The Pecan Park Eagle

Hot Stove League: 2014.

Well, we finally did it. We passed New Years Day, and even with the hiring of a new Texans coach, the NFL Playoffs just getting cranked, the BCS college football championship and the Super Bowl coming up, while college bowl games explode all around us from morning until late night and the Rockets even looking, at times, like an NBA contender, the noses of true blue Houston baseball fans understand that it’s NOW really the Hot Stove League phase of the baseball season, the time of year that precedes and does not relent until well into and near the end of the spring training phase of the season, when the rosters begin to settle or resolve, if only temporarily.

Hope speaks loudly this time of year – and not because we always have a good reason as fans to be hopeful. We simply need, as fans, to hope for a better tomorrow – even if the team we follow has lost over 100 games in each of the past three seasons. Hope floats in the long run that the Luhnow Youth Plan for Resuscitating our Houston Astros into a winner will work. In the short run, some see hope in a 2014 club that is capable of playing an entire season without reaching the triple digit loss level for the first time since 2010.

However we slice it, we have to start our hope for better days with an acceptance of the fact that, even with our recent attempts by GM Luhnow to improve the club, especially in the immediate readiness of the relief pitching staff, that the Astros will still enter the 2014 season as one of the worst, if not still the worst team in MLB. Good team? The Astros aren’t even a mediocre team until they prove otherwise – and that can only be demonstrated over the regular season of everyday play.

A thumbnail examination of the free agent acquisitions by the Astros suggests that here were some affordable guys who may help the pitching. There’s room to “hope” that Feldman will help the rotation and that former Astro vets like Qualls and Albers. plus Crain, if his surgical recovery goes well, could help the pen climb back to mediocrity and work to keep the club from losing another 100 games in 2014. Who knows about Guzman? Do we really need another guy who can’t hit for a quarter? Fowler sounds OK, but it’s hard to see him as much of a need-filled difference maker in center field – and especially if George Springer hatches as a big leaguer in 2014.

Here’s the quick sketch on our free agent acquisitions to date. It would be nice to feel more inspired, but that buzz is not screaming at me as I hoped it might – and sometimes has in many earlier January looks at the upcoming season. Perhaps, my restraint of early hope is also influenced by the knowledge that there’s a good chance the Astros games again will not be available to those of us who do not use Comcast and that most of us won’t really get to follow the team without buying a ticket, anyway.

Astros Free Agency Acquisitions for the 2014 Season Through January 1, 2014

Hope your first work day of the new year goes well! And please speak your piece about the upcoming baseball season. It can’ be much of a hot stove league discussion without you.