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2018 Houston Astros Season Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
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TexArcher
TexArcher

Bregs is going Crawford Boxes right here.

ERhine
ERhine

Prior to the footage being edited by Bender:

wesleywest
wesleywest

Two Diamond Club tickets available for the Sunday night game.  Free.  Need to pick them up from me in 77027. Rules: Poster must be a big contributor to this thread/last years shag thread.  No gue

UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9375

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Are you implying that watching the Astros with your kids is not quality time??

Ha. Yeah I almost edited my post after thinking about that.
I may be starting to burn out the 5 yo girl but she and the 3 yo boy are pretty good at this point recognizing most of the starters and yelling “Springer dinger ” and “yes way Jose” at the appropriate times
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Scraps

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Anyone a subscriber and want to hook a brother up with that copy/paste up in here?

 

https://theathletic.com/195052/2017/12/26/with-the-astros-victory-celebration-in-full-swing-a-heart-stopping-drama-was-playing-out-behind-the-scenes-the-race-to-save-a-beloved-coachs-life/?campaign_type=branded-content&campaign_id=KenRosenthal&source=fbads

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wesleywest

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11 minutes ago, Scraps said:

Anyone a subscriber and want to hook a brother up with that copy/paste up in here?

 

https://theathletic.com/195052/2017/12/26/with-the-astros-victory-celebration-in-full-swing-a-heart-stopping-drama-was-playing-out-behind-the-scenes-the-race-to-save-a-beloved-coachs-life/?campaign_type=branded-content&campaign_id=KenRosenthal&source=fbads

With nearly one million revelers joyously drinking in their team’s first championship, the Astros’ World Series victory parade had wended through the sun-baked streets of downtown Houston to City Hall, where the next phase of the celebration would take place. On stage, the exhilarated Astros were joined by local politicians and a number of luminaries at the start of the official ceremony honoring the team. It was then that Rich Dauer, the club's first base coach, abruptly began to stagger, almost as if he was drunk. He stepped to the back of the stage with the other coaches as the players were being introduced to the crowd.

Something clearly was not right. Manager A.J. Hinch immediately noticed a difference in Dauer’s color and in his state of mind that was alarming. At that point, even Dauer knew there was a problem. “I don’t really feel too good,” he told the team’s assistant hitting coach Alonzo Powell. Then, suddenly, Dauer became less responsive. Bench coach Alex Cora was anxiously looking on and started shouting to Dauer: “Are you OK? ARE YOU OK?”

Very quickly, and almost entirely out of public view, a drama was unfolding that would determine whether the 65-year-old Dauer would live or die.

Jeremiah Randall, the Astros’ head athletic trainer, had no idea Dauer’s life was in danger when he saw the EMTs descend from the stage, carrying the coach on a stretcher. The stage was so crowded, Randall and his assistant athletic trainers, Scott Barringer and Daniel Roberts, were standing below, off to the side. The three quickly conferred, trying to figure out how to get Dauer through the crowd, to an ambulance. Their initial conclusion was the same as everyone else’s who had noticed Dauer’s sluggishness that day; he was dehydrated, exhausted from the Astros’ long playoff run and exuberant celebration downtown.

The trainers and EMTs found a golf cart and placed the stretcher with Dauer onto the back of the vehicle. Randall sat in the front and called the Astros’ head team physician, Dr. David Lintner. The two discussed whether Randall should take Dauer to a small, local emergency room or a larger facility. Lintner pushed for Houston Methodist, a hospital rated No. 1 in Texas and No. 19 nationally in the 2016-17 rankings by U.S. News and World Report, “just on the outside chance there was something bad going on.”

First, Randall had to locate an ambulance. The nearest one was three blocks away, no easy distance to navigate through jam-packed streets. “There were a million people downtown,” Randall says. “You couldn’t get anywhere. The roads were all blocked off. There was just nowhere to go.” Traffic remained a major problem even as the group reached the ambulance and got Dauer inside. Randall estimates the ambulance did not move for 30 minutes.

The driver made calls, trying to determine the fastest path to Houston Methodist. Randall studied traffic apps on his phone in between giving Dauer’s medical history to the EMTs and talking to Lintner and another team physician, Dr. James Muntz, who were helping prepare the hospital for Dauer’s arrival. The situation was growing more urgent. “If you’re dehydrated and they put an IV in, you respond to the painful stimuli of the needle,” Randall says. “He wasn’t responding.”

Dauer’s wife, Chris, did not attend the parade; she had grown ill, perhaps from food poisoning, and returned to the hotel where she and Rich were staying. Hinch’s wife, Erin, called Chris with the first warning, saying, “I don’t want to worry you, but Rich doesn’t look good.” Randall followed shortly thereafter and said, “We’re taking him to the emergency room.” Chris gathered herself and headed to Houston Methodist.

Trey Hillman, the Astros’ bench coach in 2015 and ‘16, was with his wife, Marie, preparing to watch the sunset from the back porch of their lake house in Burnet, Tex., when he got a text message from Astros hitting coach Dave Hudgens. “Pray for Richie,” Hudgens wrote. “He collapsed and was dehydrated at the parade.”

Hillman, a close friend of Dauer’s who is now the manager of SK Wyverns in South Korea, immediately called Randall, with whom he had worked in 2011 for the Los Angeles Dodgers; Hillman was the team’s bench coach and Randall its physical therapist.

Randall answered on the second ring. “Trey,” he told Hillman, “you need to get down here.”

Trey, accompanied by Marie, rushed out and made the 45-minute drive home to Liberty Hill, Tex., northwest of Austin. They showered and changed, then got back in the car and reached Houston Methodist in approximately three hours.

Powell, the Astros’ assistant hitting coach, also was far outside Houston when he received word that Dauer’s condition was serious. Powell, who was about to be named the San Francisco Giants’ hitting coach, had left the celebration early and started the 16-hour drive home to Peoria, Az., with his wife, Jana. He needed to fly to San Francisco for a potential news conference that would take place in three days. “I thought the Giants would understand if I was a little late—Richie is a little more important than a news conference,” says Alonzo, who wound up doing a conference call on the appointed day instead.

Jana had been a brain injury rehab nurse before becoming a school nurse about seven years ago, a change she had made to spend more time with Alonzo. She had sat on one side of Dauer during the parade, while Randall had sat on the other. When Jana saw the EMTs take Dauer away on the stretcher, she immediately thought to call Chris Dauer. But Jana’s phone battery had run out of juice after she used it to videotape the parade and celebration; she could not charge it until she and Alonzo got into their truck for the ride home.

As soon as the phone had power, Jana saw a text from Chris asking her to call. “Richie collapsed,” the text said. “I’m on my way to the hospital.” Jana called, told Chris she knew about Richie, and apologized for her inability to phone earlier. At the time, Chris, like most everyone else, thought Rich only was suffering from dehydration. Chris, as Jana remembers, did not seem the least bit concerned. She agreed to keep Jana updated, and about 90 minutes into the Powells’ drive, Jana’s phone rang again. The news was unsettling.

The Powells immediately turned around and headed back to Houston.

Hours earlier, on the fire truck, Jana had noticed Dauer was not himself. He was quiet, wearing sunglasses, holding up his phone as if videotaping the parade. But Jana noticed his phone wasn’t even on. “I could see the signs then, but just shrugged it off, thinking it was exhaustion,” she says.

Recalling the parade ride, Randall also asks himself, “How did I not know something was not right with him?” Randall says his conversations with Dauer on the fire truck were normal, but others later informed him of odd interactions they had with Dauer that day. Yet, even if Randall had been aware of those interactions, he is not sure he would have interpreted them as a sign of a medical issue. Dauer, as an infielder with the Baltimore Orioles from 1976 to ‘85, earned the nickname “Wacko” from Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. The Astros also knew his quirky, colorful side.

“He’s just kind of this off-the-wall character. It’s just him,” Randall says. “Sometimes you have a weird conversation and you don’t think anything of it. I think that’s what some people thought that day: ‘It’s Richie. It’s Wacko.’ After the fact, we were all like, ‘Dang, we should have seen this.’”

Once Dauer arrived at Houston Methodist, Dr. Muntz—the team physician who specializes in internal bleeding—sprang into action. Muntz did not attend the parade and had raced to Houston Methodist, a five-minute drive from his home, after learning of Dauer’s collapse. The moment Dauer arrived, Muntz sensed trouble. Dauer was wild-eyed. He had gone into respiratory arrest, requiring the insertion of a breathing tube. His body was in a posture that indicated severe brain damage. “He was unresponsive,” Muntz says, “just a disaster.”

Dauer underwent an immediate CAT scan, and the results showed what Muntz feared: “Blood everywhere” around his brain. Adding to the predicament: Due to a heart condition, Dauer was taking Xarelto, a blood thinner that is difficult to reverse. Undaunted, Muntz made a snap decision. “We have some fancy reversal agents, super-expensive,” Muntz says. “I said, ‘Just give them to him.'”

Muntz cut through any delays, at one point snapping at the staff, “No more questions! He goes to the operating room.”

Muntz also called two neurosurgeons and said, “If you can’t get here in five minutes, I’m calling someone else.” One already was at the hospital. The other, Dr. David Cech, arrived within four minutes, with Dauer’s surgery just getting underway. Cech had been across the street, catching up on paperwork in an office building connected to Houston Methodist by a sky bridge. “They called me and said, ‘Listen, we need you to come over here and operate on this guy,” Cech recalls. “I just zoomed across the street on the sky bridge.”

By the time he got there Dauer was in a coma, “almost brain dead,” said Cech.

Cech made a question-mark shaped incision on the side of Dauer’s head, removed a piece of bone, then removed all of the blood. The procedure, lasting about three hours, was especially painstaking due to the time it took for the reversal agents to stop Dauer’s bleeding. His brain had shifted about a centimeter from the right to the left, pushing against the brain stem. Cech and his team relieved the pressure on the stem by pushing the brain back toward the right side.

The Powells arrived at the hospital while Dauer was still in surgery. Jana Powell, drawing on her expertise with brain injuries, spoke with Chris but could provide only so much comfort. “I was trying to be there for Chris, but trying to be realistic—this was not good,” Jana recalls. “I was trying to prepare her for the worst. But she was in shock. She really wasn’t comprehending anything that night.”

After the surgery, Chris asked Jana to join her in speaking with Cech. The conversation, as Jana recalls, was chilling. “He was trying to explain to her that this was really bad, that if he made it through the night, he wouldn’t be the same—he said he’ll never be the same,” Jana says. “He said he wouldn’t know the extent of the brain damage until Richie woke up. All Chris said to the doctor was, ‘Is he going to be OK? All I want to know is if he is going to be OK.’”

Says Chris: “I was kind of numb. I prayed. I said, ‘God, please don’t take my husband now.’ I went into the bathroom stall and prayed. But I felt I needed to be really strong through the whole thing. There was a part of me that thought, Maybe he’s not going to make it. But another part thought, No, he’s going to make it.”

The chances of significant brain damage were indeed high—“most of these people end up vegetative, in a nursing home,” Cech says. But Cech also recalls telling Chris he was cautiously optimistic because the surgery had gone well. Dauer underwent a second CAT scan about an hour after the surgery to make sure the blood was gone and his brain was back in the proper position. The scan looked good. The pressure on Dauer’s brain stem had eased.

Cech returned to the waiting room and found two security guards outside, allowing privacy for the growing contingent of Astros personnel—Hinch, his coaches and team staff members, along with some of their wives and Hinch’s daughters, Haley and Kaitlin. The bond between Hinch and Dauer dated to 2001 when Hinch was a Kansas City Royals catcher and Dauer was the team’s third base coach. Hinch, as the San Diego Padres’ assistant GM, had helped hire Dauer as the team’s Double A manager in 2013, then added him to his coaching staff after becoming Astros manager entering ‘15. Game 7 of the World Series was perhaps the culmination of their friendship. Two days later, Hinch found himself at Houston Methodist, not sure Dauer would survive. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” Hinch says. “I couldn’t comprehend it.”

Randall, who was part of the contingent in the waiting room, had Dauer’s belongings, including his cell phone. Few outside of the Astros’ family knew Dauer’s life was in jeopardy, but everyone connected to him knew the Astros had just won the Series. In those terrifying moments when Dauer laid unconscious, about to undergo surgery, Randall gained a greater appreciation of the longtime coach’s popularity within the baseball world. “His phone just lit up,” Randall recalls, “all these people reaching out to Richie to say congrats.”

The doctors advised Chris to have family members get to the hospital as quickly as possible. One of the Dauers’ daughters, Casey, arrived in Houston from Atlanta before Rich was out of surgery. Two others, Kelsey and Katie, arrived the next morning from Cincinnati. By that time, their father already was defying the odds. Dauer was responsive, stunning Chris, Casey and Trey and Marie Hillman, all of whom were by his side.

image1-300x225.jpeg
Photo courtesy of the Dauer family

In a group text shared among baseball people, Randall called Dauer’s progress, “nothing short of a miracle.” Dauer followed nurses’ commands, moving his left arm and leg. His right side was more problematic initially, but he gave a nurse a thumbs-up with his left hand as she explained where he was, what had happened.

The doctors gave Dauer a “sedation vacation,” allowing his system to slowly awaken so they could check his responsiveness, get his limbs moving. They also removed Dauer’s breathing tube three days following surgery after initially saying he might need it for a week or more. “The magnitude of what he had wrong was intimidating, astonishing,” says Lintner, the Astros’ head physician. “The pace of his recovery was just as astonishing.”

During her time as a brain injury rehab nurse, Jana Powell had seen hundreds of similar cases, but never a recovery quite like Dauer’s. She remembers thinking, There is no way this is possible. Yes, people recover, but they have developmental issues, mental issues.

Dauer, though, was completely alert. “I never repeated my name and the date so many times in my life,” he says. “Every question was, ‘What’s your name? Where are you? Who is the president?' I knew all that. There was never any time when I was out of it, never any time I couldn’t function. If it was up to me, I would have left (the hospital) as soon as I opened my eyes.”

He wasn’t kidding. Lintner recalls Dauer, with his wife and daughters present, “fussing about” two days after surgery, saying he needed to get up and walk around, go home.

“Do I hear complaining? Are you really giving these people a hard time?” Lintner asked.

“What? I feel great,” Dauer replied.

Lintner then asked Dauer if he knew how close he had come to dying.

“He really didn’t,” Lintner says. “He has always been healthy and active. The whole concept of a brush with death was completely foreign to him. I got one of his daughters to take a picture of the back of his head where he had the procedure. There were still monitors going under his scalp, into his skull. He saw those and quieted down a bit.”

Says Hillman, “Even in talking to Richie now, I know he knows what happened. But I’m not sure he can fully grasp the severity of it. We were seeing things he wasn’t seeing. In his mind it was, ‘Hey, I’m OK, get this tube out of my throat. I’ll just be fine. I need to tell you guys what is going on here.’ It was very typical Richie.”

Days after surgery Dauer was out of bed and enjoying visits from Astros players George Springer, Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa and many others. At one point, he texted friends a video of himself walking around the hospital, saying, “I’m already up to 50 percent of my jogging to first-base speed.” Eight days after surgery, in another text, he said, “I get my last drain out of my head today. Who would have thought my brain needed drains?”

Fluid in Dauer’s lungs lengthened his stay, but he was released on Nov. 15, exactly two weeks after the Astros completed their Series triumph and 12 days after he entered the hospital. Jake Kucherka, one of the team’s clubhouse attendants, helped Dauer get to his offseason home in Atlanta, sharing driving responsibilities with Chris on the two-day ride. Once home, Dauer visited a neurosurgeon, Dr. Daniel Barrow, who told him, “I’m amazed I’m even talking to you.” Barrow told Dauer he could resume his normal workouts. Dauer will continue to receive periodic checkups, but says his brain is “perfectly fine.”

His sense of humor certainly is intact. Lintner chuckles about a video Dauer sent of himself doing housework with the caption, “Get me out of here!” Muntz cherishes a text Dauer sent him on Dec. 5, barely more than a month after undergoing surgery: “Hey Dr. Muntz, we’re doing well. My workouts are up to 50 minutes on elliptical and treadmill. I lifted light weights today and just left Taco Bell with a seven-layer burrito! Life is good!” To which Muntz replied, jokingly, “If the subdural didn’t kill you, the burrito will.”

Dauer even offers a punchline in his story about asking Chris what God had in store for him. “I figured it out,” he says. “Fortunately for the fans of New York, I didn’t get the Yankees’ managing job.” But he and Chris, both Christian believers, talk about the role of divine intervention in his recovery. Hillman echoes their thoughts, attributing Dauer’s healing to “the miracle of medicine and the miracle of God’s grace.”

Chris refers to Deuteronomy 31:8: “The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave nor forsake you.” She mentions the good fortune of Randall standing nearby at City Hall to help Rich immediately, Muntz making the necessary snap decisions at Houston Methodist, Cech doing paperwork across the street on a day he otherwise might not have been at the hospital, Hillman making the three-hour drive to Houston and helping in any way he could. “I think you could see God before us,” Chris says.

IMG_0035-300x225.jpg
Photo courtesy of the Dauer family.

Dauer, who had already decided to retire, recalls nothing about what happened on stage; his last memory is of riding on a fire truck in the parade. Hinch later informed him of an exchange they had just before Dauer began deteriorating. “A.J. said he turned to me and said, ‘You don’t look good. Are you OK?’” Dauer says. “Apparently, I said I was fine, like all old-school baseball players do.”

Clearly, he was not fine. The night before, he had slipped on a wet floor and hit the side of his head. He never thought he was seriously injured, never had a headache, never considered missing the parade. But Dauer had suffered an acute subdural hematoma, a collection of blood outside the brain. Before undergoing surgery, his chances of survival—according to what doctors told Chris and friends gathered at Houston Methodist—were 3 percent. And even if he survived, his chances of avoiding significant brain damage were slim.

Dauer, grateful to all who helped him, frequently calls Randall for the names of people he does not recall meeting but wants to thank. It bothers him that his trauma perhaps diminished the Astros’ joy as the franchise celebrated its first World Series title. But Alonzo Powell, the team’s former assistant hitting coach, says the way the Astros responded to Dauer typified their season. The team started out close, grew closer after Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston and rallied one last time around Dauer.

Muntz calls Dauer’s case the most fascinating he has seen in his 30 years in sports; every second counted, every step of the way. Randall credits the ambulance driver for skillfully shaving minutes off the trip to Houston Methodist. Rich, like Chris, marvels at how “all the miracles lined up” at the hospital. Lintner says, “If any of the dominos had fallen differently, we’d be having a very different conversation.”

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9375

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More from the Athletic
Lots of good tidbits:

When it comes to his preparation and his approach, Carlos Correa is always reluctant to reveal too much of what he deems to be his secrets. “In 15 years,” the 23-year-old said, smiling, last weekend.

But early in his third full major league season, Correa has seemingly discovered the remedy to his slow starts of 2016 and 2017. The cleanup-hitting All-Star shortstop for the Astros (6-1) has five extra-base hits — two home runs and three doubles — in his first 23 plate appearances. Last season, he didn't record his fifth extra-base hit until his 89th plate appearance.

“You figure out your swing, and you figure out what you do that works for you,” Correa said. “Last year I was able to find it from May on, and I stayed with it throughout the whole season. Now this year it's still early, but I know what works for me and if I stick to that plan I think I'll be successful.”

Correa had a 158 OPS+ last season despite an April in which he slashed only .233/.309/.349 with two home runs and four doubles in 97 plate appearances. He followed up his lackluster April with a torrid May (.386/.457/.673 with seven homers and eight doubles) that landed him AL player of the month honors.

Correa has acknowledged one change in how he prepares that coincided with his incredible April to May turnaround in 2017. It was around that time he started seeing more and faster pitches off the hitting machine in the indoor batting cages, now a staple of his daily pregame routine.

“I was hitting the ball great in BP, but in the game it wasn't the same. And then I tried to go above game speed,” he explained. “Instead of hitting 70 miles per hour from the distance that they're throwing me BP, I'm hitting probably 95, 100 from the machine from a close distance. Going from below game speed to above game speed, I think it helps you slow everything down when you go out there.”

Locked in from the start this season, Correa is 9-for-19 and has an extra-base hit in four of the five full games he's played so far. He exited early Monday after aggravating a big toe bruise he sustained on a foul ball Sunday and then Tuesday sped around the bases on an inside-the-park homer. Astros manager A.J. Hinch gave Correa Wednesday off ahead of Thursday's team off day. He will be back in the lineup Friday against the Padres.

Other takeaways from the Astros' first week of games:

• In addition to not using their four-man outfield shift at Minute Maid Park, the Astros won't deploy it with groundball pitchers Dallas Keuchel or Lance McCullers Jr. on the mound. They also probably won't with Charlie Morton pitching, though that remains to be seen because he's the lone Houston starter yet to pitch on the road. Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, Brad Peacock and Chris Devenski are the only pitchers for which they've had Alex Bregman move from third base to left field. The shift's lone target so far, Texas' Joey Gallo, beat it with a grounder through the vacant left side of the infield Sunday after flying out to Bregman in its initial deployment on opening day. Minnesota's Logan Morrison will probably be the next to face the alignment when the Astros visit Target Field next week.

• Bregman is Hinch's preferred two-hole hitter. Though the Astros manager is known to vary his lineups as much as anyone, he's had the right-handed hitting Bregman in the No. 2 spot rather than the left-handed hitting Josh Reddick in six of the team's seven games and three of its four matchups against right-handers.

Last season, Reddick batted second 60 times to 42 for Bregman. When Reddick batted second Friday against right-hander Doug Fister, it appeared he and Bregman would simply alternate based on the pitcher's handedness. This week's Orioles series in which the Astros faced three right-handers proved otherwise. Reddick batted fifth, fifth and fourth in those three Houston wins.

“I'm not one to go with the same batting order over and over again, but I do like Bregman in the first inning,” Hinch said. “I like the look of Reddick in the middle of the order, especially against right-handed pitching. As our guys hit left-handed pitching, it will allow me to potentially have the bottom half of the order be left-handed dominant. … When Yuli (Gurriel) comes back, we'll see how that shakes down. I think there's a lot of different parts of that decision that have to be in sync for me to stay with that.”

Bregman, who batted fifth in the one game he didn't hit second, is batting .200/.375/.280 through 32 plate appearances. He's still searching for his first home run but has doubled twice and walked seven times against only two strikeouts.

Reddick is batting .353/.450/.706 in 20 plate appearances (he sat last weekend against Rangers lefthanders Matt Moore and Mike Minor). He had each of his two home runs and all six of his RBIs in Tuesday's victory against the Orioles.

• Hinch will use Peacock in the way we speculated last month. Peacock became the first Astros reliever this season to complete multiple innings in an outing with his three-inning stint to close Wednesday's 3-2 win. He threw 39 pitches, 12 of which generated swing and misses. Devenski, previously Houston's primary multi-inning weapon, has pitched one inning or fewer in all three of his appearances.

• Cole's pitch usage in his impressive Astros debut Sunday actually wasn't drastically different than some of his late-season starts for the Pirates last year. And although PITCHf/x didn't register any two-seam fastballs, Cole said it's not because he didn't throw any.

• J.D. Davis' swing still features too much swing and miss. While it's difficult to hone timing in a part-time/bench role, Davis' early results suggest he needs more refinement in Class AAA (which he will get once Gurriel returns April 13.) Davis has struck out in six of his 15 plate appearances. His single off Texas' Nick Gardewine on Sunday represents his lone hit.

• Jake Marisnick, who homered in each of his first two starts last weekend, is building off the offensive changes he made last year. After completely overhauling his swing in the 2016-17 offseason, Marisnick slugged a career-high 16 home runs in 259 plate appearances before a September thumb injury prematurely ended his season. He will increase his production if he can cut down on his 34.7 strikeout percentage from 2017. So far, however, he's already struck out nine times in 19 plate appearances this season.

• Tony Sipp remains at the bottom of the Astros' bullpen hierarchy, evidenced by the fact he's the lone reliever yet to appear more than once. In his season debut Saturday against the Rangers, he allowed a run on one hit and two walks in 1 2/3 innings.

• The Astros will spike Héctor Rondón's slider usage. In his last couple seasons with the Cubs, Rondón used his breaking ball on about one of every three pitches. Through his first three appearances with the Astros, the power right-hander has thrown it nearly every other pitch.

In his three innings with Houston, Rondón has allowed one unearned run on four hits. He's struck out five (three on the slider) and hasn't issued a walk.

• The championship belts passed around the Astros' clubhouse last year are absent. Technically, they belonged to the now-retired Carlos Beltran, who was gifted them by the World Boxing Organization. After each win last year at home and on the road, one was presented to the hitter of the game and the other to the pitcher of the game. “We're still debating on what we're going to do as far as that goes,” said Reddick, the Astros' resident championship belt aficionado. “I think we do something different this year.”

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9375

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I've busted the budget the first three games - bought  a tshirt and golf shirt for my brother. tshirt, jersey and pull over for my sister. 3 tshirts / 2 polos / 2 caps / world series ring paper weight.
 
im doing my part 

I’m seriously weighing that paperweight...
Have Spieth at 14/1 to win the Masters. If that happens, it’s a done deal.
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rtchorn

rtchorn 15

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7 hours ago, maninblack said:

Somebody is going to be a major leaguer very soon

I wouldn’t bet on it. They sat on Springer for an entire year when it was obvious he was ready. Granted the circumstances are different, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the kept him down until September to squeeze another year before he becomes arbitration eligible/free agent.

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Viper

Viper 12018

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It may be a bit different now that they are in win mode, vs the tank mode they were in when Springer was called up. Of course they'll also have a more valid excuse to keep him down now by saying they don't have room for him with such a great team and would rather him continue to get steady at bats in triple A. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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It's also not that likely that he would outperform Fisher this season.  Tucker did well in CC last season but he didn't crush AA like Bregman did in 2016 and we all saw that it took a good 400 MLB PAs for Bregman to really figure things out.   

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Gut Wagon

Gut Wagon 8052

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6 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

It's also not that likely that he would outperform Fisher this season.  Tucker did well in CC last season but he didn't crush AA like Bregman did in 2016 and we all saw that it took a good 400 MLB PAs for Bregman to really figure things out.   

I hope that means Fisher puts up numbers that make Tucker easier to delay. There are signs of it, but we really need a larger data set. Barring injury, we should get that in 2018. 

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