The Pecan Park Eagle

The 1965 Shooting Star is my all time favorite Astros uniform design.

As I first wrote last fall, I’m in the camp of those who like the return of the Astros to their more traditional uniform fonts, the closed star, the big “H”, and the colors orange and navy blue. That’s how we started and that’s  how we’ll always be in my own mind-time for this sort of thing. In fact, the color match is now an even greater natural. If you are going to play in a ballpark called Minute Maid Park, one  that features a train load of pumpkin-sized oranges on the tracks high above left field, how can you not fly the color orange in the uniform scheme of things – especially in light of the fact that half the fans are hanging “The Juicer” on the place as their first choice for the venue’s identity.

I fell in love with the shooting star design that came along with the 1965 christening of the new domed stadium forevermore as the Astrodome and the change of the club’s name from Colt .45’s to Astros. Although I liked the old Colt .45 jersey style, I just really took to the sight of that star blazing across the jersey of the new club from outer space. It simply spoke aloud for the high hopes and aspirations of most Houston baseball fans.

If you had appeared as a psychic prior to that first-ever game against the Yankees on April 9, 1965 and told all of us Astros fans that our future over the next 48 years would include only one World Series appearance and no wins, we probably would have laughed you out-of-town with a free Greyhound bus ticket. I shudder to even think what might have happened had you also told us as a 1965 psychic version of Johnny Carson’s “Beyondo” that our brand new Astros would be moved to the American League before we ever even got our second still unforeseen in 2013 shot at a second World Series.

Now, had you wanted to have built credibility as a psychic in 1965, you could have done so with this simple forecast: “Over the next half century, Houston will continue to build and widen its current system of freeways and cross-town avenues, but any journey to and from the Galleria area shall remain a four-hour round trip from anyplace located within thirty miles of the famous shopping center.”

Shooting stars are great. Unfortunately, they only look good on uniforms and they have nothing to do with the long-term delivery of dreams.