Tuesday's Three Astros Things
Talking about the start to the season, homer nicknames, and Peter King retiring
Some things to talk about while we celebrate baseball being back…
The highs and lows of 2024
The 2024 season sucked. Until it didn’t. Isn’t that the way of it?
Losing to the g-d Yankees is a travesty. My sportswriting years meant I let go of a lot of the burning hatreds I had for teams when I was growing up. I may not think highly of the Cardinals, but I don’t hate them.
The Yankees, though? They can go to hell. Seeing them prance around Minute Maid as reliever after reliever blew the damn game made me so angry. It made me rail internally against Jim Crane’s cheapness. It made me scream internally about the lack of prospects. If only we could have spent more, or had more guys on top prospect lists, we could have traded for Juan Soto instead of the g-d Yankees.
All my pessimism and cynicism was alive. The team would lose 100 games this year. They were falling apart. They couldn’t hit a lick. They disappeared in the clutch. It was all over.
Rationally, I knew every team went through these stretches. Early season games were tough as guys were still ramping up for the season. The bullpen needed time to work out the kinks, since it wasn’t even a finished product, as one guy who should be there, Bennett Sousa, was on the injured list.
And as Brian Arbour correctly pointed out, every Astros team goes through four-game losing streaks. That it happened to the g-d Yankees and that it happened to open the season just made it more stark.
Then Monday happened.
Settling in to watch Ronel Blanco make his 2024 debut. Seeing Jose Altuve rip a double off the Crawford Boxes scoreboard. Seeing Tuck hit only his sixth home run ever to left field. Seeing Yainer continue his red-hot streak by blasting one to left center. Seeing Jeremy Pena get off the schneid with his own bomb, his first since last July 5.
And still Blanco cooked. He unveiled a new changeup, a cambio. It danced around the zone, buried in the dirt as Blue Jay after Blue Jay swung over the top.
Houston added on runs. Blanco kept getting outs.
In the top of the eighth, Blanco had 80 pitches. I figured he had pitched a great game but probably wouldn’t see much more time. They’d turn it over to Pressly and Hader and that would be it.
But then Blanco got through the inning with 11 pitches. He came out for the ninth, 91 pitches in all and 24 straight hitters retired. Only a leadoff walk to old friend Gerorge Springer marred his ledger.
Blanco was clearly working hard. Pressing. But he got it done. Out after out after out. He bounced back from another walk to Springer, after burying another change below the zone that George didn’t bite at.
But Blanco wasn’t phased. He got a grounder from Vladito, which Mauricio Dubon gobbled up and barely threw Guerrero Jr. out at first. In the fifth game of the season, and just Blanco’s eighth overall start in the majors, he threw a no-hitter.
The 17th no-hitter in franchise history, and maybe the most unlikely one. Well, second-most, after that six-pitcher effort in the Bronx against the Yankees that featured Roy Oswalt, Pete Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner.
Maybe there’s hope for this season after all. I’m still worried about the bullpen. And Yordan’s early-season slump. But after an awful first weekend, the Astros proved they still have some magic left. That’s enough for me, for now.
List of nicknames for Astros home runs
An incomplete list of the best home run calls when an Astros hitter goes yard.
Tuve! or Joseee Jose Jose Jose
Yor-dong
Tuck Tuck Boom
Breggy Bomb
Yainer-Mite (this is the newest on the list. I’m still workshopping it)
Hermanos Cubanos (technically would work for Yordan too, but it fits old man Abreu)
Chazzy Fizz
Pena! (incomplete, obviously. His lack of general yardwork has made it less of a priority)
Jake from State Farm
Dubey (a little like how Milo Hamilton just added -ey to the end of every Astros name for a nickname i.e. Baggy, Dalgy, Cammy)
Gator (an oldie from the TCB days)
Victor Victoria? idk I’m running out of steam
The Grae Man? This is getting dumb. I’ll stop.
Peter King retired (and I got sentimental)
Note: I wrote this when news first broke that King was retiring. I just never finished the other items to send it out. So I’m including it here. Forgive me some navel-gazing about sportswriting and my former career.
I have been out of sportswriting for almost as long as I was in it. From 2005 through 2015 I wrote about sports. High school sports. College sports. Gold Glove boxing. Old coach retirements. And so many dumb things about the Astros. I write about them from 2009 through 2015. Maybe even earlier than that, because I was writing a blog about Astros stuff on and off for most of that time.
For all that time I’ve been out of sports, I still think about journalism a lot. Writing about sports still calls to me. It’s why I have this newsletter/blog/journal. When I started out this career, trying (and succeeding) at writing professional, I was given advice on how to get better.
Read. Read as much as you can. Old classic sports books. New writers. Absorb it all.
And I did.
I read about more sports than I actually wrote about. When I covered the Masters, I inhaled golf books by the dozen, to get a sense of the magnitude of what I would see. I read Mark Kram’s excellent Ghosts of Manila book, even though I had no interest in boxing. It was just good writing.
Football may be my second-favorite sport. And Peter King was easily my favorite football writer for a long time. His Monday Morning Quarterback columns for Sports Illustrated were must-reads. They helped me think about how to structure a notebook style column. They helped me think more critically about things.
I bring all this up because King announced he was retiring. And, over at Defector, Dave McKenna wrote a wonderful tribute piece to him, in the 10 Things I Think I Think style. One passage of McKenna’s stood out to me.
More than half my life has been spent in journalism, and it is a career I have treasured. But it is also a job that can overtake your life, because it is never done. I am always thinking about the next story, the next good line, the next pitch, the next person I want to call with a question.
My experience was the same. Journalism overtook my life. Running two website and working full-time for a newspaper. Writing up quick blogs on a minor Astros trade as soon as it happened. Constantly refreshing Twitter at the trade deadline because I needed to coordinate articles if a big move happened.
One time at my second newspaper job, I got five calls from my editor while I was trying to watch the wonderful baseball movie, 42. It was my day off, but they needed me in the office. Work never ceases.
Once I got out of that life, moving to a more traditional 9-5 office job, I lost the edge. I no longer feel that pressure. I was still curious. I still go down rabbit holes for information. But without the pressing need to write, write, write, I could just enjoy sports. I could bask in both World Series titles without wondering what I’d write about.
Of course, I still wrote about the 2017 win. But the reason this newsletter is more sporadic is it’s a hobby. It hasn’t overtaken my life again.
In his column, King talks about the sacrifices of being a sportswriter.
The sacrifices my wife, Ann, and my kids, Laura and Mary Beth, and their families have made for me to do this job at the highest level have been significant. To do this job well, you’ve got to have some selfishness in you, and you’ve got to miss time at home—lots of it. I don’t feel great about lots of those times, but I don’t regret them either. To do this job well, it’s a fact that some things in your family will suffer.
Ultimately, that’s what got me. The time away. It put pressure on my family in ways I never wanted to pressure them. Missed teeball games. Missed school pickups. Missed books at bedtime. It all adds up.
A family friend used a phrase that I come back to over and over again, since I first heard it.
“Happiness is never complete.”
It’s simple and profound. It can mean so much. In this instance, I use it with sportswriting. I was so happy when I was doing it. I loved going to games and writing about them. The thrill of the deadline. But happiness wasn’t complete. The grind, the overwhelming control it had on life wore on me, especially as my son got older.
I am happy now, writing this as a lark, being able to enjoy sports and still write silly things. But I miss those moments. Seeing a thrilling ending and then capturing it in words for hundreds or thousands to read. Even this happiness is never complete.
The search then is for balance. Not complete happiness, but a balanced state of being. With this, with my job, with my time home, I feel I’m closer than I was, maybe than I’ve ever been. And that’s enough.