Originally published on Substack
The bike lane delineators along Polk Street—those little humps that separate cyclists from motorists—remind me of dead raccoons. Later I’ll look it up and learn they’re commonly called armadillos, which makes sense, I guess, given that we’re in Texas. But to me they look like raccoons. Or maybe skunks. Except skunks are black and white, and I’ve seen enough of that color combination for one night.
The Astros just lost Game 2 of the Wild Card Series to the White Sox, ending their season, and I’m walking back to my Airbnb from Daikin Park, which my brain still insists on calling Minute Maid Park. I feel almost defensive about it, all those years I associate with that name, and then I think how dumb it is to care which corporation pays millions of dollars to slap its logo on a baseball stadium. What matters is what happens inside that stadium. Okay, sure, you could argue that nothing that happens on a baseball field really matters in the grand scheme of things, and you’d be right. But then I could follow that thought to its logical conclusion and say that nothing anywhere ever matters, and I’d probably be right about that too. But now we’re drifting into full-blown nihilism, and even if that’s the logical place to land, it’s no fun to land there. A better place might be existential nihilism paired with a little existential meaning-making.
Maybe nothing has meaning in and of itself as meaning isn’t a property of the universe, but something consciousness generates. On a long enough timeline everything we do gets erased, swallowed by time and space and distance and heat. But just because nothing survives entropy, that doesn’t make everything meaningless. It just makes meaning a deliberate human act. Something matters because we decide it matters, and exactly as much as we let it, no more and no less. The absence of cosmic significance is no reason not to care.
Baseball matters because I and a few million other people have decided that it does.
To some of us it matters a lot, maybe too much, and I could try to explain why, but I won’t. If you know, you know. Besides, Bart Giamatti and Roger Angellalready did that better than I ever could, so why bother. Baseball may be the closest thing we have to a uniquely American religion, even if the pews get a little emptier every year as the easily distracted drift toward faster, higher-scoring, less cerebral diversions. But this isn’t about baseball. It’s about a baseball team. Kind of.
The last time I watched the Chicago White Sox celebrate on Houston’s home field, not counting tonight, was 2005. I was twenty-five, fresh out of the army, a lifelong Astros fan from a family of lifelong Astros fans, and pulling for a team that strung together good seasons without ever quite putting it all together wasn’t just the norm but a kind of rite of passage, a test of your faithfulness to the orange and navy. Growing up in the ’90s, wondering what it felt like to root for a team that could actually win it all, I could easily have jumped on a bandwagon. The Yankees were always available as a place to park your seasonal hopes. The Braves were probably the most fun team of that era to watch, and when they finally broke through in ’95 after a few near misses, I was happy for them. But my loyalty stayed in Houston. So in 2005 it felt like the dam had finally broken, like the impossible had become inevitable. The Houston Astros were going to be world champions for the first time in franchise history. Except they weren’t. The White Sox swept them in four, celebrated on our field, and that was that.
I won’t go into the ups and downs, and eventually the mostly ups, that came after. You know the story. But it’s safe to say we Houston fans have gotten spoiled over the past decade. What used to be unimaginable became routine: eight division titles, four pennants, and two World Series championships since 2017. Every time it felt like the window was closing, the way all those earlier decades had taught us to expect, they proved us wrong. Springer left for Toronto after the 2020 season. Correa went to Minnesota after 2021. Bregman left for Boston after 2024. Kyle Tucker was traded to the Cubs. It goes on. Every time it felt like the band was breaking up for good, with José Altuve the last member of the original lineup still touring under the old name (although Correa did come back for a reunion tour), Houston kept finding new talent and kept winning the division.
My favorite era of Astros baseball, mostly because of how old I was when it happened, was the Killer B’s. Biggio and Bagwell. I still say Craig Biggio is my favorite ballplayer of all time, and then I wonder whether it’s silly for a forty-six-year-old man to have a favorite ballplayer. Whatever. I loved those teams. But getting to watch Altuve and company these past ten years is hard to beat. It’s hard not to fall in love with actually winning, with being in the hunt every September and playing deep into most Octobers. So I stopped second-guessing the front office every time it let a cornerstone walk out the door, because they kept proving what I already knew: the professional baseball people know more about baseball than I do.
But it feels different this time. The last couple of years have still been fun, watching Yordan Alvarez, one of the best pure hitters alive, launch 400-foot homers over the train tracks, and watching an aging, slowing Altuve keep doing Altuve things as he inches toward 3,000 hits. Then last year we didn’t win the division. Didn’t even make the playoffs. No sweat, we all thought, or chose to think. It was an injury-plagued season. We’ll be back.
Walking down Polk Street now, the ballpark behind me and the cleaning crew getting to work for the last time this year, after nine excruciating innings in which it never really felt like we had a chance, it just feels different.
I’ve been lucky enough to see more postseason games in person over the last decade than I can count right now. I live up the road in Austin, and it’s an easy drive. Almost every one of those drives came with the assumption that the game at the end of it wouldn’t be the last of the season. Tonight I didn’t have any real expectation of winning. It was more that I needed to go, because there’s a good chance there won’t be October baseball in Houston for a while. The rebuild a lot of us thought was coming several times since 2017 finally feels imminent. It was hard to expect much from a .500 team that backed into the playoffs on the last day of the regular season by being the best team in a division without a single winning record. Technically this wasn’t even October baseball. They’d have needed to win tonight to play on the first, and they didn’t. But I wanted one more playoff game in Houston regardless, so I bought the cheapest postseason ticket I’ve ever bought and drove down. Thirty-one dollars. I didn’t even stay in my seat. I roamed the stadium and plopped down wherever and whenever I wanted a different angle, which was never an option before. When a ballpark is sold out, your seat is your seat. Neither of Houston’s two playoff games this year came close to selling out. Instead of a sea of orange in the upper deck there was a sea of green, empty seatbacks folded up politely as far as you could see across the 400 level.
September 30th is fall for fans in New York and Chicago and Boston. Nothing about tonight feels like fall, but it does feel like Houston, hot and sticky and still, the buildings blocking whatever breeze might have made it this far inland. The Airbnb is a condo a little over a mile from the park, and I decided to walk. I’m in good shape, so why waste money on an Uber? Now I’m following the dead raccoons down Polk Street, dictating these lines into my phone to hopefully turn into something readable later, my lucky T-shirt plastered to my back like a wet plastic bag. I don’t really believe in lucky shirts or any other totems, but the religion of baseball requires you to at least pretend. I wore this one through the entire 2022 postseason run, including Game 6 of the World Series, when Yordan hit a bomb off the batter’s eye in straightaway center and slammed the door on the Phillies’ hopes for a Game 7.
It’s a shirt I made myself. My daughter and I sometimes design T-shirts and sell them on TeePublic. It’s just for fun. Nobody gets rich on a dollar or two in commission when you sell twenty shirts a year. But she’s a good artist and I’m an okay one, and it’s something we can do together. This one has Houston’s lord and savior Dusty Baker on the front over the words In Dusty We Trusty. It’s hard to name the single best thing that ever happened to a franchise, maybe impossible, but Dusty would be on that list, near the top, if I were going to make the list, which I’m not. He was the perfect hire at the perfect time. After the sign-stealing scandal and the forced exit of A.J. Hinch, Houston needed someone to right the ship, and Dusty was that someone.
Right now, though, my favorite shirt has me longing for nothing more than to get back to the condo, peel it off, drop it in a pile with my soaked jeans, and stand under a hot shower. I’ll wash it when I get home and hang it in the closet until March, assuming there’s an Opening Day in March, which, with a lockout looming, is very much an assumption. Maybe a fantasy. Dusty hasn’t managed in Houston for a few years now. He retired as a manager and went home to California. But baseball, which as you know is more than a game, won’t ever let him go completely. At seventy-seven, rich and accomplished enough to spend the rest of his days fishing and walking his dogs and listening to Hendrix records, he’s still in it, working as a special advisor to baseball operations for the Giants. I don’t care who signs his checks now. To me he’ll always be the manager who gave Houston its second championship and proved the first wasn’t just a technologically enhanced fluke.
I think about all the managers Houston has had in the forty or so years I’ve been paying attention, since I was five or six. I don’t remember Harry Walker or Bill Virdon, having either not yet existed or still been in diapers. For me it started with Hal Lanier and Art Howe. Then came the Larry Dierker years, and Jimy Williams, and a handful of others who deserve a mention but won’t get one. Before this current, fading dynasty, the most memorable of them for me was another childhood favorite and one of the most colorful characters the game ever produced, old Scrap Iron himself, the recently departed Phil Garner. Garner was the first to take the Astros to a World Series, and even though it ended with a broom and a black-and-white dogpile on our field, he’ll always be beloved in Houston. Hinch brought home the first trophy in 2017, along with everything that came attached to it.
If history is any guide, Jim Crane’s ball club will have a new manager next season, whenever next season starts. Joe Espada seems like a likable guy, but he hasn’t been able to recreate his predecessors’ magic, and I suspect his third year, which ended tonight, will be his last. I wonder who’s next. Brad Ausmus wouldn’t surprise me, but I’ve been wrong before. Whoever ends up in that chair has their work cut out for them. They’ll inherit a team that ownership still fully expects to win, even as fans like me start accepting the inevitable, and they’ll have to do it without most of the pieces their predecessors had. Altuve will still be here, and I suspect he’ll always be here and go into the Hall of Fame wearing a Houston cap. Alvarez is signed for another couple of years. Jeremy Peña will be entering his last season before free agency and could be dealt before he gets there, the way Kyle Tucker was moved for Isaac Paredes, Cam Smith, and Hayden Wesneski. I’d hate to see JP3 go, but so far that Tucker deal looks like a win, and Cam Smith homered tonight. So there’ll be some pieces in place. Beyond that, the farm system is decimated, the pitching is in shambles, and certain billionaire owners, after two straight years of paying the luxury tax, seem awfully determined to stay under it.
I don’t really know what this essay is about. I’m not sure it has a point, and I don’t think it needs one. I’m just walking back from the last game of the season, thinking about the past and the present and the future, about how everything reaches its natural end, and how we never know exactly when that will be, or whether it’ll come back. Baseball itself will come back, of course. It always does. It just looks a little different after each annual resurrection. Change is the only constant.
Reading back over these notes, they land somewhere between nostalgia, melancholy, acceptance, and hope, and I can’t tell which one is driving. Maybe none of them. Maybe all four at once. I don’t know what’s ahead for Houston or for Major League Baseball in 2027. Maybe the Astros will prove me wrong again and be right back in October next year. It wouldn’t surprise me. At this point nothing would. Or maybe they’ll trade everyone, save some money, and spend five years rebuilding the farm before taking another run at it. Either way, the same as I was through the years when a championship felt impossible and the years when it felt inevitable, I’ll be along for the ride, wherever it ends up. My “lucky” shirt will be along for it too, and when it wears out, I know where to get another. I’m not one for heaping undue importance on inanimate objects or living in a past we can’t get back to, but I can be sentimental. I think that’s okay. Those were good years to be sentimental about.
I’m almost back now. I can see my car where I left it and the porch light on at the condo.
Tomorrow I’ll head back to Austin in time to pick my daughter up from school at four. I could have driven home tonight. The game was over around eight o’clock (okay… it was “over” long before then), and Austin’s only a couple of hours up the road. But even though I wasn’t expecting a Game 3, wasn’t feeling entitled to one, I guess all those years of expecting left me with a little hope for one more Houston miracle. That’s why I rented the place. If they’d won tonight and forced a deciding game, I’d have bought another thirty-one-dollar seat and been there for that one too. They didn’t, and the room’s paid for, so I’ll sleep here, get up before the sun like I do most mornings, go for a run, and grab breakfast at Katz’s or Harry’s before heading home.
And since I’m in Houston, and traffic will be a bitch anyway, I won’t be in any hurry. I think I’ll go to the zoo right when it opens. The elephants and tigers are great, but mostly I like to sit by the chimpanzees for an hour or so and watch our closest relatives go about their day, their human eyes doing something close to communicating. The Houston Zoo is a really nice one, as zoos go. Still, I always feel a little bad for wild animals living behind fences, though maybe they’re happy. I don’t know. From what I understand, most of them are either rescues or were born there. I’ve always had mixed feelings about zoos. But that’s where the chimpanzees are.
