Astros County: November 2008 - February 2021

Over the past 12.5-ish years I have run this here blog. It initially was a blog for me to react to EVERYTHING that happened to the Astros, as it happened. I had a job that allowed me to do this, mostly unimpeded. Evenings were more difficult, but during the day the flexibility was there for me to keep a pretty close eye on the Astros. When we lived in New York, it was a way for me to keep in touch with something from Home and made me feel like we didn’t live so far away. We moved from New York to Nashville in 2009, had a (long-awaited) kid in 2012, and Astros County kept chugging along. Just part of a daily routine.

In 2014 we moved back to Texas, I switched careers, and that ability wasn’t exactly there anymore. Can’t stop teaching about the French Revolution to weigh in on the Astros trading Mike Foltynewicz and Rio Ruiz for Evan Gattis, and so it became more of a LinkStop in the mornings or evenings (depending on what was going in for me at school or with my wife and daughter). This was fine, no one seemed to mind. I disabled the comments, which made things a whole hell of a lot better on my end.

But putting those links together, in an effort to be thorough, started to take more and more time. It’s not out of the ordinary for a Hot Links post to take up to two hours to put together. That’s too much. I could scale it back, I guess but, again, routine. And I am a creature of my routine.

Except I need to shake up my routine. I have a lot on my plate at the moment between my lovely, understanding, sympathetic wife, our rapidly-growing daughter, and work/students/other duties as assigned. I’m really trying to write a book on Andrew Jackson’s 1833 tour of New England, and I’d much rather do that than worry about how Alex Bregman’s hamstring feels (I didn’t mean that, Bregs, please be okay and win an MVP this year). I’d like to watch an Astros game just to watch it, without feeling compelled to take notice of SOMETHING that I could point out or write about that night/early the next morning.

There’s also the whole social media aspect of it. We all follow the same people. You don’t need me to link to every article on Astros dot com, or everything Chandler Rome or Jake Kaplan or FanGraphs posts related to the Astros because…you can just do that on your own. My voice and opinion isn’t even that important. I’m just a history teacher. I never played baseball beyond backyard stuff, I don’t have any particular insight to impart that you can’t think of on your own. I just have a borrowed Stathead login to Baseball-Reference and something approaching institutional memory. I don’t have any sources. The one source I did have doesn’t work in the front office anymore, and he never told me anything, anyway. So what’s really the point? With a decent enough Twitter list, you can create your own Astros County. Hell, I’ll even unlock my Astros Media list so that you can follow everyone I’ve leaned on heavily for Hot Links.

The polarization of society, the inability to agree on basic rules for humanity, the constant nut-kick of a news cycle, is just too much for me. So I’m going to head out. I’ve spent most of the week off of Twitter and let me tell you, I encourage that. Maybe I’ll find that I really miss the blog and come back a little bit, but I doubt it. I’ll definitely tweet like a maniac should this book ever get finished and encourage you to pre-order it. While I’m obviously not a “material benefit” kind of guy (quit working in museums to go teach public school, for instance), there’s not much juice coming out of a whole lot of squeeze.

I will forever appreciate the real-life friendships that have grown out of keeping the blog up, and I’m not abandoning those. I’m just stepping back from pouring hours of work into a blog that I started when I was 28, and now I’m 41. The Twitter account will stay active, and I’ll keep the AstrosCounty dot com domain active just in case researchers come across it and want to collectively scratch their heads. I’ll still do Lima Time Time and Michael Bourn Identity. But I think this is it. After 12 years, I’m hanging it up. At least I’m eligible for the Hall of Fame, provided I don’t post for five more years.

The Comments Section has been transferred to the 60-Day IL

I have removed the comments section. Once in a very rare while My Dude Link or someone else will pop in with something funny and/or useful, but it's overwhelmingly and decidedly not worth it. Ultimately, you have the choice to visit this web site. If this web site does not suit your world view, there are plenty of other ones from which you can choose. For instance:

The Crawfish Boxes
Climbing Tal's Hill
Astros Daily
History Earned
House of Houston

And for minor-league coverage I highly recommend:

What the Heck, Bobby
Astros Future

It's May 30 so the Comments could be back from the IL by the trade deadline, but it's 50/50 on whether they're done for the season.

It Was Ten Years Ago Today...

I'm going to guess that it was cold in Upstate New York on November 6, 2008. Summer Upstate is gorgeous - it's the other 49 weeks of the year that really wear on you. I was probably more than a little homesick. After all, Hurricane Ike had just gone through the Houston area and screwed up my hometown as well as the 2008 Astros, and it was evident that the Window for that era of Astros' hopes was slamming shut. We were 1700 miles away from our families, and facing another winter.

I've always wanted to write. It's the best way for me to express myself. It's certainly a way to exorcise some demons. I met a guy who had a blog about the Yankees which gave me an idea to start one about the Astros. It took me about five minutes to come up with the name (it's not "Astros Country" - it's a self-deprecating joke about the size of the Astros' fan base) and the hardest part for me was to figure out a consistent way to write out stats.

When I told my wife about this idea she said, "Look, you can either do this or play video games, but not both." And I got rid of my PlayStation - I don't even remember what version of PlayStation. I think it was a solid call.

This post will be the 12,183rd published post on Astros County. That's insane. Thanks to Astros County, and thanks to you dear readers, I've had some amazing experiences: I've met a number of people - both in-person and online - that I now count as dear friends, all because we like a sports team. And not necessarily the Astros, a number of people I count as friends aren't even Astros fans...we just like baseball, and jokes, and trying not to be so serious about absolutely everything. I got a chance to sit in the Diamond Club. I get paid to write - occasionally - about the Astros for The Athletic (though I'm going through a period of crippling fear and self-doubt when it comes to The Athletic). I've had a chance to be on the radio to talk about the Astros. Tyler White bought me pizza. All of this is crazy to me, but it's also a hell of a lot of fun.

A lot of y'all have been reading as my wife and I moved from New York to Tennessee, endured some of the most horrific pregnancy complications, had a daughter (All-Star Break 2012), moved back to Texas, switched careers, won a World Series. Most every morning is an opportunity to escape a little bit. A lot of you were here when it was more fun to look at Corpus' box scores than Houston's. And I thank you for being there for however many steps along the way.

When I switched careers a little over four years ago it limited my ability to post on this cursed website multiple times a day. I did stop class when the Astros traded for Evan Gattis. Now it's generally a once-a-day thing, and no one really complained, and that's really cool. But of course Astros County is not a solo effort. The following is a list of people who have contributed to the absurd number of posts, and I'll use their profile name (not their real name, unless they used their real name as their profile name, in which case: hahahaha):

*McQuid
*Noralys Pagan
*Jexas
*Flick Nickem (who has bailed me out over the last few months taking over three posts a week)
*The County Mountie
*Jeff Blogwell
*The Masked Marvel
*The Bartender
*CardsJason
*Deputy Jason
*UK Astros Fans
*Cockroach
*The Batguy
*Leigh
*Street
*Brian Arbour
*(Not Hank) Aaron
*ClintShane
*John Royal
*A Girl in the South
*Joel

Earlier this year Astros County almost completely transformed which may have resulted in shutting it down. The details of what almost happened aren't important but I leaned on a number of the above list for advice. I count everyone here as a friend, and I can't thank you enough for reading Astros County for the last ten years.

Here's to ten more. Or not.

Monday Morning Hot Links

Well things are starting to die down as the despair casts its shadow on to the Houston Texans. If you are emotionally invested in the Texans, please accept my apologies and best wishes for your livers.

For Astros County, though, we shift a little bit into walks down memory lane, reactions to what the Astros do ("The Astros signed Player X. It doesn't make sense, but I'm not going to question it. Back to watching ALCS Game 2 and laughing my head off"), etc. Sometimes the Hot Links will be shorter, there may be days that we don't post anything at all. Winter is here in all its 86-degree glory.

One thing, before we start, though: today (November 6) is the 9th anniversary of the first post on Astros County. Later that day I recapped Brandon Backe's 2008 season and the financial outlook for the 2009 team. It must have been a slow day at work. In the Hot Links post on Thursday morning, you know, the one a few hours after the Astros WON THE WORLD SERIES, a lot of you left very nice comments about this blog. I didn't respond because the most Facebook thing you can do is to copy-and-paste "Thanks!" to every comment, which manages to cheapen the original comment. I read every single one and want you to know that I truly appreciate all of you. Writing about the Astros has been cathartic for me. I'm about four years into off-and-on research on a non-fiction (non-Astros) book, and hitting "publish" around 6:15am every morning gives me the pleasure of having finished...something. I have a lot more to research before I can even start writing the book, and I don't have a ton of free time as it is. The idea that you come to this website each morning, even if the only thing new is a list of what you should read, is humbling. Thank you.

*Richard Justice writes that the Astros' grit and determination (*checks FanGraphs for Grit+) started with A.J. Hinch. Hinch, on talking to Altuve after the 2014 season:
We talked a lot about getting better. We talked about the 100-loss seasons. We talked about the grind that had taken its toll. I asked him one question: 'Why don't we talk about winning?'

*Buster Olney: The Astros look ready to launch a dynasty, but so did the Cubs in 2016. (Also comes with a great story about how Charlie Morton misunderstood the Astros' offer, and was thrilled with the idea of making half of what he's actually making).

*Jim Duquette doesn't think the Astros land any of the Top 25 Free Agents (which starts later today).

*Meet 32-year old Kyle Hamsher, also known as Orbit.

A Note About the Last Two Days

So yesterday morning it came to my attention that the site was down. I checked it out and, well, you can go to AstrosCounty.com and see for yourself. After some help, namely from The Batguy, who had to go through this very thing last week, I figured out who I needed to talk to in an attempt to get it fixed.

When I started Astros County in November 2008, I used a Hotmail account as the email address. Then I updated that to a Gmail account and deleted the Hotmail account. A few years later I bought the AstrosCounty domain through Blogger for $10/year, set to automatically renew every year. However, at some point in the last year the domain was transferred from Blogger to Google Suite. Apparently they used the old Hotmail email account to send notifications such as "Hey your domain name is about to expire, unless you want to go f yourself." Of course I never saw these emails.

I was stuck trying to log into an account I did not know I had. When I used the "forgot your password, numbnuts?" button, a verification code was generated and sent to...that old Hotmail account. And because I couldn't answer any specific questions from a very helpful Google employee named Lucas about the Google Suite account I did not know I had, they cannot verify my ownership of the AstrosCounty.com domain.

Of course there is Phone Support for Google Suite, but it requires you to enter a Pin number...which was apparently sent to the deleted Hotmail account. Anytime I try to recover the password, the instructions to complete the reset go to the deleted Hotmail account, and I cannot give them a different, not-deleted email address to which they would send the instructions. Google cares not for their undelivered emails.

So here's where we are: Astros County is still functioning, but as astroscounty.blogspot.com, just like it's 2011 all over again. I'll resume updating tomorrow morning with the Hot Links. I'm glad the blog is still around. I liked the minor professionalism of having my own domain name. Maybe I can buy it back at some point, but at least 8-1/2 years of blogging almost every day didn't just get lost to the Wayback Machine because of a got dang Hotmail account.

Carry on.

Thanks to The Batguy and US Cocksman for their help in trying to walk me through recovering the domain. Congratulations, Cardinals, you finally did it. 

Astros County is seven years old

I overslept this morning, so this is the only #content for today. This was the first post. And here is a post linking to a long PDF for the 5th anniversary a couple of years ago.

A Note About Astros County

Many of you have been loyal readers of Astros County since I started the blog almost six years ago. We have been through a lot together: a lot of team losses, four managers, countless INTERGRITY columns and jokes, I personally have moved three times (Cooperstown to Nashville to Texas) and added a daughter to the roster. Astros County has been one of the most fun hobbies I ever could have pursued.

You have probably realized by now that there just isn't as much content here as there had been for the previous five and a half years. This isn't a knock - at all - on the other Deputies of Astros County; They're adults with full-time jobs, families, and social lives, too. 

Things are a little different now, though. For 12 years I worked in museums and museum education. But this summer i had a crisis of conscience and packed up my wife and kid to return to Texas and teach high school history at a school where 91% of the students are on free and reduced lunch. 

So we're in a transition period now. In my previous jobs, I have had the flexibility to add a post in the middle of the day, or head home for a day game, or obsessively follow the draft with the promise that I'll come in to work over the weekend. I could always get done what I needed to get done and still try to maintain The Brand. I could be a card-carrying Rovellian. 

Obviously in my new job, I'm not going to stop a class on the Renaissance to see what's happening with the Astros - no matter how appealing that may be. For the last couple of weeks I've been in teacher in-service, and just haven't been able to keep up with the team at a level that was fairly commonplace before. Any tweets you saw from the AC account came from the bathroom (no joke). 

I guess I'm asking you to bear with Astros County. We will not shut it down, we just need some time to figure out how it'll look in the future, and how I can write about the Astros and, you know, be a good teacher. We will produce #content and increase the reach of our #brand, it may just take a little time...

Hugs and kisses,

The Constable

 

Astros County Twitter Lynx

Everyone's favorite Kiwi Astros blogger has joined the Digital Age and is now on The Twitter - go follow Masked Marvel over here: @_MaskedMarvel_

If you're new around these parts and you're also on The Twitter, be sure to follow all of our semi-regulars for maximum Astros snark:

Astros County (The Constable): @AstrosCounty
The Batguy: @The_Batguy
(Not Hank) Aaron: @Aarcraft9
Cockroach: @cockroachHOU
AGirlintheSouth: @AGirlintheSouth
Masked Marvel: @_MaskedMarvel_

Note regarding the Astros County RSS feed

For our dear tech-savvy readers:

It has come to the attention of the Astros County staff that our venerable blog has been experiencing technical difficulties with its own RSS feed for the past few days. Basically, AC posts quit appearing in many folks' RSS readers on or about May 29.

No idea how or why this happened (thanks, Blogger), but Astros County has a new RSS link. If you use Google/Chrome to aggregate your RSS feeds, adding a new feed and searching for "astroscounty.com" should turn up the new link for you. If you use a RSS reader that allows you to add feeds by URL directly, the new feed URL is:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1430771998906051923/posts/default

Also, the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link at the bottom of the site has now been updated with the corrected URL.

Apologies for the trouble, all. Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Five Years: An Astros County Compendium

By now you likely already know that today is Astros County's fifth birthday. To commemorate this event, I have compiled a document for you - a compendium of my fifteen favorite posts in Astros County's history, along with every longread we have ever done. It is 156 pages and almost 49,000 words.

But before you click the link to read this five-year retrospective (or download, save to your Kindle, kill trees to print off, etc.) please consider making a donation to Astros County - which you can do on the right side of the sidebar, or by clicking this link. Donate whatever you want, like, a million dollars or less. 

Thanks for your support over the last five years, let's do this again.

2012 Houston Astros Concession Speech

The Constable wrote the 2012 Astros Concession Speech for Yahoo's Big League Stew. Take yourself five minutes and give it a read.

At the beginning of the season, he wrote the Ten Best Things About Being an Astros Fan. Read that too.

How to proceed

You may have noticed (but then again, you may not have noticed) that Astros County has been moderately quiet over the last couple of weeks. Between separate family emergencies, work, kids, etc., writing about a team 50+ games under .500 hasn't exactly been a priority. And judging from the complete lack of comments, reading about a team 50+ games under .500 hasn't exactly been a priority, either.

So how do we proceed? I don't want to pull Astros County's Annual "We're Taking a Break" post again. Should the day come where Astros County ceases to exist in its current format, I want there to be weeping and gnashing of teeth...not, "Well, they've been talking about it for three years."

Ultimately, the losing is awful. Yes, brighter days are ahead, and not guaranteed. You know what's guaranteed? This Astros team is the worst. Ever. Remember when the Astros were 2-1? That was the highlight of my season. I tweeted, "I am not emotionally prepared for 2-1." Three games in, and I was flying high. Even when they were 22-23, we all collectively couldn't believe our luck.

Little did we know how fast and hard the Astros would fall. Since 22-23, the Astros are 20-71, a .220 winning percentage, which would translate into a 36-126 full-season record.

How do you continually talk about losing? Are there positives to come from this season? Sure. The Astros have $5.5m committed to payroll next season - $500K for Chris Snyder's buyout, and $5m to the Pirates for taking Wandy. There are five players eligible for arbitration, so that will send payroll up slightly, but areyoukiddingme$5.5millioncommitted. Luhnow got rid of every asset, sacrificing this season to prepare for what will be perhaps the biggest rebuilding project in modern baseball history (the 1998 Marlins should be on the list - but Loria's a douche, so...)

Talking about losing isn't fun. The "XX losses in their last XX games" stats are getting old, as are the "Jordan Schafer managed to strike out eight times in three plate appearances" stats. Yet every day that passes is another day The Luhnow Plan is put in place. Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody said it would happen soon.

Ultimately, we're still here because there's no way we're bailing on the Astros - and talking about the Astros. Why? Because we're looking forward to writing about the good times, however far away they may be. Just bear with us while why we figure out what the rest of the season looks like.

Hurricane Ike or Hurricane Bud?

It's our first long-read of the season. It's such a long-read, we dedicated a whole page to it. Check it out: Hurricane Ike, or Hurricane Bud?

You can also check out this one, from January, on the events surrounding Carlos Lee's $100m contract.

Oh yes, the Ten Best Things About Being an Astros Fan

Over at Yahoo's Big League Stew, The Constable wrote up The Ten Best Things About Being an Astros Fan.

/clinks glass with spoon

Okay. After talking with your county leadership team, the following has been decided:

*Astros County is taking applications for the following positions:
-County Clerk
-Juvenile Court Clerk (Eddie's Farm)

The Wife has noticed that I've been fairly downtrodden lately, and made the valid point that Astros County has been around for .375 of our marriage. "I didn't let you do this for almost three years for you to arbitrarily shut it down for no good reason," she said.

So, Astros County will continue to exist, with some new leadership. The County Clerk and Juvenile Court Clerk have resigned their positions. If you are interested in the above positions, send an email to astroscounty (at) gmail.com with an example - using last night's loss to the Cubs as a reference point. Astros County will continue once these positions have been filled. In the meantime, regular posting will begin again, probably tomorrow.

Thank you for your attention.

-MGMT.

A note on our format for the time being

This is totally going to make me feel like a diva, but it's happened again. We're having a hard time coming up with the motivation to post. It's not the losing (well, it might be the losing), and it's certainly not the comments, or the readership - you all have been great.

Lately, Real Life has crowded in on the freedom to post as much as we would like, and to be honest, it has felt like a weight has been lifted off our collective shoulders. Obviously, this isn't exactly what we were hoping for. We were hoping that the inability to post updates, snide comments, and analysis would really bother us, and drive us to do better. But it's been freeing.

Life is moving at a fairly rapid clip, new opportunities (not with blogging - those opportunities rarely come up) have arisen. This isn't a farewell post - we will continue to be active on Twitter, including the County Clerk's nuggets, Men of the Match from Eddie's Farm, etc. So by all means, follow Astros County on Twitter and get most of the same information. It's just time for a little break.

Tweet you soon.

Astros County Mid-Season Awards

Here's our requisite space-filler, the mid-season awards, as certified by Astros County:

1st Half MVP

No-brainer. Hunter Pence. He's the (rightfully so) only All-Star representative. He's the only everyday Astro with an OPS over .800. He's the only Astro with double-digit homers.

1st Half LVP

This actually took some thinking. J.R. Towles and Bill Hall would be strong candidates, but they're no longer with the team. I know you're probably thinking about Carlos Lee, but he would win the Player Not Worth His Immense, Ridiculous Contract award (see below). So it goes to Chris Johnson. I think we were all prepared for a career regression after his high-BABIPed 2010, but I certainly didn't foresee him posting a -1.1 WAR (according to Baseball-Reference), lowest on the team.

1st Half Cy Young

Bud Norris. Wandy Rodriguez comes in a close second, but Norris has exceeded expectations, and is more likely to still be wearing an Astros uniform come August 1. Norris is the only player with more strikeouts than IP, and fewer than one homer per 9IP.

1st Half Cy Dumb

Brandon Lyon gets serious consideration given his atrocious 13IP to this point in the season, and he's done for the year. I'm sorry he's hurt, I hope he gets better, but I'm glad he's not even an option to pitch, because I have no doubt that he would continue to get run out to the mound. You know what? Screw it. Brandon Lyon.

1st Half Rookie of the Year

I don't know that it could go to anybody other than Jordan Lyles. Kid's been good.

1st Half Player Not Worth His Immense, Ridiculous Contract

Carlos Lee. See above.

1st Half Best Bargain

David Carpenter. No, he has not pitched for the Astros for very long. But the Astros got rid of Pedro Feliz, and turned that horrible idea into David Carpenter. I bet the Cardinals would like to have that one over. Of course, that Lance Berkman signing probably makes it easier.

Best Moment of the First Half

The releasing of Bill Hall. Another horrible mistake that was owned up to early enough to at least try to recover. Whatever that means.

Worst Moment of the First Half

Opening Day. The Astros were actually in line to be over .500 at some point this season on Game 1. And then Brandon Lyon happened, facing seven batters, getting one out, and the Phillies got three runs in the bottom of the 9th for a brutal, trend-setting loss.

The 1st Half Point At Which We Lost The Will To Live

May 4, 2011. Brandon Lyon blows a 2-0 lead in the 9th (and Aneury Rodriguez' 5IP gem), and the Astros fall to 12-18. Not that the difference between 12-18 and 13-17 is significant, certainly not now, but that broke our collective souls.

Live Chat at 3pm!

Join us, won't you? for a live chat at 3pm Central time. Right here.

Morning Update

Okay. We know it's been a few days. But an unexpected weekend getaway (set up by The Constable's wife), a dental apocalypse, and just other plans have made the AC staff largely unavailable. Should be back up and running later this morning.

New logo

So, for now, we've decided to go upscale. Instead of photoshop-ing a random logo, we now have our own logo, submitted by Honorary Citizen/Captain Awesome Dennis Fanning, of Fanning Creative.

You'll also notice that we've removed the Labels section, since it took up way too much space. You can now search Astros County with the handy search box on the side.