The Pecan Park Eagle

Minute Maid Park: Home of the Houston Astros (Certain obstructions to the architectural sight lines were not present when this picture was taken.)

Well, sometimes it doesn’t take a long month for the bloom to be off the rose of a club’s chances for a miracle, especially when they go out fall behind by 14 to 0 in the second inning of the seventh game of the season, as the 2013 Houston Astros did in their 19-6 home loss to the supposedly puny Cleveland Indians on Saturday May 20th.

Where is wild 1,000 to 1 crazed hope to go from there, but back into the bottle with the drunken genie that released its blue flame in the first place?

Their crushing loss was hardly the worst in modern major league baseball history in regular season games. That one came to life rather recently, when the 2007 Texas Rangers trampled the Baltimore Orioles by 30 to 3.

http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/boxscore?gameId=270822201

Ouch!

Nobody really had any reasonable or rational hope for the Astros this year, not with the lowest payroll of prospects and nobodies and the club moving into the American League and the biggest overall banger division in baseball, but still … and “still” is a big holdout word that spawns easily in the irrational, untested waters that part from spring training.

“Still”, the Astros look great in their in their new orange-refreshed traditionally styled uniforms; “still”, the kids are out there playing with fire this spring under the driving, positive beat of new manager Bo Porter; “still”, baseball is the long season and anything is possible and we believe in miracles; and, “still”, maybe GM Greg Luhnow is sane and everybody else is nuts about this Frankenstein monster he’s building; and, just “maybe” it will “still” get here this year and we won’t have to wait until 2015 to begin seeing measurable progress.

Wrong!

The problem with building a nursery for unwarranted hope for a baseball team is that the energy has to go elsewhere once the realization sets in from the actual and regular loss of games (sometimes, embarrassingly so) that “it ain’t going to happen” and to a place where it takes on a new form. In its most reduced form, that means the energy from spring hope most likely transforms to some kind of finish-the-season mope.

The transformation for management, the coaches, and the players shouldn’t be too hard. 2013 can simply become full-bore what it probably already was – an extended version of a tryout and training camp that lasts 162 games. The big change for fans is a little different this year because of the cable TV package which keeps 60% of us from even seeing the games at home.

People with Comcast TV service and season ticket holders must decide for themselves if actually watching Astros games this year is entertainment or torture. The rest of us who cannot watch the games at home are freer to continue our drift away from the Astros to other things.

As a lifelong baseball fan and loyal Houstonian, I’ll take the game without the money strings. If I’m expected to hold up my hands and surrender to their television package prices, just so I am able to watch this team play, I’m pretty much ready to cut bait on exploitation and just focus my baseball interests on research, writing, and the vintage game of the Houston Babies.

Life’s too short for anything that tampers with our love of the game – the one that many of us once found on the sandlots of America.