Holy crap, a three-game win streak to start off the month. It was against the Washington Generals, and it wasn’t the prettiest series ever, but still.

And now here come the dumbshit Cubs, straight from a rainout and three losses before that. They have to go back to Pittsburgh after this series to make up Wednesday’s rainout, and then they fly home to Milwaukee for three with the Brewers. Imagine that, making up a rainout and THEN flying to Milwaukee. I hope their fucking make-up game gets rained out again and they have to keep going back to Pittsburgh.

Which brings me to my main point, which is fuck the Cubs. They’re five games under .500 and won’t be going anywhere this year. They’re bringing Carlos Zambrano back from that bullpen experiment and letting him start in Houston. He’ll probably hit a double and a homer.

This is the Astros’ last home series for a while. They start a long-ass road trip Monday with four games in Colorado, then three in New York against the Yankees, then a day off, then three in Kansas City. It would be nice to see the road greys a little more often; I’m tired of the red ones.

Minute Maid Park

Friday, June 4, 7:05 p.m. CDT – FSH-HD
Saturday, June 5, 6:05 p.m. CDT – FSH-HD
Sunday, June 6, 1:05 p.m. CDT – FSH-HD

Notable giveaways

Friday – An aluminum water bottle that doesn’t look too bad, and the usual Friday Night Fireworks

Saturday – For one group you’ve got Praise in the Park with the concert by Whoever and Whomever, but it’s also Young Professionals Night sponsored by Budweiser. And also all those asswipe Cubfans will be there. So my advice is to take your sweet Jimmy Wynn bobblehead and go find a nice quiet seating section all to yourself.

Sunday – More of those Please Come to the Park specials. By September, you’ll be able to buy one ticket, then bring your entire homeowners association for $5 more.

Projected Matchups from Astros.com

Friday
Carlos Zambrano (1-3, 6.12)  v. Felipe Paulino (0-7, 4.40)

This is Zambrano’s first start after that move to the bullpen. He’s made 27 appearances against the Astros and has a 13-7 record. Carlos Lee is 21-for-55 (.382) against Zambrano with five doubles and five homers, and look out, Cory Sullivan is 3-for-4 with a homer. However, Lance Berkman is 10-for-68 with 18 strikeouts, though he also has four homers.

Paulino is 0-2 lifetime against the Cubs, including a loss earlier this season. Nobody on the Cubs has more than 5 at-bats against Paulino, and the only one with more than one hit is Soriano. He’s 3-for-4 with a double and a homer.

Saturday
Carlos Silva (7-0, 3.12)  v. Roy Oswalt (3-7, 2.78)

Silva beat the Astros back in April and just kept going. I don’t know how any Cubs pitcher could be 7-0 this year, but I’ll bet Silva’s in for an epic crash. Probably not tonight though. Berkman is 2-for-4 against him with two homers, and Carlos Lee is 9-for-30.

This is Roy’s first game back after getting ejected for tying his dick in a knot and waving it at the umpire on Memorial Day. Roy said he was just waving it at Drayton McLane and pointing toward New York, but the umpire was a dickhead and ran him anyway.

Everyone on the fucking Cubs has batted against Roy. ErrorMiss has four homers off him, and BunnyHop Soriano and Derrek Lee each have three. However, at any given time, two of those guys are likely to be hurt, so it may not be as bad as it looks. Also, Lee and ErrorMiss each have 17 strikeouts against Roy.

Sunday
Ryan Dempster (3-5, 3.72) v. Brett Myers (3-3, 3.04)

The Dumpster has lost five of his last six decisions. He has 19 career appearances against the Astros and only a 4-10 record to show for it. Nearly everyone has hit him well except for Sullivan, Quintero, and Feliz, though Feliz does have a homer off him. Berkman has four homers off Dumpster, Pence has two, and Lee also has one.

Myers is 7-3 against the Cubs. Derrek Lee is the only Cub who’s hit him consistently, going 15-for-29 (.517) with four doubles, a triple, and three homers. No one else has much of an average against Myers, though Soriano has three homers against him, ErrorMiss has two, and Nady and Byrd each have one.

Injury Report

Chicago – John Grabow and Esmailin Caridad are both on the DL. Derrek Lee is questionable because of a hamstring thing. Don’t look so shocked.

Houston – Bud Norris and Chris Sampson are on the DL. Meanwhile, Roy Oswalt has another case of Tit in a Wringer, and team physicians are afraid it may become chronic. The only possible cure is in New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, or maybe Tampa Bay.

Discuss today’s game in the Gamezone.

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 3

May 31-June 3, 2010

Nationals (25-26) vs. Astros (17-33)

Minute Maid Park
501 Crawford Street
Houston, TX 77002

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MEMORIAL DAY MUSINGS. The 2010 Memorial Day celebration features an afternoon series-opener between the young-ish and ascending Washington Nationals, and your old-ish and circling-the-drain Houston Astros. Contain yourselves, people. However, this series is less meaningless that it normally would be, mostly because of the Nats, née Senators, who are reportedly emerging as a truly interesting team to watch.

Personally, I am glad the Nationals are coming to town, as I haven’t seen them yet this year, and I want to know what all the hoo-ha (relatively speaking) is about. Washington has cobbled together a collection of talented vagabonds (Adam Dunn), once-greats (Pudge Rodriguez – currently on the DL – and Livan Hernandez), useful plodders (Josh Willingham), emerging stars (Ryan Zimmerman), and exciting newcomers (Nyjer Morgan and Stephen Strasburg, among others) into a competitive and interesting team. (OK, I jumped the gun on Strasburg, but he is the first thing everyone brings up when the subject is the Washington Nationals. . . Strasburg is the pitching wunderkind currently shutting down minor league offenses on his way to an almost sure call-up later this season. . . His minor league record in his debut season, so far: 6-1, 0.99 ERA, 22 hits and 54 strikeouts in 45+ innings through 9 starts in AA and AAA. . . There was some speculation Strasburg might get his first major league start against the Astros in this series, but insider wisdom now has his debut pushed back to the June 8-10 set vs. the Pirates. . . The Astros, or the Pirates, hmmm. . . The Nationals apparently want to optimize the youngster’s chances at initial success.) One of the joys of being a baseball fan generally is seeing each season which team or teams one totally did not expect to do anything emerge as something other than a running joke or a perpetual also-ran. This season, for me, it’s the Nationals. Maybe one season, in the distant future, it’ll be the Astros.

Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this Monday’s game whilst meanwhile in the midst of some serious gluttony, perverse behavior, no doubt excessive drunkenness, and (hopefully) some stimulating voyeurism. In other words, I’ll try and keep track of the Astros game while also participating enthusiastically in my neighborhood’s annual Memorial Day block party.

This friendly holiday get-together, which started off 18 years ago as six young families on my street meeting in someone’s backyard to barbecue, drink, and shoot fireworks, has by now grown to include three contiguous city blocks, with a concomitant increase and variation in the shenanigans involved when a whole lot of ‘grown-up’ friends get together and get sloppy drunk and drop some of their inhibitions. At our confab a few years back, as reported here, my neighbor’s usually shy and demure wife got tanked up on tequila, and/or repressed something-or-other, and suddenly jumped up in front of 30 or so of us and ripped off her shirt, revealing some really decent (as I recall) All-American middle-aged suburban housewife breastesses. Last year, I think it was, another couple we know got into a loud, beer-fueled, mid-party public argument, which culminated with the wife threatening to engage in a mega-dalliance that evening with whichever neighborhood guy or guys would step up to the plate, so to speak; all in the name of a sort of revenge-fuck scenario. I, of course, was superficially appalled at this loss of public decorum – I was standing right next to my wife and a couple of her friends when this scene broke out – and I never found out for sure, a.) if she was serious, and b.) if so, who took her up on her threat/promise/offer. Oh, I heard rumors afterward, but I don’t truck in salient gossip and rumors :sniff:  Frankly, I doubt anything actually came of it. Usually these drunken encounters are laughed off for the next few days, and forgot (mostly) within a week or so. Until the next party, that is.

But, anyway, amidst all this Peyton Place-ish fun, I’ll be keeping an eye on the Astros game. Partly to see the Nationals for myself, yes. But also because, as tempting as it is, I do not want to semi-ignore the 2010 Astros and let this season get by me. As one gets older, one realizes how quickly time can slip by, and how the people or things one really loves can get away, especially if they are ignored or taken for granted. As the lady once said, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. I don’t want that to happen to me, not this year or any year, not with the Astros. And anyway, a team as bad as this version of the ‘Stros can be as interesting to watch as a successful outfit, if you look at it in a certain way. Somewhere down the line, three or five or seven years from now, when our team is back in the thick of things, we’ll perhaps be able to look back at 2010 and say, there is where the turnaround began. That is when the team bottomed out and finally started to do the things it took to get them back among the elite. I want to be able to clearly remember these bad times, which will make the good times even sweeter, when they come. It is not the same if I have to look it up on Baseball Reference or somewhere, because I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time.

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PITCHING MATCHUPS

Monday May 31, 2010
Game Time: 1:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Nine Inning Lunch Break, sponsored by O’Reilly Auto Parts. For $40 you get a field box seat, and vouchers for $20 worth of MMPUS food; which translates roughly to a 6-inch overcooked hot dog, and a 10 oz. bottle of water.
Matchup: Washington – Luis Atilano (4-1, 4.82) Atilano is a kind of scatter-armed right-hander who is usually gone by the middle innings because of a high pitch count. He did beat Tim Lincecum in his last start – well, he left after 5 1/3 innings on a day Lincecum wasn’t in top form, and his bullpen held the lead for him. 2010 Run Support: 4.86 per start.
Houston – Roy Oswalt (3-6, 2.35) Expect Oswalt to pitch anywhere from quite well to exellent, and to either get a no-decision, or pick up his seventh loss. 2010 Run Support: 2.30 per start.

Tuesday June 1, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Double Play Tuesday, sponsored by Powerade. Too complicated to explain, it is not worth your trouble, take my word for it.
Matchup: Washington – Craig Stammen (1-2, 5.60) Stammen is the leading candidate for demotion from the rotation when Stephen Strasburg gets called up. He did pitch well in his most recent start, versus the Giants. 2010 Run Support: 4.30 per start.
Houston – Brett Myers (3-3, 3.22) Meyers continues to be solid this year, and while he has been treated more kindly by factors out of his control than Oswalt has this season, he probably deserves a better W-L record than he has. That’s life, I guess. 2010 Run Support: 4.20 per start.

Wednesday June 2, 2010
Game Time: 7:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None
Matchup: Washington – John Lannan (2-2, 5.01) Lannan is one of those guys who has looked like he is about to put it all together and become a top notch starting pitcher for awhile now. He is still only 25. His problems to date have mostly centered around arm injuries, but that seems to be behind the lefty now. He has pitched really well in his last four starts, and appears to be ascendant. 2010 Run Support: 4.70 per start.
Houston – Wandy Rodriguez (2-7, 5.37) Among all the things that have gone wrong for the Astros in 2010, the decline and fall of Wandy is one of the more troubling. He looks less like the composed and precise Wandy of the past few seasons and more like the confused and disorganized Wandy of earlier years more and more with each start. He got hammered last time out in Cincy, getting knocked out early and pushing the already at-the-breaking-point bullpen closer to the, well, to the breaking point. 2010 Run Support: 3.10 per start.

Thursday June 3, 2010
Game Time: 1:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Nine Inning Lunch Break again, brought back by popular demand indifference. Whoo-ha!
Matchup: Washington – Walter “The Big Train” Johnson (417-279, 2.17) The Nationals rotation is all fucked up at this point, so manager Jim Riggleman has Johnson pitching in a pinch. Even though The Big Train has been dead now for 65 years, Riggs says he still has something left on his fastball, and most observers give the admittedly long-moldering Johnson a better than even chance of shutting down the Astros offense.
Houston – Mark “The Thermonuclear Hothead” Lemongello (21-29, 3.65) After having witnessed Brian Moehler’s recent ‘emergency start’ in lieu of Bud Norris, it looks like Astros manager Brad Mills will give the nod to Lemongello to take the ball for this one. The erratic and irrational Lemongello, who tore his Astros uni to shreds after one bad start, and bit his own shoulder after another, will need a work-release assignment from whichever prison he is likely a resident of these days to be able to pitch in the game. I always thought Lemongello should’ve done something creative with his last name, like fellow Jersey-ite John Bongiovi. Le Mon Jello, yeah, that’s it, sounds kinda French.

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FORTUNATE SON. I walked out of my front door this morning, with the intention of finding a suitable place in my front yard to plant my American flag.

My flag isn’t big or fancy or anything – three feet by five feet, I think, and affixed to a homemade pully system I welded to an eight foot, 2” metal pipe several years ago. At the time I wanted to show my boys, who were little then, how to properly raise and lower a flag. I wasn’t trying to overtly force reverence for the flag or patriotism on them. That would have been pointless, as it always is. I just thought it might have been useful to them in the future to know flag-raising and -lowering decorum. Which, I guess it was, I don’t really know. At any rate, that flag evolved into the one I reflexively jam into the front yard for the “big” holidays – Memorial Day, 4th of July, Veteran’s Day, etc. I don’t even know for sure why I do this, really.

I have never been a flag-waver, and to be honest, I am always a bit uncomfortable around people who are. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not for me. I do not think one has to be overt about it to be deeply patriotic. Just because I tune out Kate Smith and her successors at the ballpark every time that 100-year-old song that means almost nothing to anyone is played does not mean I do not have deep feelings about the country and the men who have served it, and/or deep misgivings about 9-11, the immediate aftermath of which is when the God Bless America tradition at the ballpark started, I believe. Love the country, HATE the song.

I got into a violent argument once about the Lee Greenwood song, God Bless The USA. It is, I argued, a flagrant and smarmier rip-off of the already smarmy God Bless America, written and sung by a talentless hack; the lyrics are actually negative and defeatist (“at least I know I’m free” At least?); all it really adds up to is Lee Greenwood’s bank account gets fatter (through royalties) every time there is a national tragedy and hundreds of citizens are killed and that piece of shit song gets dragged out, again. I got punched right in the chest for my trouble on that one.

I don’t know why I react so negatively to coercive patriotism/nationalism. I do know I wasn’t taught to be that way. My parents weren’t subversives at all; in fact my maternal grandfather, my mother’s father, was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and one of the most overtly patriotic people I’ve ever met. At any rate, the reaction I have isn’t even a thinking process; it is visceral and basic, like being repulsed by spiders, or a bad odor.

To be honest, I think I just react negatively to people wanting to decide for me what I must believe in, or how I should feel, to qualify for whatever their concept of what a ‘real American’ is. But, I don’t mean to make too big a deal of this, it is nothing most of the time. I don’t hold my ears or make faces whenever God Bless America is cued up at a ballgame, I just tune it out. As long as they leave me alone, I don’t care what anyone else wants to feel about it.

I do put the flag out on Memorial Day, though. Just because I don’t buy into the cookie-cutter definition of what patriotism is does not mean I do not want to honor the guys who died fighting in our wars. I absolutely do; and, interestingly, from some of what I’ve read, a great many of those guys didn’t buy into any pat definition of patriotism, either. Whatever they believed when they enlisted (if they did), many who survived say that when the heat was on, they weren’t thinking about preserving our inalienable rights, or defending big business or the American Way or anything like that. All they were really fighting for was the buddy next to them in the foxhole, or the guys in their unit, whatever. When they were being shot at, history’s big picture meant little to them, and patent bromides about the glory of dying for those back home meant nothing. That stuff was mostly written by guys who never were shot at, anyway; who never saw action at all.

Those guys in the trenches and foxholes and rice paddys, the one’s who did not get to come home, the one’s who we honor on this day – they were likely part of an arbitrarily thrown together group, made up of men from all over, all colors and ethnic backgrounds and beliefs. And whatever their initial misgivings may have been, they put them aside and banded together and fought to the death for each other; and, as a consequence, for us. Which is as it should be, I think. Fuck the phony patriotic bullshit. A bunch of very different people coming together and fighting a common enemy to the death, for our benefit, side by side. . . if that does not epitomize what we believe America is really all about, then what the fuck does, I ask you? I’m planting the flag in my lawn for those guys, all those guys; and despite all the hedonistic dissolution the Memorial Day holiday brings and has come to represent in our culture, I will be thinking of them, and what they did and how they ended up, all the way up to when I drain my last brewski of the day. Thanks to you all, the beer sure is good. You can rest in peace.

That’s just me, showing my patriotism. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it, but I hope all the dead guys understand.

And there’s winners and there’s losers
But it ain’t no big deal
‘Cause the simple man, baby, pays for the thrills, the bills
The pills that kill

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INJURIES

Washington
•A whole shitload of guys you’ve never heard of – and who I don’t feel like listing here. The highlights are Pudge Rodriguez (bad back, out until late next week) and Jason Marquis, who has bone chips in his pitching elbow and is awaiting surgery

Houston
• Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after right rotator cuff surgery
• Bud Norris (RHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 28 with a bursitis and elbow tendinitis and a seriousy fucked-up ERA

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ALL ALONE IN THE END ZONE. It is easy to bitch and moan about the 2010 Houston Astros – I’ve done so myself, believe it or not, a few times here and there lately. But of course, the better part of me knows that sometimes in life you don’t get exactly what you were hoping for, and sitting around whining about what you did end up with really isn’t a viable option. You just have to go with what you’ve got. Sure, the Astros offense this season resembles a giant slice of Swiss cheese, and the starting rotation looks like the Maginot Line after the Germans and anyone else who wanted to march past/around/through it were done. Too bad, so sad, that is what we have for this season. So we just have to show up with it, every damn day, and hope for the best.

For some reason, thinking about this (and with Craig’s recent excellent recounting of his high school track career in mind, also) I was reminded of something that happened back when I was in high school. After football ended in the fall of my senior year, and before baseball practice started in the spring, all the inactive athletes/baseball players were dumped into what we called “rag PE”, a 4th period gym class which was basically made up of all the kids not participating in any school sport, or ‘extracurricular activity,’ as they called it back then. Some of the kids in the class had some undeveloped talent, but were just not inclined to play organized sports; but by far most were true non-athletes. When the rest of us were put into that class, the coaches pretty much left us to our own devices. I guess they figured, like in a prison, the alpha figures would emerge and run things, and as long as there wasn’t a riot or a lot of illicit homosexual sex, we would mostly be left alone.

Sure enough, right away, the class divided itself into two groups. One, led by one of my best friends, a guy who lived down the street from me named Suarez, went off to an open field behind the auto shop and started playing some game they had made up and that appeared, from a distance, to be a mix of American football, rugby, soccer, and maybe Greco-Roman wrestling. I played with them for a couple of weeks, but I never could figure out the rules. I think they were made up on the fly. It was a cool game and all, but for whatever reason I just couldn’t get into it. Eventually, I drifted over to the other group.

That group had separated into two large teams, maybe 25-30 people on each, evenly mixed with athletes (jocks, in the parlance), and non-athletes (stoners, brains, hoods, straights/narcs, etc.) They played a big touch football game on the practice field next to the boys gym every day. The rules were that no athlete could do anything except stand around on the line and bullshit during the plays. Only the non-athletes were allowed to man the “skill” positions, which in this game meant wide receiver, mainly. However, myself and a pretty good curveball pitcher we called ‘Montrose’ (because he wore a Ronnie Montrose T-shirt every third school day) were designated as QB and nominal leader of each team, the thinking being no play would ever be completed or even be got off if the QBs were stoners, or brains. The challenge for Montrose and I was to see which of us could get the most out of our mostly unskilled and highly disorganized charges, and win the game each day.

It was an all-pass game, three alligator rush, three completes for a first down. On offense, I would stand back in a deep shotgun formation, deploy my twenty or so eligible split ends and flankers, call the signals, and then start scrambling around like hell, because no one ever counted all the way to three alligators. I’d be looking with some expediency for an open guy, any open guy, on my team, who I thought might have an outside chance at catching the ball if I threw it his way.

I don’t know how the kids on my team felt about me or those games, but I had a great time playing with them. Right away I found out that a skinny, long-haired, braces-wearing sophomore stoner named Derek had hands sticky like glue (or maybe THC resin), and would catch just about everything I threw his way. He was a friend of my brother’s, which is the only reason I threw the ball to him in the first place. But when I realized how reliable he was, he became my go-to guy, my clutch receiver, sort of my Fred Biletnikoff, I guess. He rarely let me down. There were a few other kids like that, ones with no discernable athletic tendencies who, when they actually got involved in the game, surprised us all (and maybe themselves) with their latent touch football skillz.

My favorite day of that whole experience, we had played almost to the end of the period and were behind a few points, and I knew we needed a really big play to pull that day’s contest out. I thought about my man Derek, but there were problems with that choice. First of all, he wasn’t real fast, and he wasn’t inclined to run very much anyway (most of his receptions were on three to five yard dump passes I threw to him when I was being chased all over hell and back by, like, twenty defensive linemen.) Plus, even the spastics non-athletes on the opposing team eventually figured out Derek was my favorite receiver, and he was octuple-teamed on many plays. So sending him deep then wasn’t a really good option. I considered my other resources, such as they were, and finally settled on a guy we called Switchblade, a vaguely athletic looking ‘hood’ who was a junior, I think, although he sported a moustache and full beard.

I told Switchblade to line up on the right side and run straight up the field, and I’d hit him. I told the rest of the guys to run around and look for an open spot, in case I had to check down on the play. We all exchanged a fist bump and then broke the huddle and lined up. On the snap I rolled right, and noticed right away the guys on the D-line had made no pretense of counting alligators at all this time, and were coming after me. I looked for Switchblade, but under pressure he’d fucked up his pattern completely, and had run about a 15-yard out, which wouldn’t have done us much good at that point, even if by some miracle I was able to deliver the ball somewhere in his vicinity, and he caught it. I checked for Derek. He’d actually run a fairly deep pattern up the middle, but was heavily covered by seven or eight guys, plus I noticed my counterpart Montrose, playing free safety for his team, had started drifting over in Derek’s direction. Then I saw, all the way across on the left sideline, one of my guys streaking straight up the field, wholly uncovered. It was a kid we called T-Shirt.

In those days, we wore school-issued jockstraps and grey flannel gym shorts to PE. That was it – no shoes, no shirt, nothing else. There was this one kid in the class, though, whose fundamental religious beliefs did not allow him to run around that scantily-clad in public, even if just at PE, so he wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt out there every day. T-Shirt was very pale, about 5′ 4″, and he couldn’t have weighed more than 90 lbs. The whole time I was in that class, I’d never heard the kid say a word, to me or anyone else. He was on my team, but I’d never even thrown him a ball. But I didn’t have a lot of other options right then; I was nearing the right sideline, and the other team’s rushers were closing in. So I checked to see if T-Shirt was looking back my way, which he wasn’t. I let it fly, anyway, right before three or four guys on the other side grabbed me by the stretched-out waistband of my shorts and pulled them (and me) down.

That pass seemed like it went 50 yards in the air, but it was probably more like 25 or 30 (I couldn’t throw a pass 50 yards.) I sat there on the ground with the guys who’d “sacked” me, and watched the rest of the play. As the ball got nearer to T-Shirt, I realized I’d led him pretty well, and if he saw it he’d at least have a shot at catching the perfectly spiraling ball, a very long shot, but. . . At almost the same time, it occurred to me a regulation-size football, coming from that far and high, point-down, might kill him if he didn’t catch it.

I think everyone on the field that day was watching as the ball approached T-Shirt, most of us expecting a negative outcome. T-Shirt finally looked back, at the last minute, and then reached up for the ball on about the five-yard line. The force of it knocked him over, and he tumbled into the end zone. I couldn’t see what happened to the ball from where I was. Then I saw T-Shirt get up slowly, holding the ball under one arm, and smiling big. Everybody on both teams started jumping up and down and running toward him, and some were chanting “T-Shirt, T-Shirt. . . ” He tried to act all nonchalant and all, but no way.

I don’t know what ever happened to T-Shirt, what became of him after high school. Wherever he is, I’ll bet he remembers making that catch. He should, it was one of the best receptions I have ever seen, by anyone, anywhere. I am guessing that day was probably one of T-Shirt’s better ones. I know I still remember it very clearly, because it was definitely one of mine.

You know, man, when I was a young man in high school
You believe it or not?
I wanted to play football for the coach

And all those older guys
They said he was mean and cruel, but you know
I wanted to play football for the coach

They said I was too little and too lightweight to play linebacker
So I’m playing right end
But I wanted to play football for the coach
I had to play football for the coach

Because, you know some day, man
You gotta stand up straight
Unless you’re gonna fall
Then you’re going to die

Astros lose the series, 1-3.

THE WEATHER

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