THE PALLILOG
Cracks over pings, 71s & 17s, and the impossible Astros record Altuve is chasing down
Feb 29, 2024, 10:19 am
Josh Hader will become the 4th Astro to wear number 71. Photo by Rich Storry/Getty Images.
Growing up, I was never a fan of aluminum baseball bats. I refused to use one throughout my Little League days, since “Big Leaguers” didn’t use them. It wasn’t like the extra power of an aluminum bat was going to turn me into a slugger anyway. Plus, the “ping” of bat meeting baseball always sounded fake to me, certainly relative to the great sound of the crack of a wood bat making sharp contact with the ball (great sound for hitters anyway). In less than a month now the Astros’ highly potent batting order will produce many a loud crack of the bat. This weekend however “ping” is the thing as the Astros play host to their annual College Classic at Minute Maid Park. As always the six team field is excellent. It’s not a tournament. Each team gets in three games. The best atmosphere of the weekend no doubt occurs at the Friday night 7:05 matchup between Texas and LSU. The Longhorns are 14th ranked (via Baseball America) while the reigning National Champion Tigers are number three. On Sunday UT plays Vanderbilt which checks in at number nine. Houston, Texas State, and Louisiana are also in the field.
An Astros number game
New Astros’ closer Josh Hader wears number 71. That’s a number one would more typically associate with some minor league prospect getting a look in spring training than with one of the premier closers in the game. When coming up with the Milwaukee Brewers Hader wanted number 17 but was told no can do. The Brewers haven’t retired number 17 but no one has worn it for them since a second baseman named Jim Gantner in 1992. Gantner played in 17 big league seasons all with the Brewers, and was a below average offensive player in 16 of them. Former Astros’ manager Cecil Cooper played 11 years with the Brewers that fully overlapped with Gantner’s tenure. “Coop” had a six-year stretch over which he was an absolute stud, three times finishing fifth in American League Most Valuable Player Award voting. 15 different players have worn number 15 for Milwaukee since Cooper did. Gantner is a Wisconsin native (Cooper grew up in Brenham and went to Prairie View A&M) but still seems an odd choice to have his number de facto retired. Anyway, since Hader couldn’t get number 17 with the Brewers he inverted it to the available 71, and has stuck with it. Incidentally, the Astros didn’t give out number 17 for a decade after Lance Berkman was traded. Jake Odorizzi then David Hensley have worn it over the last three seasons.
Hader will become the fourth Astro to wear number 71 in a regular season game. In a perfect Astroworld that appearance comes when locking down a victory over the Yankees on Opening Day. You are scary good on Astros trivia if you can name two of the three prior wearers of number 71. One would be impressive. If you can name all three, you almost certainly looked them up.
TIME’S UP! In reverse chronological order…Peter Solomon pitched in six games in 2021. Carlos Sanabria pitched in two games in 2020, J.C. Gutierrez pitched in seven games in 2007, the last four of them for then interim manager Cecil Cooper who had taken over from Phil Garner.
Hader supplants Ryan Pressly as the Astros’ primary closer. He has a tough act to follow in entry music. Pressly’s use of the Johnny Cash classic “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” has been pretty epic. With the Padres last season Hader entered to D.J. Khaled’s “Every Chance I Get.” An upgrade seems in order. When a Brewer Hader used “Renegade” by Styx.
Catch me if you can
In falling down a rabbit hole while researching a couple of things one can learn some pretty arcane stuff. Any Astros fan of even middling caliber should know Craig Biggio is the franchise leader in regular season games played (and several other categories) with 2850 which ranks 18th all-time in Major League Baseball. That’s fully 700 more than runner-up Jeff Bagwell. Jose Cruz is third with 1870. Jose Altuve is fourth with his 1668 regular season games. Under contract for six more seasons, Altuve would have to average 197 games played per season to catch Biggio by the end of 2029. Given a regular season is 162 games, Biggio seems rather safe atop the games played mountain.
More Astros, please!
A mention that our second season of the Stone Cold ‘Stros podcast is off and running. Brandon Strange, Josh Jordan, and I discuss varied Astros topics weekly. On our regular schedule the first post goes up Monday afternoon. You can get the video version (first part released Monday, second part Tuesday, sometimes a third part Wednesday) via YouTube: stone cold stros - YouTube with the complete audio available at initial release Monday via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So how successful was the recently concluded Houston Texans’ season? Their record was the same 10-7 mark posted a year ago, they won a home playoff game as a year ago, and then were eliminated in the Divisional round as a year ago. Coming off three seasons in which the Texans won a total of 11 games, the 2023 campaign went down as an unquestionably tremendous success. Holding steady in 2024? Let’s go with middling success. While more than a few subscribe to the notion that if you’re not going forward you’re going backward, that’s too cut and dried to categorize the 2024 Texans.
Winning a horrible AFC South simply is not an achievement to brag on. That said, the Texans were leaps and bounds better than the horrible. It’s not very long ago that they were the horrible. The South is the only AFC division the Texans would have come close to winning, but while watered down with regard to impressiveness, it’s not as if winning it is meaningless. Eight times now in their 23 seasons of existence the Texans have won the division. Taking nothing else into consideration, that is quite good. With divisions comprised of four teams, if everything was equal over a lengthy period of time (quality of management, coaching, luck, and whatever else) pure math says each team should win its division once every four years. The Texans eight titles in 23 seasons is better than once every three years. Since the current divisional format was adopted when the Texans began playing in 2002, the Colts have won the South nine times, the Titans four times, the Jaguars just twice. The Texans have won their division crowns in pairs: 2011/2012, 2015/2016, 2018/2019, 2023/2024. They will be clear favorites to make it back-to-back-to-back division championships for the first time.
And now to the flip side of the coin. The Texans are an utter failure at achieving anything beyond winning a Wild Card round game on their home field. Eight playoff appearances, a 6-2 record all at home vs. a Wild Card, 0-6 in the Division round, hence zero spots in the AFC Championship game. The Texans have not come close to winning in any of those six defeats. Their best go of it was their first ever postseason, the 2011 season. The Texans were at Baltimore, and twice in the last three minutes of the fourth quarter took possession trailing 20-13. The first of those possessions featured consecutive T.J. Yates (!) completions to Andre Johnson that got them near midfield. Yates’s next throw was also intended for Johnson. It was a deep ball intercepted by Ed Reed (that would not be the last time Ed Reed was involved in a poor outcome for the Texans but that’s a wholly different topic). The Texans then forced a Ravens’ three and out and took over after the punt at their own 48-yard-line with 45 seconds left. Yates threw four straight incompletions and that was that. Thirteen years later the Texans have come no closer to the NFL’s semifinals. Using the same simple math that dictates a team should win its division every four years, with sixteen teams competing for two spots in the Conference Championship game, over the long haul a franchise should average an appearance once every eight years. The Texans are still sitting on zero. The Cleveland Browns (2.0 edition) are the only other AFC franchise to never get within one victory of the Super Bowl.
Other than the seven point loss to the Ravens, Saturday’s defeat in Kansas City is the only other non-double digit Texans’ playoff loss, and that was a nine point game only because the Chiefs took a safety in the final seconds. Their other six playoff losses have come by an average of 19.83 points. That drives home the fact that the Texans have yet to ever be true Super Bowl contenders.
Waiting for Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Lamar Jackson to decline isn’t much of a plan. Will C.J. Stroud evolve into a quarterback worthy of belonging in at least the same paragraph as those three, if not the same sentence? Will Nick Caserio atone for his arrogant and erroneous declaration that it was a “lazy narrative” to point to the Texans’ offensive line play as, well, offensive? Those are two of the bigger questions to which the answers will shape the Texans’ ceilingfor 2025 and beyond.The nucleus of a potentially elite defense is there with Will Anderson, Danielle Hunter (for one more season at least), Derek Stingley, Kamari Lassiter, and Calen Bullock. It’s not supremely difficult to get pretty good in the NFL. Greatness is a much higher hurdle to clear. The Texans are pretty good. Pretty good may be good enough to win another cute little division championship banner. Can they deliver great?
Still three weeks to go until the doors open at spring training, but the Astros are always in season for our discussion. New Stone Cold ‘Stros podcasts drop each Monday, with intense negotiations in progress to add a Thursday episode also. Click here to watch!