
Fernando Abad warms up in 9th as Carlos Lee and Jose Altuve model their classic “shooting star” Astro threads. As for the game, the Astros pitched well, hit poorly.
I’ve never stopped loving those fine-looking shooting star uniforms of the early Astros history days. With that cool shade of orange fitting far better with the general motif of Minute Maid Park, it is the hope of many Astros fans that we shall again see an explosion of orange-accent in the new uniforms planned for 2013. (Hey! – Look at me! – All of a sudden I’m also a late-in-life uniform fashionisto!)

Minute Maid Park, May 18, 2012, Texas Rangers 4 – Houston Astros 1, Attendance: 34,715 present; 40,981 sold.
It was nice to see the crowd-volume looking more like the ones we’ve become used to during our Bagwell-Biggio-Berkman contention years and less like those lost-in-the-credit union doldrum-days of the Dome back in an earlier empty time. If only the Astros fans cared, or showed it, as much as the tidal wave of Rangers fans that flooded MMP Friday night like a tidal wave. Friday night was like a Rangers home game for the crowd.
No real sure what they were, but the two Ranger clown fans spent some of their time celebrating victory by throwing stuff that looked like Mardi Gras beads to the other Rangers fans behind the Teas dugout. Meanwhile, the Rangers fans wore every name and number jersey of every player short of Ted Williams who had ever worn the uniform of the Texas Rangers.
Astros jerseys were harder to find on the backs of fans. Astros fans were too bust searching for the rare and elusive “Texas Tamale” vendors as they made their slow and rare visits into the stands on the concourse level, hey could sell a lot of those babies if they can find a way to make them more easily available, but don’t listen to me. What do I know about marketing. If I were a marketing genius, I would have come up with “Root. Root. Root.” and then cashed the huge check that went to the genius who came up with that incredible line.
The Astros have to fix that line score section of the otherwise light-on HD scoreboard. What’s the beef? Simple.
Most of us know that a regulation baseball game is 9 innings long. We don’t need that background shading in large numbers to show us how many innings have been played and how many remain. Having to read the crooked numbers over the running large numbers simply takes away the easy reference pleasure of quick glances at the line score through the game. As it is, the thing is over-kill, defeating the purpose of its eternal value and meaning to long-time fans.
Of course, I’ve only been watching Houston baseball since 1947. – What the heck do I know? Maybe making the line score busy and hard to read is what today’s texting crowd wants. As is, texters have another reason with this feature on the scoreboard to simply double-thumb their friends and ask something like: “Hey! In what inning did we get our run?”
Get there early on Saturday, folks. This is Nolan Ryan Bobble Head giveaway day.