Nightmare on Elm Street in Houston

December 8, 2011

“Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.” – Groucho Marx.

Last night I had a bad dream. I dreamed that new Astros owner Jim Crane was forced to agree on a new deal for moving the club to the American League West n 2013 as a condition for MLB approval of his purchase of the Houston franchise. Then I dreamed that Crane fired Baseball President Tal Smith without even availing himself of the opportunity of talking with the man who had built this club twice into a major winner. Wait. It gets worse. Then I dreamed that Crane hired a new General Manger that was even less well-known than any of the kids on his forty-man MLB club roster and that his job was to do all he could to make the lineup for 2012 even more anonymous (cheaper) than it already is. Pretty scary, right? But hold on some more. These fearful visions turn out to be merely the cake supporting the icing of this full-blown gaga nightmare. Finally, I dream the Angels have signed Albert Pujols to follow us to the ALW as a permanent Astros enemy. In the dream, the Angels give Prince Albert $250 million dollars just to spend the next ten years in vicious assault upon Houston pitching as a helpless intra-divisional foe.

Sure glad this is all just a dream, but I’d prefer to wake up from it soon. Nudge me, somebody.

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Remember Pearl Harbor

December 7, 2011

On December 7, 1941, my parents and I lived in this little house in Beeville, Texas.

I have always been blessed/cursed with a long and vivid memory. When I was almost one year old, my ten-year old uncle had climbed a tree and lost his footing. His neck lodged in a tree fork and he had started wailing in strangulation for help. I can still hear those mournful sounds to this day. It all took place in the back yard on a visit to my grandma’s house in San Antonio in late 1938.

Then I remember my dad ripping off his shoes and racing toward and up the tree. He pulled Uncle Albert free and carried him  back down to the ground. I remember Uncle Albert choking, clearing his throat, and crying, and everybody gathered around as dad took care of him, talking him out of his fear, reassuring him that things were OK.

Then it all goes blank. That’s all I ever remembered of the near family tragedy, but the sights and sounds of the small part I do recall are as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. That being said, here is all I remember of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the day the Imperial Navy of the Empire of Japan launched that devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

It was a warm winter afternoon in Beeville, Texas, the town where I was born and probably would have grown up, had it not been for World War II. My dad was a 31-year old Dodge-Plymouth dealer in Beeville back then. My mom was a stay-at-home housewife who was only days away from giving birth to my little brother John. Life was good. And all in Beeville, as per usual, was deadly quiet. The little town fifty miles north of Corpus Christi back then sure was, and largely still is, a good place to get caught up on your sleep.

It was early afternoon as I prepared my daily resistance to a nap, but mom and dad seemed a little distracted that Sunday from making the usual big deal of it. They huddled in the living room, almost leaning into the console radio and into the flow of non-stop anxious words that came pouring forth in ways that were most unfamiliar to me. Most of the time, the radio played at night, when mom and dad listened to their shows.

This was different. Mom and dad had worried looks on their faces. I started to worry too. I just didn’t know what to worry about and mom and dad were too busy listening to even notice what was going on with me. They just told me to be quiet and go play. And as I went out the screen door to throw a ball around by myself, the telephone rang. It would continue to ring for the rest of the day. And this was at a time when the phone was mainly used to communicate important messages. People in Beeville didn’t visit over the phone in 1938. If you wanted to socialize with somebody in 1938, you drove to that other person’s house and knocked on their door or just caught them outside sitting on their porch as a sign they were open to visitation.

Sunday, December 7, 1941 in Beeville, Texas was not about visiting. It was all business. I had no concept for what it was back then. I just knew that it was out of the ordinary and a little scary. As aunts and uncles called, came, and went, many of them began to express angry tones and some of the women shed tears. I started hearing phrases, first from the radio and then from family and neighbors. Names like “Pearl Harbor” and phrases like “Japanese attack” began to enlarge into memories. President Roosevelt spoke late in the day over the radio. Everyone seemed comforted by the fact he did and determined to do something.

Determined to do what? And about what? The whole thing made no sense to me.

It made no sense until I finally heard the radio announcer say that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had killed maybe thousands of Americans and destroyed most of the ships in our Navy. Now the reverse sense kicked in. We were supposed to pay them back by killing a bunch of their people in return.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Pearl Harbor meant that America had now been pulled into the world’s true first world war on both its two greatest oceans and nothing would ever again be the same. WWII meant that they stopped making cars and that dad was now flat-out of the new car business. Dad was not eligible for the draft due to his multiple dependents, but he learned welding as a defense factory skill and moved the family to Houston to take work at Brown’s Shipyard.

Dad didn’t know it, but he was delivering me to my true hometown when he moved us here from Beeville. The physical move took place on my 5th birthday, December 31, 1942. And the whole thing had been set in motion by the events at Pearl Harbor, a little more than a year earlier on December 7, 1941.

Remember Pearl Harbor? How I could I forget?

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Santo Finally Makes It

December 6, 2011

Ron Santo Takes a Whack

Ron Santo and Billy Williams both played for the 1960 Houston Buffs before going on to careers as teammates with the Chicago Cubs as their teams’ defenders of the left field line at third base and left field. Now the guys are together again – in the Baseball Hall of Fame. All I wish to say is that I’m glad it finally happened and, like many others of you, I only wish it could have happened earlier than December 3, 2010, the date that the wonderful Ron Santo left this planet. Posthumous awards always ring the bell  a little too loudly on the empty side, as in “better now than never, but earlier would have been better, when Ron Santo was still here among the living to share and enjoy it with family and friends.”

Ron Santo had a wonderful power stroke on offense and the kind of rocket arm on defense that defines the rare greats of third base history. Only fourteen others have received the call to the Hall as “hot corner” specialists prior to Santo, and three of those men played exclusively in the Negro Leagues, where statistical data was often poorly kept and not well documented – and  the game itself was played under the frequently far more adverse conditions of many ragged fields and unevenly officiated games. Santo has deserved his place in this rarefied company forever and I am grateful that the Veterans Committee finally made it happen on December 5, 2011.

Over the course of his fifteen season MLB career (1960-1974), Ron Santo batted .277 with 342 home runs, and 1,331 runs batted in. He played in nine all star games and won five gold gloves over the course of his career. Ron Santo had to battle the ravages of diabetes in the latter years of his life, but he hung in there, even under the loss of both legs to the disease, doing good, positive color reporting as an analyst on the Cubs’ radio game broadcasting team.

Love live the soul and spirit of Ron Santo. It bears upon its back the larger hope for an eventual Chicago Cubs redemption – and that’s no light load for any soul to carry.

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What’s Wrong With This Picture?

December 5, 2011

What's wrong with this picture? By defeating UH in the C-USA Conference Championship Game on Dec. 3rd, Southern Miss knocked themselves and all other conference members out of a multi-million dollar BCS bowl game pay off.

Winners should always get the biggest cash prize, right? Well, not exactly. You see, that kind of logic “ain’t necessarily so” when you’re talking about the way things are set up with the BCS Bowls versus their lesser light post-season brethren bowls. Take last Saturday for the best example that comes to mind.

Houston (12-0) was at home facing Southern Miss (10-2) in the Conference USA Championship Game, with UH being the only club of the two that was in the running for a major BCS bowl invitation. If UH had won, they would have gone to the All State Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans and collected $17 million dollars to share with Southern Miss and all the other members of the C-USA.

Didn’t happen, USM upset UH, 49-28, to take the C-USA crown and also knock the Cougars out of the running for the cash-driven BCS Sugar Bowl. Both Southern Miss (11-2) and UH (12-1) then got minor bowl game invitations. USM will play Nevada in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl in Honolulu on Dec. 24th; UH will play Penn State in the TicketCity Bowl in Dallas on Jan. 2nd.

USM will get $750,000 to share with C-USA members; UH will receive $1.2 million dollars to split with the other conference schools.

You can do the math easy enough. Because USM defeated Houston, the net loss in revenue to C-USA is something in the $15-16 million dollar range.

Now take on the integrity questions this system invites:

USM clearly outplayed UH and deserved to win the C-USA championship. Why should they and all the other conference schools be punished financially for their on-the-field success?

Do we want schools out there throwing games when the payoff for losing is far greater than the reward for winning?

As long as NCAA football shall be governed by the BCS format, it will continue to be a system that guarantees, most of the time, that the select group of powerhouse schools will possess the greatest number of chances out there for reaching the big payoff games at season’s end. When a wild card team like Boise State, TCU, or Houston creeps into the picture for an outside shot at a BCS bowl invitation, it also sets up the possible “laying down” by some other contender club that has more to gain financially by losing than they do by winning out over Cinderella.

Southern Miss didn’t lay down. They came to Houston and played the game the way it’s supposed to be played, but so what? That’s no guarantee against the possibility that another club down the road in that situation may be willing (or feel the need) to trade integrity for cash.

Ever hear of that happening?

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Cougarella Hits The Pumpkin Patch

December 4, 2011

When the Cougarella coach turned back into a pumpkin at midnight, the team slide off the road and into the patch with all the others who have no invitation to the big round of balls coming up. "I told you Cougarella didn't belong," cried the town wags. "The poor kid was nothing more than a step-child and galley-slave in the larger scheme of things."

As a lifelong Cougar by chance of neighborhood connection from childhood when they started playing football back in 1946, and by choice in terms of what was open and available to me as an entering college student in 1956, yesterday’s loss to Southern Miss in the C-USA championship game was not my first dance with disappointment. It was simply the inexorably loaded deflation of hope on several levels that led me into the little exercise in self-purgation that the attached Cougarella cartoon embodies. It was a Cinderella season – and the Cougars blew it – big time.

Let me count the ways:

(1) True or not, “The Loss” was a confirmation of UH’s perceived mediocrity. All season long, the rap on UH’s unbeaten Cougars has been that they were piling up wins against weak teams. Yesterday’s 49-28 collapse to Southern Miss before a national television audience at ABC will simply convince one and all that – “See there. We told you they weren’t any good.” Even thought that really was not the UH Cougars of 2011 that showed up in red yesterday, we are stuck with the egg they laid as performers with the same names as the great players who normally wear those jerseys.

(2) “The Loss” blew a big BCS payday. UH lost the BCS invitation to the Sugar Bowl that would have netted them $16 million dollars more in income than they will now receive from the not-so-illustrious Ticket City Bowl in Dallas, according to today’s Sunday Houston Chronicle. At no extra charge, even a super victory in the minor bowl will do nothing to reverse the damage done by “The Loss.”

(3) Terrible Execution by UH. For whatever reason, the Cougar players didn’t show up yesterday. They got the national attention and immediately responded with dropped passes, slips on runs, poor blocking, no tackling, missing pass defense, and horrendous special teams play, complete with sorry punting and one blocked kick for a USM TD. In spite of his 373 yards passing and two TD throws, QB Case Keenum even kicked in a rare double interception contribution to the mess with one that went straight back as a USM TD return and another on a short toss into the end zone that prevented a Cougar TD.

(4) The A&M Coach-Sniffing Intrusion. Why were the Cougars so off their game on Saturday? They had been the personification of “Cool Hand Luke” all season – until now. The only difference that I, and all the other home-grown Sigmund Freud fans who similarly commented could see on the field was the fact that the Coogs had to play this game in the glare of Texas A&M’s threat to take their coach away as soon as possible. Friday’s Chronicle headlines read something like “A&M Dumps Sherman, Sets Sights on Sumlin.” – What a crum-bum move that was! If you’re A&M, sew the poison thought of abandonment into the team’s mind. Then, if you don’t get their coach, you may at least mess up their season and their recruiting for next year. – Thanks a lot, Aggies. We know you had a right to do what you did when you did it. I couldn’t blame a pig that suddenly bolted into my house and started eating whatever he found either. It’s just in his nature to do things like that, but that doesn’t mean I have to relish the company of pigs. Tell us what you mean by “oink-oink” and then get the hell out-of-the-way. If Kevin Sumlin allows money alone to be the thing that attracts him into your land of the lost, so be it. If that turns out to be the man he is, we didn’t need him anyway. I just hope that he’s paying attention to the sorry way Texas A&M is handling the dismissal of a fine man like Mike Sherman.

Here I will have to draw from my fifty year career day job as a therapist and counselor to offer that the timing on the A&M coaching opening and interest in Sumlin most likely did play a part in the Cougars’ lack of focus on the game, regardless of what they or anyone else says in denial. The threat of abandonment is right behind the fear of the unknown as the greatest threat we all face as human beings. In fact, you could even make the case that both fears wrap around each other as one and the same, most often. As small children, we fear abandonment because of our fear of the unknown. So, once activated, you may be able to put the fear out of sight in external ways, but you will not be able to put it out of mind. It will rattle around in your pre-conscious and sub-consconscious minds until it gets settled. Until then, it will find its ways to effect your normal levels of behavior.

Let me make this statement as clearly as possible. I’m saying: It was no accident that just about every Cougar player had their worst games of the season yesterday. It was because they were effected by the game eve threat from Texas A&M that they might be on their collective way to losing the coach they all respected and held so dearly important to their success.

It was not the kind of threat that would be assuaged by Sumlin’s (paraphrased here) statements that “I have talked to no one at Texas A&M, or at any other school, about coaching opportunities elsewhere. Right now we have a game to prepare for.”

All that kind of talk says to the players is: “I haven’t done anything about leaving UH yet, but wait until we get past Saturday and let’s see what happens.”

That leaves the players feeling: (1) We are going to lose our guy; and (2) because he must think that things are better elsewhere.

If Kevin Sumlin could have made a public statement Friday along the following lines, yesterday might have turned out quite differently in the Cougars favor: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am well well aware of the interest now shown in me by the fine people of Texas A&M, but I feel the need to let you all know who I am. – I am Kevin Sumlin, the head football coach at the University of Houston, I am under contract for this year and for several years henceforth. And I will be the Cougar head football guy for as long as I have a contract and the university wants to keep making new ones with me as the old ones expire. There are just some things that cannot be bought for a few dollars more and I like being part of the Cougar family that is building Tier One thinking into all we do.”

I look forward to the day when UH plays in a BCS conference and has the facilities and money that will allow one of their head coaches to push away the vultures with the big check books and not let these pillagers effect big games and recruiting at the climax of a Cinderella season.

Cougarella shall return. We just don’t know when. But you never know. Maybe next year.

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Aggies Steal The Moment from UH

December 2, 2011

Robertson Stadium, UH Campus: Scene of tomorrow's C-USA Championship Game between Southern Miss and the University of Houston.

On the eve of their great closure for a C-USA conference championship, an undefeated 13-0 season record, and a BCS bid that will probably land them in the Sugar Bowl, if they are successful in Saturday’s game against Southern Miss, the # 7 ranked UH Cougars have had their big moment stolen away from them by Texas A&M.

The Friday, Dec. 2nd sports page headlines of the Houston Chronicle totally derailed the UH meditation on what the history about to happen on the field in a little more than 24 hours. These headlines screamed, “Uh Oh, Cougars! You better start sweating out the loss of your coach!”

They screamed it this way at the top of the page: “A&M fires Sherman, sets sights on Sumlin”

That’s right. The Texas A&M firing Thursday of their head football coach, Mike Sherman, has set in motion the swirl over UH Coach Kevin Sumlin that we knew was coming anyway. In fact, A&M didn’t really start it. Earlier word yesterday came out that Arizona State wanted Sumlin for their coach at a salary of $4 million per year. Sumlin makes $1.2 million at UH. The math is easy to do. If immediate money, or money itself, is the only consideration here, “have not” UH has lost again to one of the many “have” schools out there.

If UH cannot come up with the bucks to match these other offers, than the university will have to stay good at the art of finding and hiring their next winning coach and keeping them until they can no longer afford them. Just as UH found with Art Briles before him, UH may soon need to ferret out the next Kevin Sumlin on the staff of some other successful program and keep on moving from there. Until UH can afford it, success cannot hinge on having the bucks for hiring the obviously most successful candidate out there. Until the day comes around that UH trades in its “stepping stone” status for recognition as a “destiny” school, UH will just have to keep finding those diamonds-in-the-rough that only need the opportunity to show what they can do.

With all the clamor on campus these days about the drive for UH elevation to “Tier One” status academically, it’s important to keep in mind how that notion translates to collegiate athletics. “Tier One” in college athletics is becoming a “destiny school” along the lines of Notre Dame, Ohio State, Alabama, Oklahoma, LSU, and Texas.

With any luck, maybe Kevin Sumlin will turn out to be like Bill Yeoman and be one of those rare individuals whose loyalty to the cause will keep him in Houston for the full ride back to national greatness in football and basketball. Those are the money sports that pay for everything else. They just don’t produce the uber-dollars that some universities have for coaching salaries. That kind of support has to come from well-heeled alumni donors.

That’s it for now. The next few days should tell us much about how the Sumlin Story will play out from here in the near term. In the meanwhile, those of us who care only hope that the coach-swirl will not detract from the Cougars’ performance on the field tomorrow or in the bowl game to come.

 

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A Sam Cooke Remedial

November 30, 2011

1836: Texas arguably extended all the way through parts of current New Mexico, and other present states, fingering its way north to the current State of Wyoming.

Do you remember the old Sam Cooke song-lyrical lament that “(I) Don’t know much about history?” Well, today I just wanted to share the news and send you a link to a neat little site that Gary Richardson of The Floppy Wizard computer store in Houston sent me the other day. In something like two minutes of the clock, the people at this site could have helped old Sam quite a bit on his knowledge dilemma, at least, delivering him safely to the “do know something about history” level.

I make no claims for academic historical expertise, but I would place myself in the “do know some things” category as the subject relates to Texas and American history, anyway, and I found this little linear film (with graphic illustration) a fun way to review the surface growth of the USA from the various chronological comings of the fifty states by the years they each came into the Union a really fascinating way to review how we’ve gotten where we are now.
 
How many of you recall that the USA once possessed Cuba and The Philippines – and could have made a case for annexing the latter as a state, had we been able to figure out a practical way in those lower tech travel and weapons days of defending a state that was located in Asia.
 
I had the arguable part of Texas history brought home to me on a trip we made to Santa Fe, New Mexico back in 1998 – and I happened to have an old Rand-McNally Atlas book with me that contained a Texas sketch similar to the one shown here. I had the book with me when we later went on a downtown Santa Fe walking tour and heard nothing about the 1836-1845 period in which Texas (apparently) controlled large parts of the territory that contained large parts of eastern New Mexico and all of Santa Fe.
 
The Santa Fe walking tour people said they had never seen such a map or read or heard anything about Texas controlling their land at a time that their records showed New Mexico as being still under Mexico’s control until the USA took things away in the Mexican War of 1845. I was aware of why this condition existed. I had just never had the fact of its existence brought home to me so clearly until that moment in Santa Fe.
 
In fact, the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836 may have won Texas its independence, but it certainly didn’t settle the size of Texas’s new land acquisition as far as Mexico was concerned. Santa Anna just conceded defeat there because he had no choice and saw the need to find a way to get home before the Texans started talking seriously about his need for execution.
 
Mexico just saw the Texas Revolution as an American land grab and that’s why things didn’t get “settled” until their war with the United States in 1845,  the conflict that resulted in the much larger Mexican concession of western lands to the United States, and the Gadsden purchase settlement.
 
These 19th century battles would settle things until the late 20th century, when Mexico figured out that it would be possible for them to reclaim all of their lost lands, and large parts of the US treasury, if they simply sent their army back over the “border” one-by-one, and family-by-family.
 
What an absolutely brilliant strategy! How can any nation stop an invasion that comes so slowly, albeit steadily, that those who warn against it must do so at the risk of finding themselves branded with the indictments of political correctness?
 
At any rate, what a great refresher course this one is.

Probably the best capsule of the history of our country ever put together. It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of growth from the 13 colonies up to the present, with dates, wars, purchases, etc. included. As much as you may know about American history, I guarantee you’ll learn something from this short video clip.

This “moving” map of the country, shows it from the beginning of the 13 states through the present. It includes the acquisitions from England and Spain, the Slave states, the Free states, a segment on the Civil war, it includes some mentions of Central andSouth America, etc.

It also shows the Indian Nations as they were during the Indian Wars: Modac, Miwok, Mujave, Nez Perce, Flat Head, Crow,Cheyenne, Arapaho, Navajo, Apache, Dakota, Sioux, Kiowa, Wichita and Comanche.
A great site, especially if you enjoy American history, but have forgotten a lot of what we learned in school. Turn on your sound, as the narration is a significant portion of the presentation.
Click on the next line. (When it opens, don’t click on Go at the bottom …. click on Play at the top.)

http://www.animatedatlas.com/movie.html


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What Do Astros Need in Next General Manager?

November 29, 2011

Well, it took long enough to conclude, but it finally happened. Ownership of the Houston Astros has now transferred to the Jim Crane group under the new condition and franchise price adjustment downward in exchange for Houston’s agreement to move to the American League West in 2013. Now all the specific questions come pouring in about what it all means in specific terms.

It didn’t take long to start getting answers, or confirmations, about what a lot of people thought might happen, Starting with very clear proof that Mr. Crane wants to go in a clearly new direction, his first actions were to fire longtime franchise baseball expert and franchise administrative icon Tal Smith from his job as President of the Houston Astros. Simultaneously, Crane and his new CEO George Postolos, also fired General Manager Ben Wade from his job as the man who ran daily operations of the club on the baseball side.

With the removal of Smith, it’s doubtful to certain that we will not again see the return of those two split titles president and general manager on the new organizational chart. With former Rockets man George Postolos now tall in the saddle as CEO, the Astros will be looking for someone to run the plan and daily operations of baseball as general manager. Based upon what’s been said, reported, and implied, so far, it isn’t hard  to see the surface requirements facing the next GM. As in all things baseball, only time will tell if the next “man” up is really getting things done or just appearing to take all the right steps under the working space, staff, and money made available to “him.”

I say “him” parenthetically due to the fact that there is an outside chance that the new Astros GM could be a woman if the club were to go with Kim Ng, a nine-year vice-president for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Ng is a hot prospect among the streamlined Moneyball-Savvy younger people out there trying to break into the game as something close to the next Billy Bean.

More than likely, the next Astros GM will be someone like Native Houstonian Andrew Friedman,the current highly successful Executive Vice President of the Tampa Bay Rays. Word is out there, regardless of how reliable it may be, that Friedman would like to come home. He already knows about working with cash limitations and has successfully demonstrated his ability to overcome logic and still get his team to the World Series. If the guy’s available and affordable, why would you look elsewhere, but the new Astros leadership just may. If they do, then Assistant GM Thad Levine of the Texas Rangers may get a shot. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Here’s what I see facing the new Astros GM, whomever it turns out to be as issues to keep in mind and be prepared to fulfill:

(1) Keep developing the scouting of prospects for the minor league system;

(2) Draft good players that the club can afford to sign;

(3) Keep the academy plans going in Latin America;

(4) Make sure we have scouts who are good at spotting pitching talent;

(5) Get the big club back to a competitive level asap without sacrificing the long-term future five years down the road;

(6) Stay the heck away from expensive multi-year contracts with marginal position players like Carlos Lee;

(7) Keep your efforts to rebuild as open and honest as possible. As the new GM, Houston fans are going to have to be courted into trusting you;

(8) If austerity in spending is the new (old) anthem, do what you can with CEO Postolos to make sure that the fans are getting an equivalently affordable product during these lean years;

(7) Get the Astros back into the playoffs in a sane amount of time, and that means five years, tops. Houston fans will not accept the kind of multiple decade downslide that the fans of Pittsburgh have been forced to endure with the Pirate. If that were to happen here. Houston fans would just stop coming to the ballgames, or else, they would move their baseball watching down the SW Freeway to the new home of the independent Sugar Land Skeeters;

(8) Never lie to us. Even if your lie sounds good to you, don’t do it. We will smell it before you can even haul your second thoughts and regrets to the rest room;

(9) Surround yourself with good people who you hear – and let this effort be about baseball results – and not your ego;

Handle these nine conditions, Mr./Ms. new Astros GM – and everything else should work out fine;

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Astros Say Goodbye to Tal Smith and Ed Wade

November 28, 2011

GM Tal Smith (L) and Manager Bill Virdon took the Astros to their first National League Post-Season Games and Championship Series in 1980.The 'Stros came oh-so-close.

As a public figure, Tal Smith is both a baseball gentleman and a historian scholar of the game as it is best played by winning clubs. He knows the people (past, present, and prospective), the skills they differentially need to possess for success, and he understands the strategies involved in building a club around pitching, power slugging versus station to station hitting, and defense. He also know Houston and the climate and temperament of the local fans.

Over the weekend, however, Astros President Tal Smith and Astros General Manager Ed Wade ran into something their years of successful time in the baseball administrative saddle could not spare them. New club owner Jim Crane wants a clean sweep and change to his own way of doing things and Sunday he terminated both men from their long time positions.

Baseball people expect this sort of thing to come down upon them eventually. And Tal Smith, who has been with the Astros in some capacity almost from the very literal start of the franchise in 1962, has felt the local bite of termination previously. Back in 1980, when the Astros were just coming off from their one-game-away-miss flirtation with the National League pennant, then owner John McMullen fired Tal as Astros GM in days after season’s end, without ever clarifying his reasons for separating the brain power behind the talent drive that put Houston’s success as a winner on the baseball map behind a wonderful field manager named Bill Virdon. Sometimes baseball club owners don’t even need a drum to show that they are now marching to a different beat. They just beat up on the those with familiar identities and faces in the name of change for change’s sake.

Such seems to be the present fate of both Smith and Wade. I don’t know Ed Wade beyond the speaking acquaintance stage, but I felt he did a good job accomplishing what former owner Drayton McLane, Jr. wanted in peeling back the aging payroll and getting improvement in scouting and minor league talent started in the right turning-around direction, but I can also understand how new owner Crane might now want a new GM as his fresh face on change. I’m also sure that Ed Wade will land on his feet somewhere.

Tal Smith is flanked by former Astros Cesar Cedeno (L) and Enos Cabell (R) at the 2007 Induction Banquet for the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. (Photo by Bill McCurdy.)

Several adequate biographies on Tal Smith and Ed Wade are available on line. Just Google their names and pick one out.

My own enjoyment of Tal Smith’s company has been on the quiet e-mail exchange side of stories about players and strategies from earlier eras. My personal appreciation of the man also extends to the roles he played in building winning baseball into the Houston commitment and his relevantly keen ability for assessing the kind of talent that will be needed five years down the road on the roster that exists now. Tal Smith is just one of those baseball guys who understands the dynamic of aging when it comes to meting out multi-year contracts for big bucks. As Astros fans, we can only hope that the Smith-Wade successors will also be talented in that same direction.

Tal's Hill at Minute Maid Park was constructed as a quirky reminder of the outfield hilll that once existed at old Crosley Field in Cincinnati. (Photo by Bill McCurdy.)

Tal Smith also was the principal baseball executive involved in the design of both the Astrodome and the venue we now know as Minute Maid Park. With the former, Tal had to deal with the unexpected visual problems created by the original clear roof and the painting of these panes that killed the grass and created the need for “Astroturf.” With Minute Maid Park, Tal’s vision and creativity crawls all over everything from Tal’s Hill to the Crawford Boxes to the sweet retro look of the ballpark’s architecture.

Tal, we wish you well with whatever you choose to do now through Tal Smith Enterprises. Just know that we longtime fans are aware that any success the Astros now have will be building upon the foundation for achievement that you have been planking into place in Houston for nearly a half century.

Thanks for the memories and good luck, old friend!

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More New TV Show Ideas

November 27, 2011

"Anything good on tonight?"

Along the line of yesterday’s foray into using old ideas for the development of new television shows, here are a few others, some with famous titles, but all with new plot lines and casts for satisfying the demand for better quality programming in 2012. Here are nine offerings that the Pecan Park Eagle has come up with on the spur of the moment:

(1) I’ve got a Secret. Politicians Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, and Jim McGreevey star in a fictional account sitcom of five guys who open up a national hamburger chain. Any similarity to situations and persons in reality is strictly coincidental.

(2) My Three Sons. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush (#41) stars with George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and Bill Clinton (again) in a re-make of the old Fred MacMurray sitcom hit. A reincarnated Andy Rooney also stars as “Uncle Bub,” the live-in house manager and wisdom dispenser. (“Does anyone ever wonder why they call bathroom tissue ‘toilet rolls?’ When was the last time they rolled far enough when you really needed them to?”)

(3) The Invisible Man. Ron Paul stars in a nighttime soap about a candidate for president who tries to run for office with good ideas, but also as one who is rarely ever seen on TV or quoted in the media. On the rare occasions he does appear for Republican Party TV debates, Paul is never asked a question or reported as present. Case Keenum also stars as Case Paul, Ron’s son and the star quarterback for the University of Houston.

(4) The Loan Arranger. In a cute little play on words, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke stars in a new reality TV pilot about a federal bureaucrat whose job it is to come up with the names of financially troubled corporations that need to be rescued with loans from the largely but mostly unemployed American taxpayers.

(5) Ozzie and Harriet. Baseball Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith replaces the late Andy Rooney on “60 minutes” with a bit entitled “Ozzie and Harriet.” It’s a one-minute weekly closing segment in which Ozzie reads selectively from the collective works of author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

(6) What’s My Line?/Where’s My Line? Charlie Sheen stars as an actor who can’t decide between a high-paying TV sitcom job or a full-time career getting high as a cocaine snorter. (Just another fictional plot line with no basis in fact comparison to any real person now living or dead.)

(7) Two and Two Thirds Musketeers. Ashton Kutcher, John Cryer, Agnus T. Jones, and Chaz Bono star in this remade song and dance musical version of the famous French swordsmen of literary fame.

(8) Dancing with the Czars. Sviatopolik the Accursed, Yaroslav the Wise, Vladimir the Great, Hollywood’s Peter Ustinov, Baseball’s Lou “The Mad Russian”  Novikoff, Restauranteur Michael Romanoff, and former Russian Premier Vladimir Putin join the first cast of this new version of the old dance show. Eligible contestants must be former czars, Russian or Soviet Rulers, Political Assassins, or celebrities of claimed Russian heritage. Tom Bergeron returns as host. The three judges will be appointed weekly by Vladimir Putin and also accountable to him fot their choices. There will be no telephone voting. The people have no say in picking a winner under the new format. Based on the field and the new format, the pre-contest favorite in Vegas is – Vladimir Putin.

(9) Debaseball. In an effort to ameliorate resistance by the National League to the designated hitter rule, and to increase interest among television viewers, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig does away with the “DH” in its current form and then initiates a new rule that will apply to all professional leagues, including the National group. In the future, each team will have four designated hitters and no other batters. These four DH hitters will be the only hitters in the game, allowing all other players to be selected only on the basis of their pitching and defensive abilities. Even with no games played under the new Bud Selig multiple DH rule, so far, the name of the game has been changed from “Baseball” to “Debaseball.”  – If you have to ask why, you haven’t been paying attention until now.

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