Caught between the overall brilliance of Jose Altuve and the meteoric appearance of Yordan Alvarez, the terrific start to Alex Bregman‘s career sometimes gets overlooked. His slow starts to each season, his sometimes childish Twitter throwdowns with other players and his over the top posing and antics after launching home runs take the spotlight off of just how great he has been in his approximate 3-1/2 years with the Houston Astros.
Though it feels like much longer, the Astros have been required to cover the DH position as an AL team only for the last seven seasons. They have had many people rotate in and out of that spot, but in any one year the most ABs might have been given to Evan Gattis, Carlos “The Banger” Beltran, Chris Carter or even (swallow) Carlos Pena. In general, these folks have not been very good.
No one really knows how the Astros’ lineup might look like in 2020 under new leadership on the bench (Dusty Baker…..ok old new leadership) and behind the scenes with GM James Click.
The 2015 season was the beginning of the Astros on the field Renaissance as it ended a four year period where they had averaged a 58-104 record. In fact, if you take out the very bad 70-92 2014 season, you would have had a putrid 3 seasons where they averaged 54 wins and 108 losses. So, looking back at the wild card 2015 season, the above-average 2016 season and the 100+ wins of 2017 thru 2019, what were the top ten trades of that scalawag Jeff Luhnow during this period?
Minor league baseball is different than major league baseball in more ways than just salaries and size of crowds. As discussed in the following article, MiLB relies on having crowds, especially on their weekends and special give-a-way games for their lifeblood.
This is one of those scattershot posts that come to mind as we continue to try and fill the seemingly eternal vacuum of time and lack of real baseball news. So without further delay, let’s talk about “stuff”.
Right now I am not sure if I am more like Joe Pesci in Home Alone or Darren McGavin in A Christmas Story. All I know is that I want to cuss up a storm like both of those gentlemen did in those two movies without actually saying the words I am thinking. As Ralphie (Darren’s son in the movie) would say this is an “Oh Fudge” moment, but I’m not thinking of Fudge.
As we face another week/month/lifetime of isolation, here at Chipalatta we will share with you a list of miscellaneous ways to fill in the time. Of course, this is far from an all-inclusive list, but if it helps just one person then it is worth it.
