Foamer Night

Last season, as a resident of Seattle, Washington, for the first half of the year, I watched Jack Cust play baseball, and it was not very impressive.

Now Cust has made the same Pacific Northwest-to-Southwest circuit that I did, signing a one-year deal with the Astros with an option for 2013, and it’s time for me to look at him in the new light that is the Astros team.

Cust certainly looks the part of a jovial masher. The big gut, the warm smile, the fluid left-handed swing, the intense focus in the batter’s box. And Mariners fans had every right to expect that he would and tuck a few baseballs into the low cloud cover above Safeco Field. In 2010, Cust hit 13 taters, and the year before that, taking some reverse-chronological bunny hops, he launched 25, and 33, and 26.

But last year, when all the Mariners asked for was a bit more of the same, Cust couldn’t seem to swing his way out of a flannel shirt.

First off, I don’t know why this happened. Could have been age or any other number of factors. What I do know is my personal experience, and it was this: Seattle is a chilly, damp place. If I was a free-swinging slugger, I would find it most unpleasant to ply my trade in Seattle.

Again, there’s likely no correlation, but I can say that Cust appeared as taught as a filled sail when he hit for the Mariners. Not knowing his hitting style before 2011, I can’t speak of a divergence from his norm. But his style last year suggested desperation and angst over “it’s a kid’s game” looseness and home run lust. An expression of concern hovered over his visage with regularity, and as his failures compounded he started leaving the batter’s box with a perplexed look, an appeal to some greater driving force beyond his understanding.

Not a good place to be for a home run hitter.

Michael Barr over at Rotographs paints an unlovely picture of Cust’s decline, and he may well be right. I’m no scientist, but most every one of the lines on his graphs is diving like a nuclear sub. What I’d offer as a response is that, if there is some psychological element to Cust’s drop-off, that a new approach might do him good.

That approach? Just mash. Swing as hard as you can. Let Houston’s warmth and humidity thaw the muscles in your arms, back, and legs, and set them free. Swing hard. Close your eyes when you do it. Laugh at yourself when you topple over after striking out.

The Astros are an unformed mass of baseball chaos, with few big names to draw anyone’s eye, and with no expectations to burden a player like Cust, who clearly sagged under the expectation that he’d anchor the middle of an order. Cust must not anchor a thing in Houston. He should swing his bat like a helicopter blade to lift the lineup one mighty, hubristic, ecstatic swing at a time.

To quote Zachary Levine in his recent post on the topic: “Despite a really down year last year, [Cust] had an on-base percentage 33 points ahead of the Astros as a team, .344 to .311.”

The stakes are low; the sky is high.

Put me on the spot and I still can’t name the new Houston Astros general manager from memory. Jeff Loon–, uh, Lunny–. Something Jerry? I know more about the Texans’ twelfth-string quarterback than I do the new head of the Houston Astros.

It’s Jeff Luhnow, of course. Add a ‘z’ and you’ve got Jeff Luhz-now, a role that the guy accepted so hastily it may well have been built into his contract (a 4-year deal).

“It’s a responsible plan,” Luhnow said in his introductory press conference, in reference to his game plan. “It doesn’t steal from the future to make things a little bit better in the present.”

Luhnow’s speech could pass for the deputy mayor’s annual address at the Elks Club Lodge in Lake Wobegon. But this deputy mayor is gonna gut the system. He even looks the part of the unassuming hatchet man. He’s taking over baseball’s equivalent of General Motors, and his job is to return a crap factory to its former glory. Not a job for a cowboy or a biker rebel. It’s an inside job, a quiet restructuring.

The next step–now that the guy has declared his unyielding patience and sensibility–is excitement. Excitement for the tumult of a team full of youngsters can bring. Excitement to watch a group of nobodies take to the field and stir the pot against all odds. Excitement about the first pick in next year’s draft. Excitement about our last year in the NL, and our future in the AL.

You’re in the front door, Luhnow, now it’s time to turn on some Zeppelin and rearrange the furniture!

It is just about official that the Houston Astros will move to the American League in 2013.

It’s real, like it or not. I feel like a child who’s been told by his parents that they’re moving across the country. Unseen powers will dictate whatever adventure lies ahead.

The move is not positive or negative; it just is. Astros fans will chase a new horizon. Change is inevitable. Unlike the proverbial child from above, I can embrace the complexity of the change.

The American League is no demon, nor is the designated hitter. I watched AL baseball for a couple of years, and it is a fresh field to till. There will be new players to learn, new visual experiences to cultivate–even watching on television trains the eye to take comfort in a familiar stadium setting. There will be a change in routine. The DH leads to a different attitude as the lineup turns over. Great hitting wins out.

If Lance Berkman would never hit without playing the field, that isn’t so much my problem. He certainly didn’t resign and forfeit his paycheck while occupying the designated hitter position in New York.

Next year, we’ll play in the NL, we’ll draft in the highest slot available, we’ll feature a new hitter, we’ll scour the West coast. The wine of novelty will overrun the cup.

This is not only the end of something, but the beginning.

“Few fans will be happy with the move to the American League.” – Chip Bailey on Ultimate Astros

Chip Bailey’s statement above is a strange one for sure, tinged with the kind of naivete and close-mindedness that represents the least adventurous of Astros fans. The assertion that a change to the AL will apply to almost all Astros fans, and cause them to grumble and moan at the injustice of it all, is presumptuous beyond measure. Perhaps Mr. Bailey will cower at the prospect of a new coast to conquer, but he should hardly apply his own quaking to the city as a whole.

In response to a general sense of unease amongst the Astros faithful, I’m calling for a more adventurous attitude, one befitting a proud state and an even prouder city. Houston is hardly a place to rest on its laurels and accept the fate that dusty history ordains. Rather this is a city of redefinitions, from the sprawling madness of its unzoned streets and the fearless richness of the local cuisine, to the gleam of luxury automobiles and the shine of our glass skyscrapers. Limitations are for others, not for us. History shouldn’t weigh us down, but lift us up.

I’m not suggesting there wouldn’t be growing pains if the Astros were to shift their gaze westward. There is a lot of NL Central charm and history that we’ll miss, like the bitter and feckless Chicago Cubs and their neverending melancholy, the St. Louis Cardinals and their history of having players who play for the St. Louis Cardinals, the Milwaukee Brewers and their legacy of changing leagues and representing the city of Milwaukee, and the Pittsburgh Pirates and their funny caps from a while back. Did I miss anybody? There are a lot of teams to remember.

I’m kidding, of course, and I love the NL. But it’s important to remember, in this 50th Anniversary year of the Houston Astros franchise, the frontier spirit that forged the team, and the state of Texas. Alamo heroes Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William Travis weren’t bearers of old and dusty standards trying to protect the status quo. They were weirdos from the hinterlands of young America, who trekked through the woods to Texas because they wouldn’t have anybody else and nobody else would have them. They moved west because they could give a damn about back east. They weren’t afraid of the freshest, most unknown territory in the world, and they never cowered in the face of dramatic change.

Judge Roy Hofheinz, the driving force in the formation of the Astros existence, identity, and world-famous home, would as soon have brushed his teeth with barbed wire than settle for the status quo. As a judge and a mayor he pushed continually for forward motion, for better or worse but often for the better. When selling the MLB on a Houston franchise, he carried around a scale model of the Astrodome because he knew it would blow their minds. After it did blow their minds, he proceeded to build the weirdest, wildest architectural creation ever seen, based on a premise so absurd that few understood what the ramifications would be. When we sit comfortably in our padded, air-conditioned, luxury boxed seats at Minute Maid Park watching an outdoor game inside, we can thank the Judge and his refusal to accept the grumbling of the masses as rote.

I’m not ready to equate a move to the AL with pure progress, per se, and heck, it might not even happen. But it would be a grand adventure, and one that we should match in spirit as Texans. We would strike out west to places barely known. We would play our fellow Texans with great regularity and flourish as true rivals. We would watch a professional hitter practice his scientific art, rather than suffering the foolishness of a pitcher at the plate.

For all of its charms, the Midwest isn’t our home. It has been a resting point, a place to catch our breath while we cast an eager eye towards the setting sun.

From a Houston Chronicle article, 1965, on the construction and capabilities of the Astrodome:

“The loudspeakers can project a piercing noise that can kill pigeons–’but it won’t be used that way,’ said Roy Hofheinz.”

These pneumatic tubes fired important messages (“The Judge needs more peanuts for the elephants in the Presidential Suite!”) from one end of the 8th Wonder to the other.

This and more Astrodome magic in this two-part documentary on the Astrodome, produced by Paul Peters in 1965: Part 1 & Part 2.

“Maybe I’ll look back in ten years and admire the guy, but for right now I can’t stand Tony LaRussa,” said Halfboot, my companion at the third-to-last game of the season at Minute Maid Park. The coaches and umpires were reconnoitered at home plate before the Astros-Cards game that was crucial for at least one of the teams involved. LaRussa’s barreled chest and mullet suggested the single-minded determination the manager seems to possess. Though rarely the darlings of baseball, betting against the Cardinals–and LaRussa–is rarely a wise idea.

That said, Halfboot and I were betting on spoilers last night, using the out-of-contention fan’s only remaining weapon against the teams still striving to extend their season: pettiness. If we can’t make it, neither should these chumps. Neither should this chump with the mullet.

As for the game itself, Matt Downs chipped a deep, high fly ball into the Crawford Boxes and Jason Bourgeious hooked a double down the left field line in support of Wandy Rodriguez.

Down four to two, a locked-in Lance Berkman hit the hardest fair ball of the night on Monday, in the 8th inning, from the right side of the plate. The traumatized remnants of Wesley Wright’s pitch clattered against the National League scoreboard as the two elite Cardinals sluggers to hit before Berkman, Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday, trotted home. The game was tied, and with the Braves having beaten the Phillies–as evidenced on the very scoreboard that Big Puma had just brutalized–the Cardinals had a chance to tie for the NL Wild Card title. If they won last night, they’d have stepped into a tie for first with just two games left to play.

Instead, the softest hit ball of the night dropped the red birds in the bottom of the tenth, when the game’s most inept hitter drove home Brian Bogusevic with a safety squeeze. Angel Sanchez had swung through just about every pitch sent his way by lefty sinker baller Jaime Garcia and any other pitcher he faced. Odd, then, that Brad Mills would leave him in the game against Octavio Dotel, when a sac fly from lefty Brett Wallace would have ended it. Not privy to the wisdom being delivered probably through every available media outlet from the TV broadcast to Twitter to Pony Express, Halfboot and I both entirely overlooked the squeeze option, so when Angel squared we grabbed each other like middle school girls getting a look at Justin Bieber from a hundred paces.

When Dotel–the old Astro–muffed the attempt to glove-scoop the squeeze bunt home, we whooped and cheered as though we were the team in the playoff hunt.

That Monday night game, against all odds, in front of more Cardinals fans than Astros, had actually meant something.

I was a good inning into the Astros-Rockies game on the DVR, enjoying a peaceful Sunday baseball game a few hours after the fact, when the playback froze up and created the digital equivalent of a chewed up tape. I was frustrated, all set to dig into the game, but I let it go and moved on to other distractions. Thanks, crappy cable box. You saved me from a sorry drubbing at the hands of what should have been a punchless Rockeis team. In the words of David Coleman over at The Crawfish Boxes, “Whatever you do, stay away from the box score.”

So instead of digging into that hot mess any further, I will now consider the most joyful moment I’ve experienced in weeks as an Astros fan: Brett Wallace’s mammoth home run from Saturday night:

The Houston Astros’ on-again off-again first baseman Brett Wallace swung the bat on Saturday night, and hit the ball. Nobody moved. Fielders who should have been sprinting in pursuit of the long fly instead trotted aimlessly and craned their necks to watch its path. The mechanisms that should have sprung to life when the ball was put into play seemed like they had rusted out.

The game had not broken. There was not a gas leak at Minute Maid Park that dazed the Colorado Rockies outfielders (besides, the roof was open). What happened was that Brett Wallace established a conclusion foregone: he hit a no-doubt home run. Wallace hit the ball so hard that the outfielders felt no need to feign chasing the ball to the wall. Center fielder Dexter Fowler moved with the vigor of a 50-something weekender nearing the end of a 2-mile jog.

This Astros baseball season has squeezed questions and uncertainties against accumulating losses, endless new faces, and bureaucratic filibustering. Consistency has come only in the form of ineptitude and loss (losing ballgames and losing players). The period of time spanning the instant Wallace hit the ball to the instant it clattered far away into the deep right center field seats was among the few–and it may be the only–gathering of seconds during which it felt okay to be an Astros fan.

The no-doubt home run is a tool of the bold and successful. Prince Fielder is this year’s Professor Emeritus of No Doubt Studies, with the swagger to match the mileage, and it’s not a coincidence that he’s on the Brewers, this year’s paradigm of a well-run franchise. Wallace’s shot was a momentary respite from the struggles of the season; a hint at the promise in his powerful build. Without checking, I’d say this was the only no-doubter of Wallace’s career. He took off out of the box like a shot and settled into a quick-paced shuffle around the bases. Nobody can know if he got into one in spite of himself or if it’s an indicator of some hitch that his time in the minors helped resolve. For a few seconds, it didn’t matter. Doubt was not a factor in that small equation.

The cynical reaction to last night’s big Astros victory over the Rockies would be to suggest that we came out on firmly top in a match-up of Triple-A teams.

The Rockies sent out a lineup of anonymous characters but for journeyman and former Astros Ty Wigginton and sole electric presence Dexter Fowler. For once, at least, the Astros didn’t field the least experienced three-hole hitter, last night’s honor for unknown heart of the order hitter going to Colorado 2B Jordan Pacheco.

JB Shuck, who is likely as foreign to non-Houston fans as Pacheco and company, embraced the leadoff role against ineffective young pitcher Drew Pomeranz, a soft-throwing lefty who must conjure unpleasant memories of Denny Neagle for Rockies fans. Shuck’s three hits and a walk helped Angel Sanchez, JD Martinez, El Caballo, and Matt Downs to a serving of RBIs piled as high as a party platter from Goode Co. barbeque. With a 5-run first inning, the game was in hand early on, with the Astros stacking a few more of the 1s and 2s on as the game carried on. The end result was a flip-flop of the normal Houston role as doormat for the more experienced teams.

Brett Myers continues to try to sway me into giving a lick about his pitching, and I continue to consider his pitching extraneous and dull. Give me a Henry Sosa start any day, with the highs and lows of development and promise. An inning of Jordan Lyles in relief (see below) is more interesting than most Myers starts. It’s a harsh stance, but these are tough times to be an Astros fan, and certain limits must be set. I’m all for watching our young players struggle on some nights and thrive on others, but I can’t spend much time thinking about a player like Myers. Good on him for pitching as well as he can, but I’ll keep the hitters in the forefront of my attention on his days on the bump.

Elsewhere, in Victoryville…

Watching the highlights of the Brewers’ crazy NL Central clinching party last night–from Prince Fielder’s big bomb to Ryan Braun’s late-inning ding dong to the Cards-Cubs scoreboard watching–I was struck with the amount of excitement and momentum that a mid-market team can build. Not so long ago, the Astros were enjoying such tidal waves of emotion, when the less heralded baseball cities stick it to the old stalwarts. Nowadays in Space City it requires imagination to envision a return to mattering in such a way, but it is far from out of question. The Brewers are a fine example of the life cycle of a rising franchise, building from within until the time was right to gamble on a few key veteran puzzle pieces.

With the first pick in next year’s draft, the future should feature at least one glimmering possibility.

Lyles Sighting

Jordan Lyles appeared as a relief pitcher, the first time I’ve seen him in the role (I missed his quick Cincinnati appearance). The results were sound; Lyles had the late life on his fastball that makes him effective, and which seemed to have faded as his big league innings accumulated.

I “watched” yesterday’s surprise attack day game against the Cincy Red via the generic lefty and righty hitters and scrolling numbers of MLB’s Gameday. Gameday is the closest that we in the modern age will come to watching the score come scrolling in on ticker tape. I suppose it’s a deficiency in my imagination, then, that I wasn’t able to conjure grand images of Base Ball just by following the play by play. The valiant men of yesteryear would have made mind maps out of the basic information, visualizing Wandy Rodriguez’s pointless pinpoint fastballs and futile falling curveballs. The tragedies of Aeschylus were composed under such television-free circumstances, so I probably should’ve been able to turn the skeletons of this Chili City narrative into just such a tragic tale of lofty aspirations, skewed expectations, and thwarted goals.

Alas, I could barely keep one eye on the game, pulled away as I was by the more mundane demands of modern life. By the time my attention returned the to Gameday box, Bronson Arroyo was–miraculously, but for this Astros offense–closing out the game. Arroyo’s last pitch, an 89-mph fastball, was also his hardest thrown. The Arroyo style is utterly lost on the Gameday format, as Gameday is ill-equipped to translate the looping lobs that follow Bronson’s gymnastic leg kick. As much as I enjoy the success of a strange cat like Arroyo, nobody wants the soft-throwers to beat their own team. Sadly, the Astros make kings out of lesser pitchers this year, and on Wednesday afternoon, Bronson Arroyo occupied the throne.