THE GLORIOUS GUEST POST: PININGS OF AN ASTROS "FAN"

Hello, friends. My name is Ted, and this is my first post on Neate's tremendous Out of Left Field blog. I normally write here, and occasionally other places. I'm not as familiar with his HTML encoding, so if the top portion looks all messed up, don't blame me. Anyway, here we go now:

I lived in Houston from 2003 to 2005, serving as a public elementary school teacher (you can read about those exploits here, provided you care to). My baseball background, at the time, was fairly simple: having grown up in New York, I told anyone that would listen that I was a Yankees fan; mostly I had selected this team because my dad was a huge Mets fan, and I thought it would make my childhood more interesting if I picked all my teams in opposition to my dad (this led to me betting $1 against him in the Scott Norwood Super Bowl and crying when the kick sailed wide -- I think he bought me a Connect 4 set as a result). However, if you've grown up with a father, you know he tends to control the remote; as such, I watched at least a portion of every Mets game televised between 1986 (Game Six!) and 1999, when I left for school. I was pretty much far more knowledgeable about the Mets than the Yankees, and probably a bigger fan, honestly.

I went to college down in DC, and since the Nationals at the time were the Expos, I "rooted" (vaguely) for the Orioles, meaning I got sloshed at Camden Yards a few too many times, including heckling Kenny Lofton (then a White Sox) in the summer of 2002. When I got down to Houston, I had been through three baseball allegiances, had my heart broken a few times (2000 NLCS, 2001 World Series, the Orioles existence in general), and was ready for a fresh start.

I found love, in the form of my (now ex) girlfriend, and the Astros. When I got down there, in the summer of 2003, I made my debut at Minute Maid Park (right beneath the train; I was so honored) by mid-July. I liked the team a lot: Morgan Engsberg, a victim of tragedy, blossoming at the hot corner; Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio and Lance Berkman were indeed Killer Bs; Richard Hidalgo was deceptively fast; Wade Miller was destined for stardom, and so was Roy Oswalt. I checked out the team a few times that summer and fall, although quickly, I became more interested in the culture of Texas football.

See, Texas is -- first and foremost -- a football state. I think even if the Rangers and Astros eventually met in the World Series, and Game 1 was on a Saturday night, more people would be listening to the radio broadcast of Texas vs. Oklahoma than Joe Buck's soothing voice. That's just how it is; with the Astros vaguely good in 2003, they were regularly on the 8th page of the sports section, behind coverage of Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and sometimes even Baylor football teams. The Rockets pre-season notes occasionally got ahead of 'em too.

2004 was a little bit of a different story. I was basically living with my then girlfriend by the time the season got rolling, so my committments - both as a viewer and an attendee -- were a little bit reduced. I dragged her to about five games that summer, and a magical summer it was. We had Roger Clemens now, and Carlos Beltran, and we replaced manager Jimy Williams with Phil Garner, and lo and behold... we were in the playoffs. Having spent the better portion of my life in New York in the 1990s, I knew what a playoff atmosphere felt like, but Houston hadn't felt it in five or so years. The Rockets weren't great, the Texans were barely passable, and college football was just warming up - so the town took notice. The Astros moved to C1 instead of C8, Clemens added another chapter to his folk hero legacy, and Beltran became a man we all knew would make gazillions in some bigger market.

Everyone forgets about the 2004 NLCS, and that bothers me; I understand the 2004 ALCS was literally unreal and surreal in terms of how it transpired, but the 2004 NLCS was one of the better seven-game series in recent memory, and featured arguably one of the best individual playoff performances of the past decade, in Beltran. Interestingly, that year Beltran shone and Johnny Damon locked up Game 7 for the Sox; both are former Royals. That has to hurt. Even though the demise of the Yankees was interesting to me -- I had begun to resent them because of how much money they spent without getting proper results -- I was glued to my television for the '04 NLCS. I hung on every pitch, every FOX cutaway, every single moment. And then we lost. To the friggin' Cardinals. And then they got swept. By the friggin' Red Sox. Nothing was going my way, at all.

I caught a few games at the beginning of the '05 season live -- 3, I think -- but then I bounced from Houston, to my current gig in Connecticut (which I'm trying to bounce from now, but that's a story for another day). I followed the Astros from afar, which was hard because I didn't get them in my market, and even though they had made the playoffs the year before, they weren't on national TV so much.

Then, the '05 playoffs began, and again, I hung on every moment for those guys. It helped that the ALCS that year was a pretty tame White Sox vs. Angels match-up, whereas the NLCS was another go-round between us and St. Louis. I checked The Houston Chronicle frequently to see where, and how often, the Astros were featured. I literally threw stuff around my depressing 1 BR when Pujols emasculated Lidge in Game 5. But then -- THEN -- WE did it. We made the World Series. The Houston Astros in the mother-tooting World Series.

Er, then we got swept. And it wasn't so interesting in the process.

Last year, again I had a fleeting relationship with the Astros - can't get 'em on national TV enough, and every time you do, it seems like Lidge is completely imploding, which is just depressing -- and right now, I do as well. I look at the standings, and the MLB.Com game recaps, and I'm sad they're 0-4, because it used to be something I was so involved in, even though I bucked the trend of residents down there: football first, everything else second. The fact that they opened the season being swept by the Pirates and the heroics of Xavier Nady was bad enough, but to drop the fourth game of the year to the Cardinals and a guy who's never started before is also less than desirable. I imagine some of my former brethren, who got so caught up in those Clemens-Garner-Beltran moments, turning to notions of spring football, and Colt McCoy, and the Texans draft stock, and whether Matt Schaub really is the answer.

Deep in the heart of the Texas -- a song they sing at Minute Maid 81 times a year -- the Astros are not the top priority. But I hope, for their sake, that this early season rut is just that: an early season rut. I want the young guys to shine, and the pitching to come together, and Oswalt to throw 20 on his back again, and Brad Lidge to suddenly banish all the negatives from his head (so Wheeler can stay a set-up man), and Carlos Lee and Berkman can just start bashing the hell out of the ball. That's what I hope for, because the Astros deserve it, and Houstonians deserve it. It's a beautiful downtown ballpark, as indicative as a city renaissance as any ballpark in America (uh, at least as far as I know). Let's just hope - for my sake, and for Houston's sake - that it doesn't become a house of horrors this year.