You’ll have to excuse us for a moment as we drift a bit away from baseball.  And in honor of the man who inspired this piece, we’ll be using his trademark royal “we.”  If we’ve appeared to hijack his tone, we apologize.

There are only two mediums in which blogs can truly thrive: sports and politics.  This is because these are the only two large mediums in which opinions are central.  Sure, you could have blogs dedicated to coup d’états and natural disasters (and we would not be surprised if these existed) – but those are inherently fact-based situations.  Either the president of Turkey was overthrown or he wasn’t.  Either an earthquake struck Chile or it didn’t.  It’s hard to have a compelling opinion one way or the other.  But politics and sports are different.  Obama opted out of public financing – this is a fact.  But is this a good idea or a bad idea?  How do we think McCain will react?  Lloyd Carr called a screen on 3rd and 11 – did it cost the Wolverines the game?  Should he have called a slant-route to Manningham?  Politics and sports are ripe for debate and discussion – and thus their respective blogospheres were born.

My favorite player growing up was Craig Biggio. I modeled my little league-self after him. Contact hitter, 1^st or 2^nd in the line-up, playing solid 2B. And boy did I love playing baseball. But then me and baseball had a nasty falling out. Try explaining to a 10 year old that his favorite sport is on holiday because the players he loved watching wanted more money – it doesn’t compute.

So then came my experimentation phase. Football, basketball, hockey, racing – you name it, I started watching it. And this all contributed to the sports fan I am today – a fanatic. There is practically no sport I wont watch (except NBA basketball) and I spend large portions of my day scouring the internet for information on everything – from F1 and IRL results to NFL training camp news to European soccer transfer rumors. Shit, I’ve even watched cricket… and enjoyed it! (With the assistance of about six pints of Stella.)

But you can never deny your first love – and that’s baseball, and that’s the Astros. So when the blogging masterminds of BFD, Matt, Tim and crew crafted this small corner of the interweb to muse, bitch and blog about baseball – I was tres excited. And since I want to see this site keep churning out nonsense and build its own little baseball community – I’ve offered up my services.

So what can you expect from me? Well, I’m not 100% sure yet. I’m guessing an initial burst of content fueled entirely by my general excitement of having an outlet and an (I think?) audience. Hopefully after that – settling into a stable and consistent routine. Geographic and financial factors (I live/study/work on the East Coast now) have conspired to limit my ability to actually SEE the Astros, so there may be a lot of just general baseball musings. Oh and definitely some fantasy (NEEEERRRRRD!) jabbering – since for the first time in my fantasy life, I’m in first.

That was a long way of saying hello. I’m DisplacedTexan. And I’m a sports-aholic.

PS: Bonus points if you get the reference in the title.

It’s no secret that mlb.tv’s service has been total and complete ass since it was launched with incredible promise.  But instead of getting better, it seems to be getting worse.  And to top it off, there does not appear to be an answer to watch games if you are a Linux user, which I am.

In 2005, I ordered mlb.tv for the first time for the express reason to dump expanded cable.  I don’t watch TV outside of sports, and that’s what sports bars are for, anyway.  As a special treat, mlb.tv went to Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s proprietary technology…and we all know that Microsoft loves playing nicely with other OSes.  Or not.

Anyway, that’s it.  Just venting because I am pissed, and is there anything scarier than a pissed off geek?  Yeah, didn’t think so.

(BTW, if you think Linux is geeky, give Linux Mint a go.  It’s straight-forward, beautiful, and you don’t have to screw with anything to get it to work.)

As a companion post to the one at DGDB&D, I am presenting some old school Astros fight songs for your listening pleasure.

I collected all of these at Astros games in the 1970s and 80s, and I feel like the last two, especially, symbolize the disco era to its fullest. The quality is pretty piss poor, to which I apologize, but I hope to get my hands on a newer turntable to re-rip these in the future.

Two of these songs are by the 80s era disco icon Sue Laws. In that era of swinging and sex, I always imagined her singing the national anthem, taking part in a warm-up gang bang, singing the 7th inning stretch, and the finishing her night on a pile of naked bodies. Perhaps there was a little projection going on with that, but I’ll leave that to you Freudian people.

Enjoy!

Go Go Astros! - Mack Hayes
Vamos Vamos Astros! - Mack Hayes
Houston’s Gone Banastros - Sue Laws
World Series Disco - Sue Laws

I {heart} you all,

bfd

PS: As with the Oilers songs, I expect the Chron to steal these and take the credit for them. That’s how they roll, peeps.