The mood in the Astros clubhouse yesterday after the 2-1 loss to the
Phillies was about what you’d expect. Michael Bourn tried to stay upbeat,
citing that the team is fighting hard and they know they have good players.
(Fortunately, unlike many around Minute Maid Park, Bourn sounded like he
actually believed the part about the good players.) Geoff Blum punctuated
his post-game interview by rolling his eyes (rightfully) at some cameraman
who asked him the idiotic question “Did you anticipate being 0-6 at this
point?”
Roy Oswalt? Well, he let his pitching do the talking yesterday…and I
don’t mean that in a “Roy brought the funk and needn’t say anything” kind of
way. I mean it in a “Roy threw 114 pitches in six innings, lost 2-1, and
then chose not to speak to the media afterward” kind of way. I suppose for
the paltry of sum of $15 million per year, it probably is a lot to ask Roy
to stick around and speak all of us on days he actually pitches.
As Brad Mills stood in front of the cameras and talked about how hard the
team fought Sunday and, like Bourn but with more emphasis, claimed that
“That’s a good baseball team we have in there,” I couldn’t help but fast
forward to June….July…and think of how many times Mills is going to have
to stick up for his team, reassure us that they’re going to continue to
fight, search for slivers of positivity amidst a sea of empty green seats at
the ballpark.
Because the fact of the matter is that this is not a good baseball team.
We’ve made one turn through the starting rotation and it hasn’t been
pretty. Granted, Philadelphia will make a lot of teams’ pitching look like
batting practice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Astros have lost
these first six games in every conceivable way, finally crossing “pitchers’
duel” off the list Sunday afternoon.
So here we are. 0-6. No other team in baseball is winless, and only
the
Astros and Baltimore Orioles (Two teams that will be colliding in the
same
sentence a whole lot more if the Astros don’t win a game soon, Signed
1988)
have fewer than two wins. One week into the season, and the season is
basically over.
And I’m here to tell you what Drayton McLane and
the 2010 Astros won’t,
Drayton because he doesn’t know when to turn his sprinkler system of
bullshit off, and the team because it’s their job to win games — in
the
grand scheme of things, losing and losing BIG is not the worst thing
that
could happen to this franchise.
I’ll explain.
You see,
sometimes it’s not good enough to be able to merely see rock bottom
from where you are; you have to fall all the way there, face first. You
need to bottom out completely. Like in Party of Five, when Bailey
Salinger was going through his alcoholic phase in Season 3, he knew he
was
drinking all the time, but it didn’t really faze him. His family staged an
intervention for him, and that
wasn’t enough. It took Bailey nearly crashing his jeep and practically
sending his ex-girlfriend Sarah (played to perfection by an up-and-coming
Jennifer Love Hewitt) through the windshield to finally wake up and
realize
that he needed help.
I think Drayton McLane realizes his baseball team needs to make
changes.
He’s given Ed Wade more control than Tim Purpura ever had, and has been
much
more open to actually signing players that the team drafts. However,
Drayton hasn’t had his “Ed Wade goes through the windshield” moment yet,
where he realizes that his team needs more than just tweaks, that it
needs a
total and complete facelift.
A summer of empty seats and a 62-100
record would be just that — Drayton
McLane screeching his jeep into the middle of an intersection as Ed Wade
bounces headfirst off of the windshield . (And yes, I just compared
Drayton
to a maniacal alcoholic and Ed Wade to Jennifer Love Hewitt…where else
can
you get analysis this hard-hitting?)
Baseball teams generally
fall into one of five categories:
1.) Genuine contender — at the
very least, a high probability to be playing
in October (Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Cards)
2.) One or two flaws
away — will hang around long enough to stay in the
conversation, much hope for the future (Tampa Bay, Minnesota, San
Francisco,
Florida last year are all examples)
3.) Building toward something —
optimism generally exceeds their won-loss
record, usually a young team (Milwaukee the last few years may be best
example of this)
4.) Mediocre ambiguity — average to below average
in every sense of the
word (see: Astros, 2009)
5.) No hope (the usual suspects —
Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Baltimore)
The Astros spent the better
part of 1997 through 2005 as a Category 1 or
Category 2 team, making the playoffs more often during that time than
not
and finally making a run at a world championship in 2005. The only year
that you could really say they were a bad baseball team in that
timeframe
was 2000, their first season in the new ballpark.
The Astros’
problem now is that they are (and have been for four years) a
Category 4 team, mired in that meaty low-70 to low-80 win part of the
baseball curve with a team that has only a handful (literally) of future
building blocks and where two-thirds of the payroll is being used on
four or
five players who are all well over 30 years old and are either
ineffective,
injured, or fat. Just a bad situation made worse by an owner who spent
too
many years thinking that the fan base couldn’t deal with taking a couple
steps back in the name of logical rebuilding.
The end result?
Well, you’re looking at it. For now.
Getting back to my original
premise that losing at historically bad levels
would actually be good for the Astros, the bottom line is that the team
needs to find some way to get from the ambiguity of Category 4 to the
clarity and hope of Category 3, and the fastest way there is to
supplement
the seeds FINALLY being planted in the minor league system through the
draft
with some more prospects and some serious shedding of bad salaries.
Basically
what I’m saying is, we all know this is going to be a Category 5
(hopeless) summer for the Astros, so my guess is Drayton would rather
pay
the pro-rated portion of, say, $62 million than $92 million for
hopelessness.
Drayton McLane has never been a seller at trade
deadline time (if you listen
real close you can hear him saying “It’s not what champions do…”);
he’s
been a buyer a couple times, most notably Randy Johnson and Carlos
Beltran.
The only way Drayton McLane moves Roy Oswalt (easily the biggest asset
he
has) or Lance Berkman (this knee thing isn’t helping his value) or
Carlos
Lee (oh please God, hear our prayers) is if the Astros are a clear dud,
on
the field and at the turnstile. And trust me, if you’ve seen the crowds
this first week, until this team puts something watchable, something
with
potential, out there on the field, then the two go hand in hand.
What
I’m saying is a team that in June is on pace for about 62 wins with a
lineup full of 30-something-year-old independent contractors may be what
finally gets Drayton McLane to okay the final phase of becoming a true
rebuilding franchise. No one, and I mean NO ONE, will show up to watch a
bunch of old guys that suck. No one showing up means a whole lot of
dollar
ticket giveaways and a whole lot of unconsumed beer and nachos. It also
means that shelling out a $92 million payroll gets a lot more painful
(not
that he can’t afford it, but Drayton’s not into making Berkman and Lee
into
charitable causes). It means veteran guys, no matter how great Brad
Mills
is at making the ballpark a happy place, will be disgruntled with all
the
losing. In short, it means they finally aggressively move their aging
guys. This needs to happen.
Staying on pace for 70-something
wins means there is hope. That’s a little
too good. 62-100 feels futile. Downright hopeless. The Astros, for
the
time being, need to have no hope for 2010. As George Costanza once
said,
“Hope is killing me. My best bet is to be hopeless. It’s my only
hope.”
Exactly. (And last I checked, George Costanza had at least one more
World
Series ring than Drayton McLane or Ed Wade. So there.)
Before
the halcyon days of 1997-2005, the Astros went through their own
rebuilding period. In fact, you could call the early 1990’s a Category 3
period for the franchise — lots of mediocre to average records, but a
young
team that had a plan (minus the Drabek/Swindell double-dip fiasco), a
nucleus, and was building toward something. Go to
baseball-reference.com and look at the lineups of the Astros from
1991-1994 — it’s almost all guys
under the age of 30. Now, not all of them panned out, but you had a
direction. Look at their lineup in 2010 — other than Bourn, Hunter
Pence
and Tommy Manzella, the whole lineup including the top of the rotation
and
highest-paid reliever are all 30 or older.
If nothing else, even if most of the 20-somethings of the early `90’s
either
didn’t pan out or wound up blossoming elsewhere (the late Ken Caminiti,
Luis
Gonzalez), at the very least the young clubhouse created a dynamic
whereby
Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell were forced to lead. The seeds of their
greatness as players, but moreso as leaders and professionals, were
planted
in those early years when they had no choice but to lead. Who else was
going to do it?
Fast forward to 2010 — if your building blocks of the future are Hunter
Pence, Michael Bourn, hell even Jason Castro, let’s put them in a
clubhouse
that’s theirs. Throw them in the leadership swimming pool and see if
they
can do more than dog paddle. Wouldn’t you rather see a bunch of younger
players following Pence’s insane work ethic and Bourn’s cool demeanor
than
all of these old guys getting iced down watching Carlos Lee get fatter
and
Lance Berkman getting his knee drained again?
Gut it, Ed Wade. Gut the whole team, keep the good, young parts. Move
forward.
And if you want to ask one of your so-called leaders, Roy Oswalt, about
his
thoughts on being traded (after all, he does have a full no-trade
clause), I
would suggest you try and find him somewhere other than at his locker
after
a game. He doesn’t seem to be hanging out there much lately.
Listen to Sean Pendergast on 1560 The Game from 3-7 p.m. weekdays on
the Sean & John Show, and follow him on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/SeanCablinasian.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2010.
