The Pecan Park Eagle

Bo Knows the Power of the Moment.

Winning. – Bo Porter referred to it in so many words as the business of taking care of what’s on your plate each day on the road to becoming the best ballplayer you can be. It’s not dreaming of championships in the future. It’s doing each day what needs to be done for the sake of making a championship possible when the so-called future eventually slides your way as the day to be seized.

In so many well expressed words off the quick mind and clear-speaking tongue of the bright and fiery new Houston Astros manager Bo Porter, that is the cauldron where the power of action in the present eventually boils over into the only future dream that ever comes true. – Bo called it “the process.”

Speaking before a standing room only crowd at the January 14, 2013 monthly meeting of SABR’s Larry Dierker Chapter at the downtown Houston Inn at the Ballpark on Monday evening, new Astros skipper Bo Porter gave all with minds to see, and that seemed to include just about everyone there, that this city has a new kind of leader in town. You could literally feel the energy in the room rising as the ideas from Bo Porter brimmed to the surface and overflowed the cup in crystal clear delivery.

Quality Starts. Bo calls them the most outrageous statistic in baseball. The “QS” goal and the fear of blame teaches minor league staff to mollycoddle big investment pitchers in the minors. Then, when those who learn to pitch in the minors under little pressure, they arrive in the big leagues either prepared to wilt under big pressure, or else, they ruin their arms under great major league exposure to high expectations. – In this baseball culture, look for Bo to rely a lot on relief pitchers who can handle the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings while he continues looking for starters who are retrainable going deeper into the game.

According to Bo, The “QS” stat has become the favorite child of negotiating agents, further noting that agents will quote in bold type a pitcher’s 26 quality starts at contract time and totally downplay the fact that the same pitcher went 12 and 12 the previous year.

Going from 1st to 3rd. Asked by someone of what we might expect from his Astros, Bo answered without hesitation: “Watch they way we run the bases, especially, the way we go from 1st to 3rd.” He then proceeded to point out that runners who reach 3rd with none or one out have a much greater chance of scoring than those who stop at 2nd on a fair ball single to right – and the risk of getting thrown out on these plays is only about 4%. Dick & Jane Reader Translation? – “Run, Astros, Run!”

Fundamentals of Running for Outfielders and Base runners. Bo Porter was a standout football player for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes who might have chosen to try the NFL before he signed to sign with the Chicago Cubs to give his all to major league baseball. He’s a baseball man who still thinks like an aggressive football mind. With the Washington Nationals, for example, Porter noticed that a number of the outfielders had this flopping bird habit of flailing their arms from side to side in the long run pursuit of deep fly balls. The effect of same undermined their abilities to steady themselves for the catch, even if they did manage to reach the ball in descent on the fly.

Bo also remembered the steady downfield running he did at Iowa with the football tucked under one arm while the other pumped in tight tuck on the side like a locomotive power carriage wheel. So, as a result, Coach Bo had some of these guys in spring training out there chasing flies with a football under their throwing arms strictly as a method of searching for a steadier gait. – And, guess what? Many were helped by the exercise, Bo says.

Bo’s base runners on the Nationals ran hard out of the batter’s box, even on apparently dead-for-sure easy out plays. Bo wants to make the opposition’s defense forced to think on every play about all the options available to his own club’s runners, if they go to sleep. – “Relentless pressure” is the name of the game.

Implicit Greater Pitching Change Responsibility as a Result of the DH. Mike Vance, Bob Dorrill, and I were privileged to have dined with Bo Porter prior to his SABR talk. It was there that he revealed his implicit take on how the American League’s DH rule places more responsibility on the manager for deciding how long to go with a tiring or struggling pitcher. In paraphrase, it boils down to this: A manager will always want to get a guy out of there before things go south or get worse, of course, but he isn’t able to use a pinch-hitting chance to cover that concern because that’s a game situation that doesn’t arise in the AL. At times, the AL manager may want to help a pitcher learn to stretch his longevity, and again, with the DH rule in place, he cannot avoid the opportunity of extending a guy’s mound time because of an expected need to pinch hit for him. In the AL, the pitcher stays until the manager pulls him. There is no built-in customary “take out time.”

Too much else to share in one column. – The man Bo Porter is the real deal. I cannot remember ever being more excited than I am at this moment about the coming of a new Astros manager – one whose every word speaks volumes for his wisdom that life only works well when we are able to travel it from moment to moment with all the passion, creativity, ability, and life that’s been given to each of us for living full force.

Bo Porter gets it because Bo Porter obviously lives it.

Now we could only wish that the “The Bo Porter Story” really were a baseball movie script. Then we could watch Astros scoring from second base next season with a football tucked under one arm to both enhance speed and amplify their crunch upon the catcher on close plays.

Thanks for coming to Houston, Bo! We need you!