The Pecan Park Eagle

Harry Craft
Houston’s First MLB Manager
1962

HOUSTON MLB MANAGERS

Top 10 Houston MLB Managers in Wins

Through All Astros Games of Aug. 15, 2018 *

* As the only active manager with a dynamic record in 2018, A.J. Hinch’s record also includes the 74 wins and 47 losses he’s added through 8/15/18 to his career Houston mark beyond the 341 wins and 307 losses he has registered in our first table of this managerial data through the complete regular season win mark that all managers had achieved through 2017.

Win Records here do not include post-season games.

Bill Virdon, whose field leadership took the Astros to their first serious “ball hangs at the lip of the cup on the 18th hole” fashion” runs at the World Series in the late 1970s and 1980, is still the all time wins leader with 544 regular season victories.

Larry Dierker’s .553 winning percentage tops all Astros managers with serious time at the helm.

The addition of these 2018 still-in-progress season wins-to-date allows A.J. Hinch to move from 5th to 3rd place on the all-time (let’s call it what it is) Astros regular season wins list.

On the morning of August 16, 2018, an off-date, the Astros have played 121 regular season games and they have 41 games left to play. It is possible, but not probable, that Hinch will catch Dierker for 2nd place this year. The Astros would have to go 34 and 7 in their final 41 games to make this happen, but that doesn’t matter, anyway. Either way, they are both part of the brainy baseball-wise mosaic that has taken the Houston Astros to the top of the baseball world in ways too numerous to list here.

I’m also a big fan of Bill Virdon, Art Howe, Phil Garner and the Roman Candled temperament of Hal Lanier for the goose he gave our aspirational sails back in 1986.

Anyway, the information here is for your own reveries on all we’ve had to go through to get where we are today. In reality, managerial success is an art form that isn’t dependent so much upon which manager had the most wins, but what they each in their own ways brought to the canvas of baseball as THE great American game.

Enjoy the day off from Astros baseball, everybody. And let’s hope the Astros pack those clubs they found useful in the Wednesday night, 12-1, execution of the Rockies at MMP. There are some hungry division title seals awaiting us in both Oakland and Seattle this trip, and we will need all the clubs our guys can bring to bear against the opposition.

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Babe Ruth Died 70 Years Ago Today:

August 16, 1948. 

Thank You for the Important Reminder, Tom Hunter ~ Time Flies Far Too Quickly ~ Even for Heroes like The Babe. I was 10 at the time and I had to run to my room to cry in private when I heard the news on the radio. I wasn’t yet old enough to know that it was sometimes OK to cry in front of your friends when somebody very special passed away. Tons of us fans still love and miss you, Babe! ~ Hope you are at peace, wherever you may be. ~ If I hadn’t given up my anthropomorphic view of Heaven many years ago, I could probably still see you hitting monster shot homers up in the clouds. ~ But that’s OK. ~ I can still hear the sound of your bat making contact with the ball in my mind. ~ It is a sound that I never got to hear in person on earth. ~  It is so cool!

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

Tags: HOUSTON MLB MANAGERS

This entry was posted on August 16, 2018 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Baseball, History. 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.