Sweeps ARE sweet – even when the fruits of harvest arrive too late to bake a Word Series level cherry pie! It still tastes good to savor the good times in the middle of a baseball season in Houston that mostly has offered little more than mediocre to bad. We’ll take whatever rain of good fortune that wants to fall our way in the middle of a drought year that has been as dry of long term credibility in winning as I am able to lately remember.
On Labor Day Monday, the Houston Astros completed a long weekend of stunning results against the defending World Champion Philadelphia Phillies by rallying in the bottom of the 7th inning for two runs and a 4-3 victory. It proved to be the fourth straight win over the Phils and a minor, but irritating hitch in the Philly plans to wrap up the National League East as soon as possible. At a time the Phils were falling in four, their primary division rivals, #2 Florida and #3 Atlanta were both falling too – and the Braves were going down for the fifth time in a row, to leave Atlanta 8 games back with 25 games to go. Florida sits at 6 back of the Phils with 25 to go. The Phillies could’ve put both their division rivals on almost total flatline status by sweeping the going-nowhere-in-the-NLC Astros over the weekend, but they did not. The Astros are now in 3rd place in the National League Central, but in spite of the sweet dextrosity of their weekend windfall, they remain 14 games back of the NLC division-leading St. Louis Cardinals with only 25 games to go.
Let’s stay with the sweet for a few minutes longer.
Friday night’s 7-0 bombing of the Phils made the Astros look like a world class winner – with starter Wandy Rodriguez appearing as the second coming of a lefthanded Cy Young – or perhaps, more accurately, a modern day Rube Waddell. Saturday night’s 5-4 two-out walk-off Astros win reminded us why we weren’t that broken up in Houston over the club’s trade of closer Brad Lidge to Philadelphia following the 2007 season. When Kazuo Matsui banged out that that two-out game winning single with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th, it just reminded us of our own past heartaches with the affable Mr. Lidge in the close-it-out-or-die role for Houston. Sunday afternoon’s 4-3 rally win allowed us to renew hope in the future of rookie hurler Bud Norris and also in the pulse of Houston hitters to rally late for a second consecutive game. Then Labor Day afternoon’s completion of the four-game sweep, this time by another 4-3 count, took the cake, even if we couldn’t have cherry pie. Back to back doubles in the bottom of the 7th yesterday by Miguel Tejada and Hunter Pence off Phillies reliever Chan Ho Park tied the game at 3-3. When the Astros then loaded the bases off Park, Michael Bourn, the National Leaue stolen bases leader, and the main guy we got for Lidge in the post-2007 trade, stood in there and worked Park for an eight-pitch walk to force in what proved to be the winning run in a second straight 4-3 Astros win over the 2008 champs.
How sweet it is! – And let’s not forget Hunter Pence either! “Mr. Enthusiasm” cranked a key double in yesterday’s game – and he also banged out three home runs in the Phillies series. There’s room to float hope again. We simply must have the patience as fans to go through a little (dirty word next) rebuilding with younger players to turn all this sweet stuff into the ingredients over time that bake into that long awaited cherry pie of a World Series championship. Anything less than a full understanding of that ancient Branch Rickey formula for big league baseball success will eventually burn the Astros at every further shortcut move they attempt to take.
Check out our second photo from Monday on this one. I did see one thing yesterday that slightly rained on my indoors victory parade on Labor Day. A lot of you already know where I’m going with this point because of my constant references to it over the years. That is the inexcusable issue of fans interfering with fair balls hit down the line – or with balls hit to the outfield short of the rail or fences, where some fans reach over the rail or fences and above the field of play to try and catch the ball as a souvenir. Suddenly a long fly ball out becomes a home run. This tempting move happens most often near the left field Crawford Boxes, but it happens in right field too.
Check out the two idiots in the photo trying to get their hands on Pence’s game-tying double in the 7th. As it turned out, they didn’t come close – and Pence did reach 2nd base, anyway, the same place he would’ve been had either fan managed to touch the ball on its clear flight down the right field line as a fair ball. The point is about what fan interference may often give or take away. Sometimes it will result in a player being given a double when he only would’ve had a single, had the fielder been allowed to deal with the ball and without obstruction. At other times, a crazy bounce in the corner may produce a triple that will then be reduced to a double by fan interference.
I say come down hard on these ball-chasing fools. Throw them out of the ballpark. I get why that doesn’t happen, but Mr. McLane would be doing the rest of us a big favor, if he would have them escorted out of the ballpark – even if they did fulfill Mr. McLane’s understandable fears and never come back. There are still quite a few of us who go to the games to watch baseball – not to watch ball chasers, tee shirts being shot into the stands with slingshots, or games of ring toss in the stands between innings. I could better tolerate the attention-span revival games for younger fans, if we could just get rid of the ball-chasing cretins who put themselves into the game by interfering with balls in play.
Tags: Houston Astros
The Pecan Park Eagle 
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