After getting a bit of respite from the 100+ F temperatures the last few days, we are heading back up; it is what it is in a Texas summer. And the same could be said about our first-place baseball team, the Houston Astros.

After getting a bit of respite from the 100+ F temperatures the last few days, we are heading back up; it is what it is in a Texas summer. And the same could be said about our first-place baseball team, the Houston Astros.
In the comments to the last post – a good friend of the blog and our in-house island inn-keeper, uncleknuckle (previously known as Daveb) – mentioned that he didn’t think any of us thought this team would be this good. It is a good point.
Apologies to Bon Jovi for stealing the title of this post from a line from Living on a Prayer, but this year’s Astros team is doing much more than living on a prayer.
After a red-hot May that pushed the Astros into the lead in the AL West, they began June stumbling and bumbling a bit as they went 4-5 in the first 9 games.
The Astros’ New York/New York tour continues on Sunday after the good guys rebounded from a Thursday heartbreaker loss with a solid win on Friday behind another great start by Justin Verlander. Then they followed it with the Cristian Javier, Hector Neris, and Ryan Pressly no-hit win on Saturday. The team is now 4-1 on this nine-game run through the Yanks and Mets.
This may be the most challenging week and a half of the season for the Astros. The best team in the NL (the Mets) visits from New York for two games, and the Astros head east to play the best team in the AL and in all of baseball, the Yankees, in New York for four games.
This post is slightly shanghaied by the news that Jeremy Pena has been placed on the IL. But since this is all hypothetical, let’s pretend that Pena is back and Dusty Baker has asked your opinion about the makeup of his daily lineup. Talk about hypothetical….
As I morph older and older, I find that I am turning into my parents. Good people living in a world that is not catering to them. Sometimes it is the gazillion ways people choose to be “social” these days, though I assume that anyplace that tosses you because they don’t like your opinion is not that social.