Astro naught.
That had to feel really good for the Astros. Houston 8, Texas 4: Adrenalizing, cathartic, you-can-breathe-now stuff.
The Astros, whose fans didn’t have very good nights on Monday or on Tuesday, on the scoreboard or otherwise as their club dropped the first two of three as Texas came visiting the domed Inferiority Complex.
The Astros, who won their fourth and final matchup out of 19 against the Rangers in 2016, slightly less failed than their 2-17 mark in 2013 — unless you consider that the 2013 Astros lost 111 games, which in context (they are 72-55 this year when not playing Texas, compared to the Rangers’ 72-56 mark against other teams) makes this year’s spit-up against Texas a whole lot more failed.
The Astros, who said “no” to managerial candidate (and hometown product) Jeff Banister a month before the Rangers interviewed and hired him.
The Astros, whom Cole Hamels said “no” to nine months after that, days before he happily packed his bags for Texas.
The Astros, who then traded two of the key players they’d offered Philadelphia for Hamels (lefthander Josh Hader and outfielder Brett Phillips) to Milwaukee instead, getting Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers, one of whom has been a below-league-average starting pitcher and the other of whom the Astros gave up for nothing a month ago, after which the Rangers picked him up for next-to-nothing, getting .775 OPS production out of the 30-year-old, compared to the .594 he put up for the Astros.
Gomez has been vocal about the coaching and the culture in Texas and how both were new and refreshing changes from what he’d experienced in Houston.
In contrast, Colby Rasmus was vocal about the Rangers taking steps to get better at the trade deadline — acquiring Jonathan Lucroy and Carlos Beltran, both of whom Houston had reportedly checked in on — on the heels of sound-bite remarks by his general manager who made it pretty clear that he was more interested in years that didn’t end in ’16 and “wasn’t prepared” to move top prospects for pennant race help (even if controllable beyond this season).
(Never mind the $47.5 million spent this summer on Yulieski Gurriel for his age 32, 33, 34, 35, and 36 seasons. That doesn’t count because it doesn’t negatively impact those precious farm system rankings. Also: Peace out, Hooks. Thought you had those hated RockHounds. And go get ’em, JetHawks. Take the Blaze down and make the organization really super-turbo-proud.)
The Astros are really good right now, in spite of (1) their record against Texas and (2) what their own front office apparently thinks, at least when it’s publicly on-message.
The largest newspaper that covers the Astros started the season with a “Dallas sucks” hatepiece (the city, not the broken Astros ace), embarrassing clickbait that I’m not going to link here and that’s about as classy as fans throwing fruit and baseballs at Carlos Gomez.
Much more recently (this week, in fact, after Houston’s 14th loss of the season to Texas two nights ago), that same paper called the Rangers “the team from South Oklahoma,” which is smart, finely crafted, highbrow humor right there. Strong.
And Tuesday, a talk show host in Houston applauded Jason Castro’s bat to the back of Lucroy’s catching helmet, adding: “Lucroy looks like a scraggly dirtbag. He doesn’t fit the mold of the Astros.”
I’m just glad the Astros didn’t feel Jeff Banister was the best fit for their mold, and that Cole Hamels wasn’t digging that mold, either.
As Joe Sheehan points out, the Rangers went 10-1 against Houston this year in games decided by one run or in extra innings — and that that nine-win gap is virtually what separates the two teams.
Is that luck? Lance McCullers Jr. thinks so. (Other Astros may, too, but McCullers went to the air with it: “They get lucky a lot against us.”) I suppose Ken Giles agrees, since he proclaimed after Texas won the first seven match-ups of the season that Houston “ha[d] more talent” than the Rangers, whom he and his boys were fixin’ to “go out there and put . . . to the ground.”
In the remaining three games of that early June series and in each of the ensuing three-game series between the teams, Houston won once and Texas won twice, a collective 4-8 stretch that left the Astros 4-15 against Texas for the year. I wasn’t sure what “put to the ground” meant, but that clears things up.
In two of those final three series that the Astros dropped to Texas two games to one, including this week’s, they nonetheless outscored the Rangers, run-diff’ing the best team in the American League while the Rangers were busy win-diff’ing them.
I don’t have a good feel for what the team culture is like in Houston. I’m a big fan of Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa and George Springer and Alex Bregman and Chris Devenski, but it seems like the time-tested way to win with guys like that, in the stage of the career they’re at, is to have veteran leaders around who have been through the wars and can help set a tone.
Gomez raves about the Texas clubhouse. Beltran says the looseness of the room is in direct contrast to how quiet and tight it was in New York.
Mark DeRosa says of the eight teams he played for, “none treats their players better than the Texas Rangers.”
That’s been a few years, you say? DeRosa adds that Ian Desmond, a player he helped steer toward Texas seven months ago, says he’s never had as much fun playing the game as he’s having now, with this group of players and coaches.
And then there’s Lucroy, who this week told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times: “The veteran leadership here, on the players’ side, is just astounding. And the coaching staff is awesome. They let Adrian [Beltre] run the clubhouse, and it’s a tight ship. Guys watch what he does: He plays every single day hard. Guys take that example, and they follow it.”
Who’s that guy in Houston?
Does it matter to the Jeff Luhnow front office if that guy isn’t there?
Houston is missing some things, it would seem, though even its holes would have been masked had the club just been able to handle the Rangers at a level anywhere close to the way it’s handled the rest of the league.
Big win last night for the Astros, who go into 2017 with a one-game win streak against those cross-state rivals that hammered them all season long (again), and who hold steady in the sixth spot vying for two AL Wild Card berths — a position they’d be as far from as South Oklahoma if they managed to merely split this year’s head-to-head with the Rangers.
See ya again on May 1st, Houston. Go get the Mariners, even if you have to do it without Altuve and without Bregman.
And Go JetHawks.