What the fuck, dude? Who the hell are you?
Actually NYY apparently thought of it first. Beltran brought the system from there to Houston with an intervening stop in Texas.
You come to this Astros site and call the team “cheaters?” Clearly you do not understand this site where you are, and how could if you just joined yesterday. Keep it up, and you won’t be very popular here. Maybe you don’t care.
BINGO!
Then you will not be here long.
Astros have always faced trouble. Following the stros has been very difficult at times.When we were down, the only thing to do was follow the minors, with a hope and a prayer. We are in the golden age at the moment. When tthe hurricane hit, my black girl and I were in the george r brown. With here her son and grandkids. They gave free tickets to the game. I said lets go, she said she doesn’t like baseball. We went, and I said we will go for 5 innings. When we left, she said she had a great time. That is all you can ask.
Yes, being a Houston fan has taken those of us who follow the team through some down times, but those times do not cause a true fan to abandon the team, and those down times make the good times, like those we have experienced the last few years, even sweeter. A true fan shows up daily through good times and bad and is loyal to the team despite the opinions of others or despite slings and arrows cast by MLB. A true fan may be exasperated, frustrated, or even angry at players, managers, plays, or games, but a true fan never leaves the team.
I hope I have been a true fan of the Astros, but I know for certain my longtime friend BudGirl is one. We all should aspire to be Astros fans as faithful as BG is.
I had three pre-Astros encounters with mlb growing up. Short version is that Steve Garvey giving me a hat, watching Reggie Jackson strike out, and Nolan Ryan putting a guy in a headlock failed to interest me in professional baseball.
In 93 I am living in Mexico City and many of my friends and students are baseball fans. Mostly they favor the Blue Jays–chinga los gringos, viva NAFTA. I end up watching what turned out to be the last game of the 93 Series in a bar with some buddies. The drama of the last at bat between Mitch Williams and Joe Carter captivated me. I had never seen Williams pitch or had any idea who he was, but when Williams ran out to the mound he seemed shrouded in an aura of doom. And Carter seemed ready to play executioner to poor Willams’ sacrifical goat as he raised his bat to strike. Ball into the stands, blood in the sand then fireworks.
In 94 I am living in Houston for the first time and I go to an Astros game with my Dad and soon to be father-in-law. Though Canadian, my fathe-in-law is a baseball (but not Astros) fan and talks about Ted Williams and how beautiful his swing was and how no one could hit like him and the Dome was ridiculous but appropriate for a hard luck expansion team called the ASSSStros. We drank beer continuously. Eventually it happened–the Wild Thing came out to pitch in relief for the Astros. I was fascinated to see if he could get back on the horse after such an excrucitating finish to the 93 series. I don’t think Williams got an out before being pulled for another pitcher.
I work with a guy who had been a fan of the Astros since their first year as the .45’s and we talked a lot of Astros baseball. We never go to a game together–he sits alone in the Dome with binoculars and a scorecard and usually has money on the game. He had seen a couple of Ryan’s no-hitters in person and talked about the many pitching greats and excellent teams that had gotten close to the Series but didn’t make it. Told me about the swarms of mosqitos at the first park, Mike Scott’s no-hitter, Mantle’s home run in the Dome, and the shock and sadness of J.R. Richards’ stroke.Told me I was lucky to become a fan now because the Astros had never sent so many players to an All-Star game.Bagwell, Biggio, and Caminiti are the best infield the team has ever had and they are all young…
The broken hand, and the strike and Caminiti leaving for the Padres, my inability to give a shit about any sports team who are not the Astros.
94 was a great year to fall in love with a franchise. So much promise and so much heartache.
Eventually I found the big freight train of a fan site and grew in love in love for the Astros, dislike of the Grocer, and in disgust for Bud Selig.and Richard Justice.
And in the background of everything that has happened in my life has been a love of the Astros. Going to the juicebox on game of thones night with my daugther and the last home national league game with my boys. All the times I was a desginated driver for my beloved father in law and my first game in the juicebox after he died. I flipped a coffee table at the end of game seven in 17 and im still thrilled about that magical season. Grateful that the Astros have a chance to beat the Dodgers again while both teams are good and goddamn I’m glad to be around to enjoy it. Fuck the Cubs.
I didn’t know when i became an Astros fan. I will say that i really started following the Astros around 1994. My first favorite pitcher was Butch Henry, I must have thought he was cute. Honestly don’t remember anymore. I remember thinking Wagner’s perfect pitch usually resulted in a blown save. I loved Cammi.
I found AC and started going to AA meetings and things just amped up. I’m loyal to those I love.
Then in 2001 baseball gave me something i most needed. A reason for my dad and i to be able to sit in a rehab room for hours and keep each other company.
I had always watched sports with my dad, mainly football, since i can remember. But that summer baseball was there, and the Astros were now on a channel daily. It’s not the sport we would pick to play first. After all, when you have a lazy eye your depth perception is off and makes catching a ball hard.
But when the Astros beat the Yankees in 2017 to go to the World Series he was there in the stands with me, I could feel him.
So, yeah the Astros are it. And the rest of the teams can suck it.
Thank you all for the great stories.
This has been better than imagined.
Wonderful.
I was about 10 when I went to my first Colt .45 game. That summer we went to see a Colt batting practice a few hours before the night game. No one was in the stadium but the Colt players and my dad and me. Dad went to school with Jim Busby, Colts’ 3rd base coach, and Busby told him to come on down into the dugout during BP and he would get a baseball signed for us by some of the players. I remember Nellie Fox was on that team and my dad really liked him. Anyway, Busby got my baseball filled up with autographs. I wish I could say it was a great experience for me but, honestly, I was totally intimidated by these mythical characters. It also turned out that Nellie Fox lived in a motel room at The Surrey House on South Main during the season where we were staying. It was a typical motel unadorned of any luxuries. We would see him come home for the evening a couple of hours after the game chewing on a cigar.
My early exposure to sports was through the lens of my dad, who has always watched sports on TV but never attends games and has never been a fanatic of one team (Cowboys and Longhorns are the closest). So I grew up watching the MLB postseason, the NBA finals, NFL games, and a LOT of golf. My earliest specific memory of watching baseball with him was the earthquake during the 1989 World Series; I was almost 7 and remember thinking that when the live feed from Candlestick cut out it was some sort of prank. Dad let me stay up to watch the end of the 1991 Series, as well as plenty of Super Bowls, the early Jordan/Bulls Finals runs, etc.
I played Little League for the first time in the spring of 1992 (I was on the Padres, so of course Tony Gwynn was my first baseball hero), and that summer Dad decided it was time to take me to my first MLB game. The choice was either Houston or Arlington, so we decided to hit an Astros game on the return trip to see family in the Golden Triangle. Even though the Dome had lost much of its charm by then, it still had a pretty big impact on me. It helped that the Astros won (beat the Pirates IIRC). I was an “Astros fan” from that day forward.
I only played one more year of Little League, but watching as many Astros games on HSE and its derivative forms (Prime Sports?) became a routine. Experienced my first real sports heartbreak in 1997, then again in 1998 (Dad bought us NLCS tickets). Started reading AstrosConnection in 1999, then dove into the TZ in 2001. I got my ass handed to me more than a few times, but in all seriousness, it was a really formative experience for an 18-year-old kid that thought he knew everything about everything. It definitely helped shape my worldview and my personality, and I don’t think the experience would’ve been nearly as valuable had I found the TZ at a later age. As a high school senior I was another TZer’s date to her senior prom (that’s a hell of a story for another time). In typing this I realized that I’ve been posting about the Astros with a number of you here for over half my life. Pretty weird.
I’ve always had a hard time separating the fun of being a fan (in the “fanatic” sense of the word) from the stress of watching the games. During the 2019 postseason (ALDS game 2, actually) my Apple Watch popped up a high heart rate notification; my heart rate hit 151 just sitting on the couch watching Osuna/Harris struggle through that 9th inning jam. I realized it was a sort of voluntary anxiety that was fun when I was younger but really just made me feel awful now - I already deal with enough anxiety. Ever since the 2019 World Series ended I’ve significantly reduced my sports intake, and I realize that I’m a lot happier for it. The emotional distance allowed me to watch last year’s postseason run without feeling like I was going to throw up or die.
So now I realize that I have come full circle and have mostly turned into my dad, who still approaches the big games with minimal emotional investment and just wants to be entertained. Meanwhile, my 12-year-old son is very much the Astros superfan that I used to be. I’m not sure if my current state of fandom is permanent or not, but I can say this: fuck the Dodgers, fuck the Yankees, fuck the Red Sox, and double-fuck the Rangers.
Cesar Cedeno was an all-star, and I got to pick a few books from our reading club, one happened to be on MLB all-stars for the National League. I took one look at the rainbow gut unis and at that moment I became a Houston Astros fan (somewhere in 1976) - I was 7. It was the rainbow guts that did it.
Man, I still love those throwbacks!
Those uniforms almost made me an ex-Astro fan. They went from the iconic shooting star to that shit.
I must say the shooting star is still my favorite.
But the rainbow guts were worn in some of my favorite games and therefore in my favorite memories.
Ryan no-no, Puhl 10 huts in 80 NLCS, Watson scores MLB 1,000,000 run. And many more.
I will always have a soft spot.
Just realized I shared a similar version of this when the thread first appeared last year, but anyway:
Born and raised in Katy (Houston suburb). Loved baseball as a kid and played until I was 13-14. In high school, I was the varsity student manager all four years, too. Always grew up liking the local teams (Astros, Oilers and Rockets).
My parents used to take me to games at the Dome, and in 1998, my dad got me out of school early to go to my first playoff game (game 1 of the NLDS vs the Padres) to watch Randy Johnson pitch. I vividly remember the midnight trade deadline when ESPN announced the Astros traded for him. I was so pumped. The Justin Verlander last-minute deadline deal evoked a very similar reaction from me, too.
Taking a deep dive through the annals of OWA is a treat sometimes. Finding this thread and reading it on a hotter than Hades day here in SoCal where I can’t go out has been fantastic. Not gonna lie, some of the posts on here tugged at the heart strings and were fun to read.
As for me, myself and I, I think I became a lifelong devout, ardent, loyal, vociferous and long-suffering Houston Astros Baseball Club backer in '79 due to my Dad. He was an incredibly proud 4th generation Austinite/Texan/UT alumnus and he and my Mom moved to Tucson from San Antonio in late '73 right before I was born. My Dad had been a TV Anchorman, got a job at the local NBC affiliate there in Tucson, so hence the move. However, comma, his heart was always back home in Austin and in Texas and he missed it all his years in Tucson. He had gotten his 2nd bachelor’s from UH and loved being in Houston in the mid-late ‘60s. He was a young buck reporter for KHOU and would often “utilize” his press pass to go see games at the new Harris County Domed Stadium- I think that’s where he fell in love with the Astros.
That being said, Tucson was the home of the Astros’ AAA farm club, the Tucson Toros, and my unloved younger sibling, MikeS and I ended up living 1.3 miles from their stadium. We went to tons of games (we could walk) got to see loads of talent come through and some future Astros as well- Toros games were a blast. Each year, the Astros tried to come and play the Toros for an exhibition game and in '79, my Dad took us to said game. I made some remark about liking the Astros and their uniforms and, as luck would have it, a kind stranger behind us bought me an orange Astros hat with the H and star. I. Was. Stoked. I wore that damn orange hat all the damn time and in 1st grade in ‘80, I apparently went running into my parents’ bedroom to tell my Dad the Astros had beaten the hated fucking dojers and that “Bill Virdon was proud of them.” My Dad often said that was a fond memory of me- he already knew they’d won because he was watching the game, but didn’t want to ruin my elation.
Living and growing up in Tucson was challenging as an Astros backer and each and every opportunity to see the Astros on TV (we got the Padres VHF station) or hear them on the radio (we got dojers games on AM radio) was a treat. The first time our Dad took us to Houston to see The Dome was in '81 in a torrential storm. I can still remember pulling up to the parking lot in the rain in our Toyota Tercel, the wipers barely able to keep up, walking into The Dome and being blown away- we were finally at the place our beloved Astros played. And it was the middle of the '81 strike. Sumbitch.
It wouldn’t be until summer '93 I first got to see the Astros play a regular season game in person and at The Dome. It was against the reds/commies and I still have the program with Eric Anthony on the cover.
Fast forward to '97, I had moved to Austin, my roommates were all from Houston and devout Astros fans as well and as a recent college grad out on his own, I was so excited to finally have Astros games on TV. Plus, home games were only a 3 hr drive away (ask me sometime about making the hated bravos- Astros NLDS Game 3 at The Dome in '97 in about 2 hours driving from Austin…). All my years living in Austin afforded me ample coverage of the Astros and made me appreciate being gone from Central Texas and not being able to follow them as easily (thanks be for modern streaming, et al. It’s a lot easier than it used to be).
MikeS got me hooked on Astrosconnection.com in the early '00s and it was a daily routine to go on there in the morning at my piss-ant desk job for post game recaps, etc. That site was epic and so fun! I finally came back around to OWA a year or so ago after figuring out how to fire up my account again, and I must declare, it’s been a haven for me now that I live in SoCal and am surrounded by fucking dojers fans left and right. You can feel their vitriol and hatred for the Astros and it fuels my disdain for that organization even further. They really are a gaggle of self-aborbed, arrogant chucklefucks.
I cannot thank you all for your posts, your insight and laughter. It makes being on an island that much more palpable.
And, as Coach/Jim R aptly stated (I guess I’m paraphrasing, really), being a lifelong fan means sticking with the team through it all- the lows, the highs, the anguish- all of it. This team has found many ways to round house me in the mommy-daddy buttons and has made me beyond elated at times, too. Wouldn’t have it any other way, they’ll always be my team no matter what and I scoff always at t-shirt/front-runner fans of other teams (I’m thinking of all my arlington mouth-breather/stRanger buddies back in Austin).
I’ll never get over the '86 loss to the hated ny steM- it will always cut me to my core, I’m still smarting over the '19 team that was redonk as the kids say (keep the expos in Montreal- fuck the gNats) and, of course, last year hurts, but again, the Astros will always be my team, no matter.
Sorry for my long musing.
Let’s go Astros.
was listening to radio years ago. Guy had a business man coming in fron elsewhere. Rodeo time. Guy asked radio nouncer, there are wagons and cattle. they come in every wednesday to sell their cattle in downtown. Then the guy says, that guy has a gun. He says yes that is for cattle russtlers. I moved from the netherlands to houston ass freshman in high scchool.
This is unintelligible. If you are having a stroke, please call 911.
So English is kind of like your second language.