Daily Archives: June 11, 2010

Toward the end of the 2007 season, it seemed obvious that the Astros, on their way to a 73-89 record just two years removed from the franchises’ only World Series appearance, were going to have to start rebuilding. Instead, the team hired former Phillies general manager Ed Wade and decided to take an out-of-left-field shot at winning their weak division, which had been won by an 85-win Cubs team in ’07.

Wade traded closer Brad Lidge to the Phillies in November, but made no effort to trade any of his other valuable veterans and instead traded seven players to the Orioles and Diamondbacks in December for shortstop Miguel Tejada and closer Jose Valverde, respectively. Thanks to a monster season from Lance Berkman, it almost worked. The Astros won 86 games in 2008 and were just two games behind the Wild Card lead on September 14, but a five-game losing streak at that point ended their postseason hopes and they finished 11 games behind the 97-win Cubs in the division and 3.5 games behind the second-place Brewers for the Wild Card.

Despite that disappointment and winning just 74 games in 2009, the Astros still have not rebuilt, though now that they’re on pace for a sub-70 win season this year, it seems the time has finally come as Berkman, who has a $15 million option for 2011, ace Roy Oswalt, who is owed $16 million next year with an option for the same amount in 2012, and left fielder Carlos Lee, who is owed $37 million over the next two seasons and thus could prove unmovable, are all expected to be on the block for this year’s trading deadline.

I’m actually impressed that the Astros are doing as well as they are this season. Coming into the season, I really thought Houston would be the worst team in the majors this year, but right now, five teams in baseball have worse records, and the Royals have an identical one. Still, only the Orioles and Pirates have worse run differentials and Baseball Prospectus’s Third-Order Wins drop the ‘Stros below the O’s as well.

Yeah, they’re that bad.

The Astros biggest problem is they can’t score. Again, only the O’s and Bucs have scored fewer than the Astros average of 3.34 runs per game. The Astros’ team on base percentage is .291, which I needn’t tell you is the worst in the majors, and their .340 slugging is also dead last among the 30 teams. Their team OPS+ it 69.  It’s stunning how bad the Astros offense is. Berkman is slugging just .418. Carlos Lee has done little outside of his nine home runs (.227/.264/.396). The second-best hitter on the team to this point has been 30-year-old infield castoff Jeff Keppinger, who is hitting a very batting-average-dependent .300/.352/.399 with all but one of his extra-base hits being doubles. Busted catching prospect J.R. Towles again failed to hold onto the job, leaving it in the hands of catch-and-throw veteran Humberto Quintero (.252/.282/.353). Second baseman Kaz Matsui was so bad he got released. The new left side of the infield, free agent third baseman Pedro Feliz and rookie shortstop Tommy Manzella, is hitting a combined .222/.259/.288 with three homers and 15 unintentional walks in 382 plate appearances. It’s bad, people, real bad.

The pitching is better, in part because it has to be, and in part because Wade took a gamble on one of his former Phillies players and it paid off. Brett Myers, who starts tonight against Andy Pettitte, is leading the Astros in ERA (3.01) and wins (4). Roy Oswalt, who the Yanks will miss, has pitched better, but with less luck (2.66 runs of support per game and a 3-8 record) and has struggled in his last two starts, inflating his ERA by close to a run. Twenty-six-year-old Felipe Paulino, whom the Yankees will also miss, has been coming on strong of late, but with little to show for it (3.00 runs of support and a 1-7 record).

The performances of the other two starting pitchers the Yankees will face this weekend, 31-year-old lefty Wandy Rodriguez and 38-year-old veteran Brian Moehler, have been less encouraging. Rodriguez, who will face the rejuvenated Javier Vazquez on Saturday, showed some nice improvement in his late 20s and seemed to have a break-out season last year, winning 14 games for a bad team with a 3.02 ERA, 193 strikeouts, and a 3.06 K/BB, but this year his strikeouts are down, his walks are up, he posted a 6.75 ERA in May, and he is getting killed by righties (.324/.391/.459). Moehler, who will face Phil Hughes, a pitcher 15 years his junior, on Sunday, is a replacement for injured 25-year-old Bud Norris, who wasn’t pitching well either. Moehler has made three starts in place of Norris, one awful, one solid, one quality, but this is a pitcher who has posted a 5.16 ERA over the last six seasons and has struck out just 3.6 men per nine innings this season.

Frankly, the Yankees should sweep this series. There are no Jake Arrieta’s on the way to the Bronx to replace Moehler. If there’s any concern here, it’s that the Yankees’ interleague history against the Astros comes with some bad mojo. First there was the six-pitcher no-hitter seven years ago tonight (thanks for the reminder, Will), then there was Chein-Ming Wang’s career-altering broken foot in 2008. The upside is that the Yankees are 5-0 against the Astros in games in which they’ve gotten a hit. Here’s hoping they keep that streak intact this weekend.

With Brett Gardner still out with pain in his thumb and Alex Rodriguez diagnosed with tendonitis in his hip flexor (apparently unrelated to his hip labrum issue from last year), the Yankee lineup is a bit short tonight. Robinson Cano hits cleanup and Nick Swisher backs him up in the five spot, that leaves the two hole to Curtis Granderson, brings Francisco Cervelli up to seventh, Granderson’s usual spot, and the last two spots are the replacement players: Ramiro Peña at third and Kevin Russo in left. Gardner is going to take batting practice and the doctors say Rodriguez could pinch hit (both are day-to-day), but for all intents and purposes, the Yankee bench is Marcus Thames and Chad Moeller.

Good thing they’re playing the Astros and have four days to get healthy before they have to face the Phillies. To that end, Jorge Posada has tested himself behind the plate and says he’s ready to catch. I still prefer him in the DH spot, but I don’t think Posada starting at DH necessitates Moehler being on the roster if Posada can catch. Moeller can always be called back up for the next day’s game if there’s an injury to Cervelli, so at most you’d lose the DH for a few innings without Moehler there. What’s more detrimental to the team: a couple of at-bats going to a pitcher or Chad Moeller taking up a roster spot every single day?

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Free South Africa, By Keith Haring (1985)

Keith Haring used to have a boutique just south of Houston Street called The Pop Shop. I remember they used to sell enormous versions of this poster for a buck (man, I should have bought a dozen of ’em). I had one hanging in my room, which made for stimulating conversation with my mother who was raised in the Belgian Congo. Picture me, the young, know-it-all New York Liberal vs an apolitical mother who was raised by Colonialists. We could have guest starred on Piper’s Pit.

Still, the picture endures…

Haagen-Daz Vanilla.

The perfect crime.

A butta mid-’90s Hip Hop joint…

[Picture by Bags]

Burt Lancaster had been a movie star for nearly forty years when he appeared in Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, but it’s probably the film that first made me a Lancaster fan. I’m sure I’d seen him before on TV – a movie of the week airing of The Island of Dr. Moreau, or on HBO’s heavy rotation of Zulu Dawn – hell, maybe even a Million Dollar Movie broadcast of John Frankenheimer’s excellent thriller, Seven Days In May. Regardless, while I knew the name and face of Burt Lancaster, he’d never meant anything to me until Local Hero hit cable TV a short while after its 1983 release. I was just old enough to appreciate its charms and to become a fan of its legendary star.

Local Hero finds a Houston oil company yuppie, MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), sent to Scotland by his employer, Knox Oil & Gas, to purchase an entire town and its bay for a new refinery. The research and planning has been done, all that’s left is for the deal to be made with the locals. MacIntyre gets the job due in part to last name. However, he confides to his friend that his parents were Hungarian and they adopted the name MacIntyre because they thought it sounded “American.” That detail gives you some sense of the world view of Forsyth’s film.

This is a true gem of a movie: gentle, but pointed, moody, but hopeful and eccentric and funny without trying too hard. Local Hero gives the viewer the illusion of comfort of familiar terrain while actually being quite unlike any other film.

Forsyth, who had already had one sleeper hit the previous year with Gregory’s Girl, has said that without Lancaster’s star power, the film would likely not have been made. Lancaster plays the CEO of Knox Oil, Felix Happer and though he’s on screen far less than Riegert, he creates a truly memorable character. Lancaster was no longer the acrobat or chiseled tough guy of his youth, but he’d grown into an even better actor.

Happer has some of the qualities we’d expect of the CEO of a massive oil company: he’s a narcissist and a bully. However, he’s got a couple of somewhat endearing quirks, most prominently his fascination with astronomy. When MacIntyre visits Happer for last minute instructions on the deal before flying to Scotland, Happer seems only interested in making sure MacIntyre will call him personally at any time if he witnesses anything unusual in the heavens – especially in Virgo. This sets up the beautiful sequence of a drunken MacIntyre’s rapturous phone call to Happer as he witnesses the aurora borealis for the first time.

Lancaster and Riegert both deliver layered, nuanced performances that keep the delicate balance of whimsy and cold reality in play. (Happer may be a boorish oil billionaire, but you’d like to think that if he ran BP, the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would never have played out like this.) Lancaster’s comic touch in his dealings with his quite possibly deranged psychoanalyst is especially deft and charming.

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Mark Harris writes about the disappointing start to the summer blockbuster season in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly:

As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends. Making movies because you belive in the script, the director, the idea, the creative possibilities? That’s 1970’s nostalgia, if not rank sentimentality–leave it to the indies.

…The rest of this summer will certainly provide some big hits, because that’s what summers do. And–who knows?–maybe we’ll even see some really good mainstream films; perhaps some combination of Pixar, Christopher Nolan, vampires, Julia Roberts, 3-D, and Michael Cera will save the season. But a few clean wins aren’t likely to change the fact that in 2010, the Hollywood studios and those who run them are behaving like irresponsible custodians of the great tradition of mainstream moviemaking. Their choices are lazy and defensive; their creative ambitions are hidden even from themselves; they look to marketers rather than filmmakers for inspiration; and their product just isn’t very good. When the grosses go back up, all this will doubtless be airbrushed away like a starlet’s worry line. But what if they stay bad? The result will be, at last, a crisis. Perhaps exactly the crisis Hollywood needs.

Well put from a guy who is the only reason to ever glance at EW.

[Photo Credit: Jakarta Daily Photo]

Living in Cooperstown, one never knows when one will run into a former major league star. That scenario happened to me again last weekend, when I was asked to conduct a village trolley tour for friends and family of former home run king Hank Aaron. I was told that there would be no former major leaguers on the tour, so I was surprised by the ensuing encounter. I didn’t meet Aaron–he decided to remain at the hotel–but I happened to run into another former Braves slugger, not to mention a former Yankee.

Bob Watson, a friend of “Hammerin’ Hank” and a fine player in his own right, was standing right outside of the trolley door. I didn’t recognize him at first, but he did look vaguely familiar. I thought that he might be a retired player, but I could not place a name with the face. Then I saw someone approach him, exclaiming, “Hey, Bob.” At that moment, it popped into my head: Bob Watson. The face now jived with memories from some of my old baseball cards. He still had that strong, rounded build, the one that reminded me of his timeless nickname, “Bull.” It’s a fitting name for the man who currently serves as Major League Baseball’s disciplinarian.

A few minutes after my moment of recognition, Watson took his seat on the right side of the trolley, in the second row, well within my sights. Bob simply blended into the tour, politely asking questions like some of the other riders, but making no mention of his big league experience. He was apparently too modest to draw attention to himself. About midway through the tour, Billye Aaron, the exceedingly cordial wife of Mr. Aaron, pointed out that one of the trolley riders was indeed Bob Watson. She emphasized that Watson had not only played for the Braves, but had become the game’s first African-American general manager when he was hired by the Astros. Shortly thereafter, the conversation turned to Bob’s work as the general manager of the Yankees, and how he had helped put together the 1996 world championship team. All through the conversation, Bob remained silently humble about his accomplishments.

Watson ended up resigning as Yankee chieftain prior to the 1998 season, largely because of health concerns and the stresses of working under the watchful fist of George Steinbrenner. (Just look at how much Brian Cashman has aged over the past decade. He looks at least 50.) Given Watson’s brief but successful tenure as the Yankees’ general manager, it’s easy to forget what he achieved as a ballplayer in the seventies and eighties. Those who remember Watson’s playing days probably recall him as a power-hitting first baseman, but Bull actually started out as a catcher in the Astros’ organization. Watson struggled with his mobility and his throwing, so much so that the Astros decided to try him in the outfield, at first base, and third base. The Astros intermittently returned him to catching on two occasions, but ultimately settled on him as a left fielder and occasional first baseman. Playing alongside Cesar Cedeno in Houston’s developing young outfield, Watson began to establish himself as one of the National League’s finest young hitters.

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