immediate prospects for the future don’t look so good, either.  The Pirates are in the midst of a stretch of mediocrity of historic proportions, 15 straight losing seasons, and no end in sight.  They probably have no chance of turning it around until the current inept ownership sells the team to someone with enough sense to hire good baseball people and open up the checkbook and stay out of the way.  The Astros are at the beginning of a downward spiral that probably won’t wind completely out until the current (gutless) proprietor/huckster figures out his endless meddling in baseball decisions and his Dale Carnegie bullshit isn’t going to get it anymore, and decides to go elsewhere, where there are people who want to be champions, today (there is of course the possibility this will never happen, fans.)  Drayton McLane can micromanage in the business world, and force his silly motivational crap down the throats of all the underlings he pays $7.50-an-hour with meager benefits to wear blue aprons, and fake smiles, while they move his cheap, Chinese-made merchandise, while he gets rich off of the disadvantaged and disaffected. . . but his business ideas and his brand of hypocritical pandering don’t work quite as well on professional baseball men, or on millionaire players, either.

You had some good times in Houston, McLane, but you have stayed on too long.  Save your legacy, do us all a favor, and take your hoary bromides and your polished Florsheim loafers and your idiot offspring and just get the fuck out.  Sell the team.  I don’t care to who.  Please, Drayton.  Don’t leave mad, just leave.  Shove off.
 
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Projected Matchups from Astros.com

Friday
Ian Snell (9-12, 4.00) v. Roy Oswalt (14-7, 3.41)

I heard Rich Lord and whoever the clueless boob he is partnered with on the radio go on and on the other day about Scott Kazmir, after Kazmir had blanked the slugging Red Sox, 1-0.  They said Kazmir with the Devil Rays is like Steve Carlton was with the early 1970’s Phillies (in 1972, Carlton went 27-10 for a Phillies team that won 59 games, total).  They were amazed Kazmir is currently 12-8 for a team that probably won’t win 70 games.  And they are right, Kazmir is emerging as a really good starting pitcher, but mostly in obscurity, playing in the baseball black hole of Tropicana Field.  But leave it to the local media to look right past a pitcher doing something at least as good right in front of them. . . Roy Oswalt is currently 14-7 for a team that probably won’t win 70 games this year, either.  By my estimation, he has four starts left this year, counting this one.  It would not surprise me at all if he ends up with 17 or 18 wins; nor will it surprise me if he may need to go somewhere else eventually, to get the kind of recognition the Rich Lords of the world think a pitcher like Roy O. has coming to him.  Maybe he and Kazmir will end up on the same staff in the South Bronx one day, the stuff of Rich Lord’s most fevered nocturnal emissions.

Saturday
Matt Morris (9-9, 4.59) v. Wandy Rodriguez (8-13, 4.65)

Wandy Rodriguez at home is like Elvis in Vegas, Elton John with the royals, Billy Joel in a supper club.  He’s like Hitler in Poland, Genghis Khan on the steppe, Hannibal in the Alps.  Wandy at home is like a TV evangelist in your checkbook, Tammy Faye Bakker and Jan Crouch in Merle Norman’s, Jerry Falwell at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  He’s like David Hasselhoff at a kegger, Nicole Ritchie with a hypodermic, Whitney Houston on crack.  In other words, at home anyway, Wandy Rodriguez is golden.


Sunday
Paul Maholm (10-14, 4.32) v. Brandon Backe (0-1, 5.91)

Wacky Backe is back.  That’s a good thing.  Brandon Backe is just fun to watch, no matter what is happening to him out there on the mound.  He is one of those rare guys who doesn’t understand the idea or even grasp the concept of pacing oneself, of conserving energy and effort now in case one might need it later.  Fuck that, Backe might say.  As he knows better than a lot of people, there are no guarantees there will be a “later” and if there isn’t, where does that leave you?  Fucked, that’s where.  With all this unused, conserved energy, just wasted.  Backe only understands going all out, all the time.  It is a style of play we used to call “balls to the wall”, back in my racquetball days.  I never had a nice racquet, because I had to buy a new one about every other week, having horribly bent the old one from slamming it into the wall behind me after faulting on a serve, or going headlong into the wall with it chasing down  a particularly tough return from my opponent.  I won the intramural singles championship one year, and I remember the last part of the last game well.  I was well up, and in control of the serve.  I stood there for a second, dripping sweat, rotating the ball in my hand, getting ready to serve.  I was thinking that if I approached this thing coolly and tactically, I could almost be assured of winning the game and the match.  But where was the fun in that?  So instead of playing it conservatively, I tried to bury my serve into the front corner, down low, but I faulted.  On my second serve, I should have just put the ball into play, but I tried to bury it again.  Fault.  Fuck!  My opponent took over, and instead of securing a liesurely finish for myself, I’d let the other guy back in, and it took several more minutes of furious play (I think I finally won 23-21, something like that) to finally put the thing away.  In retrospect, it was foolhardy on my part to try to ace that last serve, but what happened afterward was tense and challenging and fun as hell.  I damn near blew the whole thing, but I didn’t. . . balls to the wall – I think I identify with Backe because I gather he approaches most things in a similar way.  Good for him.  It may cost him some along the way, but he’ll never be bored.  And neither will we be, watching him.



Etcetera

Notable giveaways

The Minute Maid staff empties out the promotions closet of whatever is left in it this weekend, giving away several must-have items over the course of the weekend.

On Friday, in addition to the regular fireworks show, the team is celebrating College Night, with discounted tickets for college students and a pre-game concert on Lefty’s Pub by some band called Another Day.  Also, they are giving away a set of Astros dominos to the first 10,000 fans sixteen years and older.  The bones will make a nice diversion during the game, which promises to be somnolent borefest. . . Also, after the game there will be a kolache-eating contest, sponsored by the Kolache Factory, whatever that is.  Gluttonous fans will compete to see who can down the most sausage-and-cheese-stuffed-biscuits-erroneously-called-kolaches in an 8-minute period, for a $10,000.00 first prize.  I don’t know whether to be more appalled that we now apparently pay people to compete in making fucking pigs out of themselves publicly, or that some slick chain is allowed to call a blob of gooey processed whatever a kolache (the Kolache Factory’s special this week – sausage and gravy kolaches!)  My old Austro-Hungarian-Czech grandma used to make kolaches every Christmas, but I seem to remember them being fresh-baked, and filled with stuff like pecans, and molasses, and poppy seeds.  I must have missed the year she made the ones filled with a pre-formed suasage-shaped handful of offal, garnished with a gelatinous glob of hydrogenated vegetable oil that, for commercial purposes, the USDA allows one to call “cheese.”  Fucking gross, grandma.

On Saturday night, the prime giveaway item is a ridiculous and demeaning Carlos Lee bobblehead doll.  How low will these desperate bobblehead purveyors go?  I don’t know, but wherever it is, you can bet the Astros marketing department will be right there with them.

On Sunday, the team will give away probably the only useful and valuable trinket of the whole weekend, a die-cast Astros Matchbox™ car.  It probably won’t have doors that open or be completely metal like they were when I was a kid, but Matchbox™ was always an infinitely better product than the suck-ass cheap knock-off Hot Wheels, by Mattel™.  Come to think of it, I’m surprised the Astros did not pick Hot Wheels to go with on this one.




Injury Report

Pittsburgh – A bunch of guys, with various injuries.

Houston – Some guys with bad injuries, some guys with not-so-bad injuries.




Our ‘Interesting Things To Look For This Series’
(a/k/a “I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I’m Just Amused”)

• The Astros Mail It In.  And not even by U.S. Mail.  More like by Italian mail, or one of those places with a socialist government where it takes 17 business days for a letter to be delivered across town, and then it’s all bent up and shit when it gets there.

• MMPUS Fans Celebrate.  At their bagful of swag and trinkets (“These dominos are cool!”), because they ran off Phil Garner and Tim Purpura, and because the owner is finally listening to them, and he will now run the team accordingly.

• Drayton McLane, Agonistes.  Empty rhetoric.  “It has been a championship organization, and will be again.”  “We will go out and get the right people, to make this work.  Prospective GM’s dream of a job with an organization like the Astros.”  And, oh yeah, “I am a MAN WITHOUT HONOR.  I’m a fucking liar, I am two-faced, and I go out of my way to cause harm to former employees.  Don’t forget that.”

• Goodbye, Craig Biggio.  An era comes to an end.  Turn out the lights, my man, because the party is definitely over.

“I saw the best plans of my team destroyed by an
              anemia of offense, starving hysterical naked,
       dragging themselves through the waiver wires at dawn
              looking for another bat,
       wrongheaded suits burning for the ancient heavenly
              connection to the an .850 OPS hitter in the machin-
              ery of night,
       who starved for runs and with a bullpen in tatters sat
              up dreaming in the supernatural darkness of
              Lidge's slider coming back to him, floating across the outside corner
              contemplating dropping at the last,
       who bared their brains to Heaven at the trade deadline and
              saw more production and Ausmus staggering on Men-
              doza Line illuminated,
       who expelled from the central garden for crazy &
              obscene routes to the flies the esteemed
              Mr. T.,
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in their underwear, burn-
              ing their money in wastebaskets and watching
              their shining knight Jennings lob the ball,
       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
              the middle market with a change purse embroidered “Alice”,
       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank fruity drinks with umbrellas in them
              in Kissimmee, like death, or purgatory, their
              hopes like a drama queen empty in the end,
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
              cohol and cigarettes and endless calls,
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
              lightning in the mind leaping toward deals for
              Tejada & Garland, illuminating all the mo-
              tionless world of Time between,
       Peyote-like delusions of long balls, in the backyard green tree cemetery
              park, dumb-ass whining over the rooftops,
              Wal-Mart desolated borough of joyless noons
              blinking in the ugly light, sun and moon and retractable
              roof vibrating and then it was clear – it was time 
              to act, to shitcan the Count, ranting about champions,
       who chained themselves to light rail for the endless
              ride from West U. to holy East Downtown on benzedrine
              until the noise of church bells and pre-game drunks brought
              them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
              battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
              into the dreary light of Truth,
       who sank into the darkness and slipped out of light
              floated out and drifted free down over the bayou at
              noon into the shimmering light, down over the ship canal
              and went down somewhere into Channelview, near Dell Dale,
              where they all belonged.”



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Pirates win the series, 3-0.  If Helen Keller was in the forest and a tree fell, would it make any noise?. 



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