Rays 3
Astros 1
submitted by Neil T
The Astros have been losing a bunch of games lately. “That’s baseball.” Collin McHugh. “Four straight losses,” Houston Astros.
I keep a book in my office to read at lunch if I think I can afford the time, and for the last few months it’s been Roger Angell’s Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion. I have two favorite baseball writers: Bill James and Roger Angell. They’re about as different as two writers can be, but they’re both good writers, and they both approach the world of baseball as fans. And when they were writing they both liked baseball fans.
I’ve made fun of James before in my recaps, by declaring myself a statistics god and going off on absurd statistical analysis, so tonight I thought I would do an Angell recap. It would be easy enough, all I would I have to do was write about Tropicana Field as a beautiful baseball field, and pick a player to say some stuff about. I was thinking about Valbuena, both because I admire Valbuena, and because Valbuena is about as good a place as any to start talking about this team. I was going to say that Carter looked like half of the population of a cop squad car. Glad I got that in.
I’ve reached a comfortable schtick with these recaps. I think of something funny in the world at large, write about that, and then cram a bit of a recap into it. But this week at lunch I read a New Yorker essay by Angell about three Detroit Tigers fans, and it made me think of us. These were three pre-internet friends, who went to games together, who called each other to talk about baseball stuff, who wrote letters to each other, and who checked the evening papers for the box scores. Evening papers. Papers.
Truth is, I don’t have much to say about baseball. I’m not baseball smart like HH or JimR. I’m not baseball news obsessive like anyone in the BusRide. I don’t really care what ex-Astros are up to. I had planned tonight to watch the game carefully and have something profound to say. Instead I sat on the back porch and drank whiskey and smoked a cigar and listened to Blum and Ashby. Fuck it, I’m so stupid that I can’t dislike Ashby.
But you know what? I’ve put up with a lot of emotional baseball havoc over the last three years, and there’s some stuff I know: McHugh pitched a pretty good game. Rasmus hit a dinger. Valbuena got a double, and that lifted my hopes, but they were subsequently dashed. And I shared it with a pretty good group of friends.
Astros lost. Astros may lose again. I will care, but I’ll share it with a pretty good group of friends. Here’s for the rest of the season.