MLB Teams: Houston Astros
The Houston Astros were an exciting team when I started watching baseball back in 1998.
Their name fitted my preconceived idea of an American sports team (in a good way) and they were a force to be reckoned with in the NL Central. I soon learned about the Killer B’s (Bagwell, Biggio and Derek Bell back then, later to include Lance Berkman) and they made a big splash that summer by signing Randy Johnson. If I hadn’t immediately pinned my colours to the A’s mast (for the non-too-scientific reason that they wear similar colour uniforms to my soccer/football team), I could well have turned into an Astros fan that year.
Either way, 2009 wouldn’t have been much of a year for my chosen team (I’ll leave the A’s for another day). A newcomer to MLB certainly wouldn’t consider the Astros to be exciting now.
Houston have been stuck in a rut over the last few seasons, featuring several excellent players (most notably Berkman and Oswalt) yet failing to put the pieces around them to make a strong challenge for postseason glory.
Their Beltran-powered postseason run in 2005 now looks like the last hurrah of a period that saw them make the postseason in six years out of nine from 1997. The NL Central is an even division, which in some ways has been damaging for the Astros since that World Series visit. They’ve been close enough to think that they could make it to the postseason again, despite not having a great team.
They don’t seem prepared to trade away their assets in a rebuilding effort, but they don’t have enough talent to win now either. Their farm system is considered to be unimpressive by prospect experts, in sharp contrast to their Lone Star rivals the Texas Rangers, and they currently sit bottom of the NL Central.
Apart from that, they’re looking pretty good right now
The end of the two main Killer B’s summed up the Astros’ downfall. Bagwell missed most of the 2005 season and all of the 2006 season before being forced to retire. The affair seemed to drag on, not least because the Astros publicly aired their considerations over an insurance claim on Bagwell’s contract. However, it didn’t drag on quite so much as Craig Biggio’s farewell. He really didn’t merit a starting role over his last couple of seasons, but the Astros kept sending him out there so that he could continue on his way to the 3,000 career hit mark. While it undoubtedly amounted to a considerable personal achievement when he finally got there on 28 June 2007, it also made you question the Astros’ priorities and they haven’t offered any positive answers since then.
So is there any hope?
A full-blown rebuilding project doesn’t look on the cards just yet (although it probably should be), but the Astros could well decide to take some steps backwards over the next couple of years to help them go forwards in the future. While that doesn’t sound greatly appealing at first, being part of a team that is at the beginning of a project can actually be very rewarding.
Those first few years may be tough in the win-loss column (I said I’d leave the A’s for another day, but I feel like I could be writing about Oakland), but think of it as serving your apprenticeship as a fan. Hopefully the Astros will build a new team that can bring success to Houston and if you’ve been part of it from the start, that success will mean even more to you.
The Astros have never won a World Series so a newcomer has the opportunity to be a part of their first Fall Classic victory (whenever that may come). And if it takes a while for that momentous day to arrive, at least their ballpark might have been renamed from Minute Maid Park by then.
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When I was getting into baseball in the summer of 2002, I was on a field course with an American university. A baseball fan from the university who was on the course wrote down the names of all the Major League teams, put them in a bowl, and then asked me to pick one out to determine who I was going to follow. I drew the Astros, and so I kept an eye on them during the second half of the 2002 season, but I never grew the fan’s connection.
Before the start of the 2003 season, I realized that I was going to get a chance to see a game that summer, between the Mariners and your A’s. I read up on both teams to try to decide who to root for (it just didn’t seem right to continue to follow someone assigned to me at random). The fact that the Mariners had never been to the World Series was a big plus, as was the city’s history of great music. Add in that they were the home team, and my decision was made.
Unlike with the Astros, I immediately became attached to the Mariners, so much so that I stayed up to watch them on Sunday night baseball the day before one of my finals.
The match-up I saw was Ryan Franlink’s career game, a two-hit shutout, backed up six Mariners runs. I was lucky enough to see Ichiro rob the A’s of a home run by scaling the outfield wall, and also saw Mike Cameron take a great diving catch.
I never knew of your dalliances with the Astros, Joe! There’s not much to choose between Houston, Oakland or Seattle at the moment, but that’s not a good thing. Whichever way you would have turned, 2009 wouldn’t have added up to much.
But there’s always next year!
Wow – that was a spectacular typo. The K in Franklin jumped three letters. I suspect the letter most evocative of good pitching was trying its hardest to dissociate itself from mediocrity.
And that should be “backed up by” of course. No humorous ways to dig myself out of that one.