The Pecan Park Eagle

First of all, allow me to make one fact perfectly clear. I love Lance Berkman as a baseball player, and especially as a Houston Astros baseball player. He’s one of our guys, one of our Houston heroes in a game of local loyalty that cries out for the constant presence of both good guys and bad guys.

That being said, and on some visceral level that takes me all the way back to my East End childhood days at Buff Stadium, I can’t stand the way Lance turns every runner who reaches first base into the opportunity for a little informal union hall meeting at the company rec room bar. Every time he smiles and starts a congenial conversation with one of “the enemy,” I wonder how that is registering with the kids who watch the game. Are we now giving the kids the idea that friendship, good sportsmanship, and nurturing the enemy are more important than holding our  opponents in contempt and winning the game? If so, what’s baseball and the world in general coming to?

Maybe things are just changing. When I was a kid at Buff Stadium in post WWII Houston (and on the sandlots too), we needed the other team to be our enemy, while we were playing the game, at least, and sometimes for slightly longer periods. We needed to see the Buffs as “the good guys” and the other team as “the bad guys.” It just made the play a little more exciting when we could see winning the game as the triumph of good over evil, and of justice prevailing over inequity. Lance’s fetish for fraternizing with players from the other team, and he’s not the only Astro who does it, just makes me feel, even at my advanced age, that the whole gang from both sides is going out for pizza after the game.

It’s a bell that doesn’t ring well in my baseball head – and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard. I don’t think Commissioner Bud Selig likes it either. I’ll always feel that the sight of Barry Bonds running out to carry Tori Hunter off the field after the latter robbed the former of a home run with an unreal All Star Game catch a few years ago was one of the flashpoints on Selig taking steps to make the All Star Game more competitive. I don’t like the steps he took, but I think I do understand why he took them.

During my baseball salad days, three names stand out as the Trinity of Villainy among Buff foes. All three men shared in common the facts that none of them ever played for Houston – and that all three men played for at least two other Texas League clubs at variable points in their baseball careers. We never found ourselves beyond their threat in Houston – and we also suffered some disappointing summer nights because one, or another, or the other managed to come to bat in the 7th, 8th, or 9th inning and typically crack something like a three-run homer to steal a beautifully pitched winning game away from the likes of Buff pitchers Al Papai, Octavio Rubert, or Vinegar Bend Mizell. It was very tough when that would happen to my 10 to 12 year old psyche.  Anytime that  any of the bad guys crashed an unanswered late inning home run, I’d start to feel sick. First I’d go home madder than a young buffalo bull (and mind you, this was back in days prior to our social concern about the availability of children’s ental health services) and just lay there in bed for hours, wide awake, listening to the monotonous roar of the attic fan and seeing that homer fly over the wall again in my mind, every time I closed my eyes.

I finally had a coach who picked up on this tendency in me. He taught me what we in Houston have all heard Craig Biggio say 10,000 times during his career: “When the game’s over, you just have to put it behind you and move on. There’ll be another game tomorrow.”

That worked for me, but it’s important to note what Coach Frank Veselka did not say. He did not say – Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t really matter who wins.

Of course it matters who wins! Otherwise, why play the game it all? And it does matter how you play the game. We all have to learn how to not go nuts when we lose.

The three bad guys who almost drove me nuts by their late inning hits (usually home runs) against the Buffs were Russ Burns, (BR/TR, OF) who played for Beaumont, Tulsa, Dallas, and Ohlaoma City; Les Fleming (BL/TL, 1B) who played for Beaumont, Dallas, and Shreveport;  and Joe “Snake” or “Cobra Joe” Frazier (BL/TL, 1B) who played for Oklahoma City and San Antonio.

Thanks to fellow SABR colleague Bill Hickman, I now have a photo Russ Burns (far right). Do you see how mean he looks. I felt he lived to put the hurt on Houston.                            

Les Fleming, as you can readily see from the old Cleveland cap he is wearing (far left), got some big league time with the Indians. He sort of looked like the Bluto/Brutus character from the Popeye cartoons. In fact, I think that’s why I became a big Popeye fan as a kid. When Popeye was beating up Bluto for Olive Oyl, I felt he was also beating up on Les Fleming for all of us Buffs fans. – The third guy, however, was unquestionably my most hated Buffs bad guy enemy. Joe Frazier approached the plate in the late innings pretty much in the style that his nickname suggests. He just slithered up there as Buff fans hissed their contempt for his presence on our turf.

Hisses from the fans didn’t bother Joe Frazier. He was just as coldblooded in the clutch as his nickname suggests. And he was pretty darn effective when it came to finding that right field wall in time to put the big hurt on our Buffs at the absolutely worst moment.

If you want more details on these three careers, check out each of these men at Baseball Reference.Com:

RussBurns: http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=burns-001rus

LesFleming: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/flemile01.shtml

JoeFrazier: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/frazijo01.shtml

The only thing that any of these men could’ve done to escape my memory of each as villains would have been to end up their playing careers on the roster of the Houston Buffs. None ever did. I guess they had no “good guy” blood in them.

That being said, I’m wondering if any of you today have any players you consider to be, or to have been, villains of our Houston Astros. If so, I wish you would leave a comment about them in the reply section that follows this posted article.

Thanks. And have a good day. Unless you are an enemy.

Tags: Baseball, Houston Buffs

This entry was posted on September 15, 2009 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.