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It's tough following sports in Houston

By Tom Kirkendall

As noted earlier here, given all of the incredible disappointments over the years, there must be a special place in Heaven for folks who continue to follow Houston sports teams.

The latest example The Stros haven't even held their first full team workout in Spring Training yet, but the news is already .  .  . well, .  . not so good.

First, Baseball Prospectus lists precisely one Stros farmhand -- catcher Jason Castro -- in its Top 100 baseball prospects, and Castro is no. 76 on that list. I guess that new "build from within" program is going to take some time.

Or course, this comes on the heels of an extremely quiet winter for the Stros, who didn't make any major moves in a depressed free agent market. They aren't admitting it, but Stros management apparently realizes that this club's window for competing for a playoff spot is closed.

Although an improbable 36-18 second-half record allowed last season's Stros to win 86 games and at least con some naive fans into thinking that they actually had a chance for the NL wild-card spot, Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA prediction system projects this season's Stros to contend for the league's worst team. PECOTA has the Stros topping the woeful Pirates by only one win, 65 to 64.

In view of that, it probably makes sense that the Stros spent most of the off-season cutting costs. In one of their key moves, the Stros withdrew a $27 million three-year offer to reasonably effective pitcher Randy Wolf in favor of a relatively cheap, one-year, $2 million deal with 36 year-old lefty Mike Hampton, who has pitched a total of 147 innings over the past four seasons.

Granted, that's not much production over that stretch. But that means chances are he'll break out and be more productive this season, right?

Well, so much for that theory.

Finally, to put a punctuation mark on another dismal day of following Houston sports teams, I flicked on the car radio to a local sports talk show Monday afternoon while driving between meetings.

The two hosts and a caller were addressing Michael Lewis' NY Sunday Times Magazine article about Rockets forward Shane Battier.

In the article, Lewis provides an in-depth analysis of how the Rockets are on the cutting-edge of modifying traditional statistical analysis to find undervalued players such as Battier. It is clearly one of the most interesting, erudite, well-researched and important articles written about sports so far this year.

Despite that, Here is how the conversation went between the two sports talk radio hosts and their caller:

Caller: "Have you guys read the Michael Lewis article in the New York Times about Shane Battier and the Rockets?"

Host One: "I've heard about it, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet."

Host Two: "Oh yeah, I also heard about it, but I haven't read it yet, either. What's it all about?"

Caller: "Well, I haven't read the article, either. I was hoping you guys had read it and could tell me about it."

Mercifully, I turned off the radio.

Chalk it up to just another episode in the continuing sordid story of following Houston sports teams.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).