Pictures of the Moment
Astros Win Record Game # 103
September 29, 2017
Astros Ryan Pressly Gets Called Strike 3 on Jace Peterson of O’s
The Astros outfielders did their little victory dance to celebrate the occasion. Now, on Sunday, 9/30, the Astros have a chance to expand their club season wins record to 104 in the last game of the regular season at Baltimore.
It sometimes remains hard for me to comprehend how far we’ve come in Houston as a major league city since our innocent beginnings against the Chicago Cubs on April 10, 1962. Our inner core of professionals who have built this house from Day One have all done their contributing parts, as have our players, owners, and moments of success and disappointment on the field. They have all been great teachers ~ and the seasons themselves have all provided fans with teaching points that have helped us come to terms with Great Expectations as they are brought crashing to the shores of a partisan club MLB season beach.
All of them, not just the Crane-Luhnow-Hinch team, have done their parts, even when it was personal experience over time instructing us avid fans from the lessons of our own pain as an opportunity to recalibrate our own often excessive expectations.
Nobody expected any kind of big success in our first big league year of 1962, As a result, no one was surprised or disappointed when the original Colt .45s finished in 8th place in the NL. By 1971, however, when the renamed Astros still had not found a way to being a serious contender after ten years in the big leagues, fans were beginning to ask the adult version of a child’s favorite question on long boring auto trips: “Are we there yet?”
Had this business of being an Astros fan been an academic course, many people would have earned their master’s degrees over the two-season course of 1979-1980. The Astros were finally getting close enough to feel the burn when a pennant suddenly slipped away at the last moment, the cries of disappointment slipped into agony: “Oh! This hurts bad! I don’t know if I can take much more of this! Come on, Astros! Let’s make it right for once!”
The baseball gods saved the Ph.D in disappointment for 1986 and the 16-inning playoff game loss to the Mets in the Astrodome: “C’mon, Knepper! How do you pitch so well for 8 innings ~ and then go out there and blow a 3-0 lead in the 9th? ~ We had Scott going for us tomorrow! ~ But now there is no tomorrow! ~ Damn! Damn! Damn!”
For those who missed their doctorates in 1986, there was 1998, the year of Randy Johnson and those randier San Diego Padres: “Thanks for trying, Mr. Dierker, but you couldn’t bat for them too! ~ Besides, it’s beginning to look like the baseball gods just have it in for Houston!” (Bad symptom development here. ~ When a subject begins to personalize disappointment with the ideation that some external force is working against him or her, the road now leads to Paranoia and not to Paradise.)
2005 finally brought Houston its first World Series, but not without cost. This was the year that the Astros were stopped from an easier clinch of the pennant at home when a late inning bomb by Albert Pujols of the Cardinals over Brad Lidge of the Astros forced the NLCS back to St. Louis for one more game. Houston had to use Roy Oswalt to take the game, but that move forced manager Phil Garner to start an unready Roger Clemens in Game One of the World Series in Chicago against the White Sox. ~ The Astros got swept by the White Sox, leaving their longtime fans to choke on their fears of the outrageously sadistic baseball gods: “Oh well,” one Astros fan muttered. “Maybe, the next time we get to a World Series, we’ll only lose by 4 games to 1.”
Ugh!
The gutters got cleaned in 2017 as the Astros walloped their way through the cream of baseball’s hierarchical royalty franchise crop. They beat the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Dodgers in some of the most convincing and thrilling games ever played.
Houston Strong did it all! ~ And now it’s getting ready, hopefully, to do it again ~ and this time, as the club that now holds the record for most regular season franchise wins over the course of a single season.
Thank you, Astros, and simply know this too. ~ Most of us who have been watching you from your 1962 start no longer expect anything from you! ~ We simply believe in you ~ and the idea that, if what we go into together in the name of love is meant to be, it shall be!
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Bill McCurdy
Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Pecan Park Eagle
The Pecan Park Eagle 
September 30, 2018 at 6:50 pm |
It’s great to see them as winners and contenders every year, keeping my fingers crossed for a win today and that new record.
October 1, 2018 at 4:02 am |
It’s so odd. The team had its best September ever and set a club record for wins and road wins over one season and two seasons. Yet it felt like the whole season was a big struggle. It seems sort of weird. There was only one winning streak of any serious length (7 games?) and several unpleasant losing streaks. Yet here they are.
I once calculated that if a team wins two games, then loses a game, and repeats that same pattern over 162 games, the team will finish the season with 108 wins and 54 losses (Boston’s record this year.) Their longest winning streak over the 162 game season would be 2 games! They’d lose every third game. And they’d finish with a 108-54 record.
Baseball is a deceptively difficult game.
Mark