The Pecan Park Eagle

Larry Dierker & Dave Raymond, SABR Meeting, 2009.

As you probably know by now, the Houston Astros have announced that radio game broadcasters Dave Raymond and Brett Dolan will not be back to continue their media duties with the club in 2013. After seven seasons as the “back street boys” to the forever-on-his-way-to-retirement Hall of Famer Milo Hamilton, the guys have been let go for all the usual reasons that flow from the explanatory blanket that always reads as “we’ve decided to go in a new direction.”

“New direction” covers everything, but it always begins with “we didn’t hire these guys; let’s go find our own.” If the replacements fail to turn out to be Hall of Fame quality, at least, we won’t have to live with the fact that one or both of the guys we just terminated were pretty darn good, even if we didn’t hire them.

I don’t envy what Raymond and Dolan had to encounter over the past seven years: Milo Hamilton is a treasure, all right, but he was always this fading into the distance figure, sort of like that ancient Jimmy Durante act in which the old actor keeps walking away in the dark, but always stopping to turn and wave goodbye again from the next receding spotlight down the path. – And his verbal shout “GOODBYE!” back to Houston fans never grew any quieter, even as Milo faded further into the distance each lesser dutiful year in the act of supposedly turning the show over to Dave and Brett.

Didn’t happen. Probably never was going to happen. And now that it has, the two younger men are left holding the bag of having to say all the right things they need to say to help them blur over their disappointments and find other jobs in broadcasting somewhere else as Milo takes the “no comment” route in protection of his own hope for one more spotlight goodbye tour with the Astros next season.

It’s just how the world turns. And always has. As it is, we seldom see justice or equity in real-time. When they do occur, they sometimes arrive way beyond the precipitating moment. Other times, they just may not happen at all. Not in this lifetime, at least.

Good luck to both Dave Raymond and Brett Dolan. Although I never got to meet Brett Dolan, I did get to meet Dave Raymond through SABR and I was most impressed by his intelligence, his humor, and his love of baseball and its history. Our highlight SABR memory with Dave Raymond will always be the time he interviewed both Hall of Famer Monty Irvin and former Astros icon Larry Dierker on the same afternoon. What a great time we all had as Raymond led these baseball greats smoothly through a narrative review of how things used to be.

Class lands on its feet. Dave Raymond and Brett Dolan are going to be fine. We Houstonians are just going to miss them. Until their terminations, anyway, many of us still embraced the idea that our town was capable of raising our own Hall of Famers – and that class and character are not qualities that must always be imported to Houston. Even though Raymond and Dolan hailed from California and Iowa originally, they had been here long enough to have become real Houstonians, anyway. We jut gave them the opportunities they needed, but with all the aforementioned floor-traction problems.

Maybe next time.