If the Astros were in the NL West, they’d be 1 GB.  Hooray mediocrity!

*hits self in face*

Really?  Randy Wolf?  Look me in the eyes and tell me Ed Wade shouldn’t be fired… yeah… you’re a liar.

For the Stros, June was an ugly month.  It’s not like the team completely sucked ass and died, though, which makes a retrospective…interesting.  However, there are some patterns that are obvious, some patterns that many fans were worried about before the season began.

Offense:

Team: .264 Avg,  .317 OBP, .426 OBP

And there you have it, really.  We play baseball like a slow-pitch softball team.  Only 65 BB in 841 ABs is not acceptable.  We had 29 HR as a team in the month, yet we only drove in 92 runs.

However, there’s another disturbing trend at work.  We are a reliant team.

 Lance Berkman: 977 OPS.  Lee: 954 OPS. Wiggington, Erstad, and Loretta were the only other guys close to 800.

Miggy Tejada:  684 OPS.  After an awesome first month, he’s been a less than 700 OPS kind of guy.  Even Adam Everett has a 653 career OPS.  IOW, yes,Tejada has been Everett without the defense and about five extra bases a month.

Kaz Matsui: 2 BB in 67 ABs.  So much for his ability to get on base.

Hunter Pence: Eh, he’s young, so he gets a gimme.

Still, thanks to Berkman and Lee, the offense wasn’t so bad.  In fact, we were what we have been: lots of HRs with nobody on base.  HRs are great, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but we need to get people on base to make them count.

Pitching:

Ever seen Semi-Pro?  That scene where Jackie Moon talks about how he’s never thrown up?  Looking at our staff would induce that.

Again, we were made up of two players: Roy Oswalt and Wandy Rodriguez.  They combined for 5 of our 10 wins,  and provided an excellent third of our innings *as a team!*  Can’t say enough good things about their performance for the month.

Scuffy Moehler??? Two of our remaining 5 wins, and some solid pitching, if not nerve-wracking.

So, let’s take away those three guys, and what do we have???

 In the other 128 innings, our pitchers gave up a whiplash-inducing 5.85 ERA and 1.66 WHIP.  This includes Chris Sampson’s outstanding transition to the pen, where he was borderline unhittable.

Brandon Backe and Shawn “Ack!” Chacon led the shit-fest, but it was truly a team effort.

Fact is, we can’t expect Scuffy to put up numbers.  Basically, we have Roy and Wandy on our pitching staff, and we have Berkman and Lee with the occasional help on offense.  Why did we have such a poor June?  Over-reliance on the few.

The truly bad news?  We are an old team, and we have been injury free.  It’s more likely to get worse than better from here.

I haven’t said anything about it on this blog, but I’ve been dealing with some pretty serious shit lately.  For anybody who has asked, I haven’t hidden the fact that my mother and I were about as close as oil and water.

But, if there’s one thing in common that we did have, outside of religion, was the Astros.

It was my mother who introduced me to baseball.  My dad had one of the meanest sinkers I’ve ever caught, but my mother was the one who loved the game.  When her parents moved to Texas from New York, Babe Ruth helped my grandmother out by holding a certain little baby on the ferry.  When my mother was dying, I was able to tell her about my son, whose stroke looks like some melding of Reggie Jackson and the Babe.

It was my mother’s parents who had the badass tickets at Stros games when I was growing up.

The movie “Field of Dreams” is as much about Joe Jackson as it is about the caste system in India.  The movie is about the bond between a father and son, long since estranged (and dead, I guess) by the paths that life took them.  Without the game of catch, the last month has been some bed-ridden version of “Field of Dreams” for me, an excuse to bond with my mother.  We got to watch her almost beloved Yankees play her actually beloved Astros.  We got to talk about the poor composition of the team.

Then, she went to sleep.

Then, she died a couple of days later.

Out of everything else, it’s this simplistic bond - the bond of baseball - that I feel like I have failed at more than any other with my mother.  All other things considered, perhaps it’s that one commonality that we shared that could’ve given us more time together.  Perhaps, everything else considered, maybe not.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen a co-worker persue his dream, and my mother died.  Why are they similar?  It’s always been those things I haven’t done that I’ve regretted more than the things I have done.

I wouldn’t have done things too differently, but I do regret certain parts of the situation.  And I think baseball could’ve been the key.

(This post is dedicated to CEP, who turned out to be a helluva stand-up guy at the end)

Thanks for joining me here in part two, which is really just part 1A of an obscenely long post I felt like breaking into two. What’s really the problem with the Astros? As I suggested earlier, it’s a combination of McLane’s overbearing personality which led to the hiring of problem number two, Special Ed.

It starts at the top with Drayton. You can’t completely begrudge the work he’s done – he introduced a modicum of stability and success into a franchise that had lost its way. He saved the franchise from being moved in the early 90s. That being said, the best owners keep a watchful eye on their franchise but leave the iron fist at home. Not so with Drayton and I think this is best illustrated by two problems. First, the Hunsicker departure. For once, Dickie Justice is right – running Hunsicker out of town was a terrible idea. He’s responsible for our one and only World Series appearance and (just look at the Devil Rays) clearly knows what he’s doing. You keep that sort of talent around even if you disagree with him at times.

Things are in a right awful state at Minute Maid Park. As much as I enjoy Shawn Chacon going Stone Cold Steve Austin on Ed Wade, that is a downright frightening indicator of the cancerous state of the clubhouse. I’ve got my own theories, mostly premised on two things: (1) Drayton McLane is a despot, and (2) Ed Wade makes me wish Steve Phillips was in charge. But all joking aside, it’s time to be extremely worried about your hometown heroes.

What started as one long post – I’ve decided to break into two parts. The idea is pretty simple: accountability is lacking in two places – the Astros and the coverage. Welcome to part one, where the average fan gets no answers from the media!

Now I usually steer clear of the Chomicale, but these guys have access to the clubhouse – and if I’m going to get a straight answer about what’s going on, I need to give Little Dickie Justice and the merry bad of ass-clowns over there a chance to inform me. How many times must I burn my hand on the stove?

Not the one that begins with, “I never thought it would happen to me…”, but it’s a start.

HOUSTON (AP)—Astros pitcher Shawn Chacon was suspended indefinitely by the team Wednesday for insubordination after reportedly grabbing general manager Ed Wade by the neck and throwing him to the ground.

Now, I’m not condoning violence, per se, as much as I am hoping that, when Chacon grabbed Wade, it dislodged whatever it is that has obviously been keeping oxygen from his brain.  Of course, it’s also fair game to wonder how Chacon grabbed Wade’s neck in the first place.  Was he actually just giving me a friendly colonoscopy that got out of hand?

Nevertheless, it’s fair to think that Chacon has seen his last game as an Astro.  And, here again, we go dipping into our horribly depleted minor league system to try and find an answer.

Dammit.

(PS: Dear AP: I linked to one of your articles, assholes.  See you in court.  And if you think the proven scam artists at the Media Bloggers Association represent me, you guys are incredibly moronic.)

The Astros team I feared in the offseason? The one with no pitching what so ever and a streaky, long-ball based offense? Yeah - I found them. And since they are playing Baltimore, they’re even in my TV viewing area! Which means I’ve been able to watch it live and on TV! If you need me, I’ll be over here crying myself to sleep because I see no fixes in the near future and nothing coming up from the farm.

That’s a long way of saying the following - it’s time to fire Ed Wade and Cecil Cooper. To be fair, Ed Wade should never have been hired in the first place. There are not actually words in the English language to express my utter dislike of Ed Wade. “But he drafted Utley, Rollins and Howard for the Phillies!” And tried shipping two of them out of town for crappy veterans. I really don’t understand - the model for sustainability is to develop a strong farm system and compliment it with key veteran/free-agent signings. Look no further than the Red Sox. The core of that team is home-grown talent (Ellsbury, Masterson, Paplebon, Youk) with some fantastic free agents. So what do we do? Ship whatever is left and bring in aging veterans like Tejada and Matsui. This, friends, is not a recipe for success. And don’t tell me we can’t afford that model - look at our payroll.

And as for Cooper? I no longer can justify his moves. He rests veterans for inexplicable reasons, makes curious pitching decisions, and just generally seems out of his league. Gah!

I understand this is a long rambling rant from a disgruntled fan. But watching the Good Guys play ball the last few days has been nothing short of distressing. And the Cubs are in first. God I hate baseball.

Real life has been real busy lately, and this will be a quick edition of rights and wrongs.

Rights:

Carlos Lee, Darin Erstad, and Miggy Tejada all put up OPS better than 900.

Brad Ausmus and Michael Bourn both had OPS over 790.

And that’s about it.

Wrongs:

Team batting line for the week: .263 avg, .306 OBP, .351 SLG, for an OPS of 657.  Hunter Pence was 2-23 for the week.

Worst of all, and I harp about it constantly, is our inability to draw walks.  In 206 PAs, we drew the grand total of 12 walks.  To put it in perspective, the “normal” season for a starter is a little over 600 PAs.  As a team over the course of a season, we would’ve had 36 BB and 114 Ks.  That’s downright NEIFI!-esque, and it’s why we are struggling.  As nice as it is to hit home runs, you’ve got to put people on base.  Out-making is not a viable offensive strategy, but it’s what we are doing.

Speaking of out-making, Friday’s game deserves the ole’ pink highlighter treatment thanks to all the caught stealings (CS).  For the week, were had 8 SB and 5 CS, which, in reality, is just below the steal break even ratio of about 67% (in other words, you must be successful on 67% on your steal attempts for the steals to be worth it).  But that doesn’t include a huge out by Hunter on the bases in Saturday’s game.

And the pitching?  For the week, we had an ERA of 7.01 with a WHIP of 1.65.  *We* walked 29 BB in just 54 innings, which gave our opponents a net gain of 17 baserunners.  That’s three baserunners per game via walk alone.

Roy, who had his best start of the season earlier in the week, got lit up on Sunday.  Shawn Chacon had the only other quality start for the team with his outing.  For almost everybody else, it was fuggly.

After failing to take advantage of a week of home-cooking, we again hit the road where we’ve struggled with a 16-21 record.  We kick off the festivities at Baltimore, and we wind up the week with one of the surprise teams of the year, the Tampa Bay Satan Worshippers.  They’ve been my second favorite team to watch this year, so I’m excited about the match-up.

I don’t get home to Houston much and when I do it’s usually holiday season - which means no baseball.  So whenever I get a chance to catch a game at Minute Maid, I’m usually pretty damn excited about it.  Just such an occasion presented itself to me this year.  Of course the only series I could see was against the Washington Nationals - a team I’ll spend all summer watching since I’m living here - but whatever!  It’s Astros baseball!  It’s Minute Maid!  It’s cheering for the home team for once!

But something peculiar caught my eye when I was purchasing tickets.  There were two sets of prices - one column of costs a full 50% more than the regular ticket prices!  “Have we started charging for premium games against the Cubs and Cardinals or something?  Rivalry games?” I asked myself.  Oh no.  These were the special costs for the home series against the Yankees and Red Sox.  Areyoufreakingkiddingme?

Look - I can understand the idea of fleecing every Masshole and Bleacher Creature roaming the streets of the Greater Houston Area.  But that’s the sort of bullshit gimmick reserved for teams that can’t sell out the cheap seats.  The Astros don’t have that problem.  Despite hiring Ed Wade and fielding a beer league softball team - the team still sells tickets.  The fans still come out.  People still care - and more importantly still PAY.  So to jack up the prices on everyone just because the storied Yankees and Red Sox are coming to town is an insult to any and every Astros fan.

What exactly are you charging me extra for?  To see the decaying corpse of Mussina take the mound?  The right to boo Andy P?  The chance to high-five Manny when he jumps the fence for no good reason? (Ok that I’d pay to do.)  But the point remains - what makes them so damned special?  If Bristol wants to fluff these two teams nine months out of the year, that’s their prerogative.  But for Uncle Drayton to pass the buck on to the regular Astro fan - that’s unconscionable.

Just needed to get that off my chest.  If any of you lads bit the bullet and paid the premium - please share with me below why!  And if it was worth it.

OFF TOPIC:  RIP Tim Russert.  For a political junky like me, Meet the Press is as much a part of my week as box scores and breakfast.  He was the finest and most objective political journalist left - and he will be missed.