SEASONS IN HELL Vol. I, No. 2

BUSTIN’ ROCKS IN THE HOT SUN

Astros (14-17) @ Rockies (12-18)

May 12-14, 2009

Berkman-Cooper Overdrive, a/k/a The Houston Smashstros, roll on down the highway into Denver Tuesday after sweeping the team from St. James of Southern California over the weekend.  It was maybe the worst drubbing of a bunch of Spanish priests since ol’ Three Finger Monteczuma was still dealing that splitter of his from the Big Mound.  The Astros will be looking at taking care of business this week against Colorado.  Hey, you may think you saw the Astros at their best this past weekend, but Carlos Lee and Miguel Tejada say you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Berkman says he needs to get himself back in the lineup, so we should be looking out for number one (seven).

The Rockies, by the way, start their early-season evening games in Coors at 6:40 p.m. Mountian (local) Time, instead of 7:10 or 7:30 or whatever.  This is probably due to weather concerns more than altruism, but it means fans in the Central Time Zone save an hour waiting to watch the game on FSSW (Fox Sucks in the Southwest.)  It is the least the Rockies can do, playing as they do in that bizarre time-warpish crack of existence known as the Mountain Time Zone (UTC-7).

Outside of Denver, Phoenix and/or El Paso, what the fuck is in the Mountain Time Zone, anyway?  Turns out, a whole lot of places named Utah and Idaho and Wyoming (“So what country do you want to go to?”  “Wyoming.”  “Sal, Wyoming’s not a country.”)  And chunks of other non-essential states like Nebraska and Kansas and the Dakotas, North and South.  In Mexico, they call it Pacific Time.  In Canada, they say, “It’s aboot time.”

Except for the Navajo Nation, Arizona, otherwise located in the Mountain Time Zone, does not observe Daylight Savings Time.  What the fuck?  Do the backasswards sun-dried fruits out there think Daylight Savings is somehow tied to the civil rights movement?  It appears that, once again, the Native American tribes are more in tune with nature than some palefaces we could mention.  Anyway, this non-observation of the obvious is why, even though they start their weekday evening home games at literally the same time as the Rockies, the Snakes games don’t start here until 8:40, instead of 7:40, like they do from Denver, which is in the same fucking time zone.  Confusing, yes?  Where is Eric Van Däniken when you need him?

You know what?  Fuck the fucking Diamondbacks.  Fuck Eric Van Däniken, too, for that matter. What the fuck do I care about a fifth place team full of nobodies, or a fat little Dutchman yammering about ancient astronauts?  Anyway, they are some other Series Preview writer’s problem now, not mine.

PITCHING MATCHUPS
Tuesday May 12 (7:40 p.m.)
Houston Felipé Paulino (1-2, 5.23)
This year’s receipient of the Official Cecil Cooper Mind-Fuck Award™, Michael Bourn Division.  Paulino looked really good in a couple of early starts, so naturally Skip sent him to the bullpen, where he got blowed up real good.

Colorado Ubaldo Jimenez (2-4, 5.45)
Ubaldo is a tantalizing prospect/up-and-coming talent with a really fun name to say.  He looks terrible at times, at other times terrific (his last two starts, specifically.)

Wednesday May 13 (7:40 p.m.)
Houston Mike Hampton (1-3, 4.91)
He’s had a rough go of it the last few times out.  I am beginning to wonder how long he will last.

Colorado Jason Marquis (4-2, 3.92)
Well known as a thermonuclear hot-head on the mound, Jason Marquis has battled himself his whole career – his potential is huge, but he is his own worst enemy.  In addition, he is a world-class prick.  But someone in Colorado has got him to settle down (so far), and he has quietly emerged as the Rockies ace.

Thursday May 14 (2:10 p.m.)
Houston Wandy Rodriguez (3-2, 1.80)
Wandy is Houston’s best pitcher, home or road, but he still carries a bit of a stigma as a hometown pitcher.  Doing well in Coors ought to drive a nail into that coffin of that notion.

Colorado Jason Hammel (0-1, 5.40)
Jason Hammel has been a spot starter for the Rockies this season, stretching out the rotation when the games start piling up.  The most notable thing about this former Rays farmhand is he is 6’ 6” and gangly.  Sometimes on his follow-thru he looks like the fucking Eiffel Tower out there.

INJURIES
Houston (Dutch) – Brandon Backe (strained intracoastal muscle, it gives him canal vision), 15-day DL, may return mid-May (supposedly), residents of Togo and Ulan Bator care passionately about this, no one else does; Jose Van Däniken (strained calf, apparently it broke out of the corral at Lee’s ranch and El Caballo chased it down and jumped on it, causing it to strain), 15-day DL, returns mid-June; Humberto Quackenbosch (shoulder), 15-day DL, returns mid-May, J.R. Towles wishes to dispute this diagnosis; Doug Broke-Hale (strained left hamstring), 15-day DL, returns late may, Broke-Hale is starting to remind me of my wife and I in Sam’s Club. . . we have the cart piled high and teetering with essentials like a 500-pack of Totino’s Pizza Rolls and four gallons of mayonnaise and stuff like that, then we hit an unseen bump in the aisle and shit starts falling off of both sides; Lance Van Däniken (sore left wrist), day-to-day-to-day-to-day-to-day-to-day, meanwhile Gunther sits in the three spot, like a Poi Dog, pondering.

Colorado – Taylor Buchholz (strained credulity), 60-day DL, due back whenever, just another one of the family jewels Purpura foolishly traded away; Jeff Francis (torn and frayed something-or-other), 60-day DL, due back next spring, or the next, anyway in Mountain Daylight Time; Franklin Morales (dazed and confused for so long it’s not true), 15-day DL, due back late May, he’s been hurt and abused, tellin’ all his lies; Ryan Speier (crashed and burned), 15-day DL, due back sometime, when in doubt, he whips it out, he’s got himself a busted hand, it’s a free-for-all; Troy Tulowitzki (left quadriceps strain. . . quadriceps = a leg muscle), day by day, day by day, oh sweet lord. . .

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
The season is just short of a quarter of the way over.  The season is still young, there is plenty of time left; time to regroup, to surprise, to upset the status quo, to run the startled leaders down from behind – in short, there is time to right wrongs, to fix what is broken, to tune up what isn’t broken, and to break through the walls this team has built around itself, to climb out of the hole this team has put itself in.  We all know, from recent past experience, that it is way too early to count the Astros out, to look beseechingly at the heavens and. . . what?  To throw our hands up in exasperation and anger and, needing an outlet for our rapidly backing up bile, to explode in bitter, bilious, righteous invective, aiming our enmity at anyone and/or everyone associated with the Astros who we decide is responsible for our anguish?

Well, it is too early for that, this season; there are those who will tell you it is too early for that, ever.  “Life is too short,” they will tell you.  Well, yes it is.  Yes it fucking is.

The NL Central Division, at this admittedly early point in the season, is beginning to shake out into a discernable pattern.

It is not likely this is how things will end up – I don’t imagine the Dickities will stay out of the second division for very long, for one thing – but in a general sense I think what we see here is pretty much what we will be seeing for some time, for this season and for several seasons after that.  The Cardinals, FTCubs, and Brewers are and will be the class of the division – “class” being a term I am using loosely here – and the Skyliners, the Gay Buccaroos, and the Astros will mostly be bringing up the rear, so to speak.  Any of the bottom three (well, except for the Pirates, maybe) might get it together and climb up into the top tier of the division for awhile, as the Reds are presently, but the stay will almost assuredly be short-lived.  This is probably the reality for awhile, get used to it.

Having followed the Astros for forty years, I am familiar with rooting for a team that is not going anywhere anytime soon.  For the majority of their history, the Astros have been there, done that.

It is not a terrible existence, pulling for a loser.  One might consider oneself lucky to have a team to pull for at all.  I remember the soul-deep, foreign, scarifying fear that suddenly crept in when John McMullen, in the midst of negotiations regarding a stadium lease or something or other back in the 1980s, suddenly and casually threatened to move the team.  God.  I think I really understood then, for the first time, what the phrase “the banality of evil” means.

There is always hope.  As long as the owner and/or management appear to care/be half-ass trying, there is hope.  But even when, by mid-May, or the All Star Break at least, those hopes get dashed just like, deep-down, you knew they would, even then there are so many rewards, just watching the baseball.  As a fan who, like many others, has become accustomed to pennant races and national attention over the last several years, I sometimes have to remind myself of my baseball fan roots, of where I came from.  When I can do that, when I can remind myself of who I am, baseball fan-wise, well. . . then whining about this or that move or trying to outthink the front office or tell them what they should be doing instead of what they are doing – it all just seems silly, and stupid, and pointless.

And then I become myself again, or, as it sometimes seems, myself for the first time; because my brand of baseball fandom is such that I often entirely forget the lessons learned previously, as a new season’s hope starts to carry me away.  I forget for a little while, anyway; until my baseball mortality creeps back in and messes up my reverie.  In the end, I simply cannot outdream what my fate is.  And my baseball fate is to follow this wonderful, wacky team that ends up disappointing me as often as not.  And I have no regrets.  No regrets at all.  And I wonder, once again, at the sweet bittersweet-ness that comes from loving this team, and this game.

For some reason thinking of love and baseball and the Astros in this context reminds me of Knoxville: Summer, 1915, the elegiac prose-poem chosen to preface James Agee’s last novel, A Death in the Family:

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts.  We all lie there, my father, my mother, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.  First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.  The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and, those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved, in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

THE WEATHER
I see a bad moon rising, followed by four strong winds, and then a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.  It sure got cold after the rain fell, then, here comes the sun.  Sunny days, oh ye children of the sun.  But wherever I go, a black cloud’s following me.  I think it’s gonna rain down down, down on me, so I howled at my ma through the driving rain.  Here in my car I feel safest of all, windshield wipers slapping time, out on the New Jersey turnpike, ridin’ on a wet night, beneath the refineries glow is when I saw it.  The marquee moon.  Just waiting.

Otherwise, it will be partly cloudy and mild.

Well, I sure take it with me wherever I go
And you might like to see it but it never does show
Like a wind in the valley that never does blow
Like the grass in the back you never did mow

It’s a black sky formin’ on the ridge
It’s a woman waitin’ standin’ on the bridge
It’s the price that you pay for walkin’ on the ledge
It’s everything you do and nothin’ that you did

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