MLB Houston

When I sat down tonight to watch the Pirates and Astros, I didn't really think I'd be seeing anything all that special. The Pirates and 'Stros are tied for last in the NL Central, after all, and both teams have been pretty frigid of late. When Phil Dumatrait picked up an RBI single in the first, the announcers mentioned it was his first career hit. Then i the in the fourth, Runelvys Hernandez laid down a bunt into noman's land and scored a run. Again, the announcers noted it was his first career hit. That seemed mildly more interesting. In the bottom of the fourth, Denny Bautista came to the plate. Yep, RBI single, first career hit. Now that's odd.

Now, I'm only a baseball historian on Sunday afternoons after three beers, but it strikes me as incredibly rare that three pitchers all managed to pick up their first career hits and have them all be RBI singles in the same game. I'm sure it's happened before, but probably not all that often. I guess it's not all that surprising that it happened in a game where the starters combined to give up 17 runs, but I'm still impressed.

In case you'd forgotten, Runelvys Hernandez is the guy that kicked off the whole Shawn Chacon saga by taking Chacon's spot in the Astros rotation. Tonight he managed to actually give up ten runs (including two RBI singles to pitchers that had no career hits coming into the night), which is pretty rare for a starter. I imagine Shawn Chacon's looking in a mirror somewhere and feeling pretty good about himself.

Maybe the All-Star Game is a meaningless to the players and just an excuse for Bud Selig to admire himself for a week. That doesn't mean that the selections should be stupid. Today, the MLB 'Haus gives you All-Star Grievances.

Grievance: Nate McLouth over Jason Bay- It's not that McLouth isn't a deserving All-Star, because he is. The problem is that he's mired in a terrible slump, putting up a .209/.258/.355 line with two homers over the last month or so (prior to today's game). There's a decent chance that by the end of the year, McLouth will have faded completely. Still, he made the team over Jason Bay, who's already a two-time All-Star and is slugging along like he has every year of his career besides an injury-filled 2007. It should take more than a flash in the pan to make an All-Star team.

Grievance: Miguel Tejada? Really?- After a down year in Baltimore last year, Tejada got off to a decent start this year. That's all quickly gone to hell, as he's hitting .198 since May 30th. Tejada's not an All-Star, he's a guy in the twilight of his career that Ed Wade is going to regret trading for by the end of the season.

Grievance: Adam Dunn isn't even a snub- I get that Dunn's only hitting .228. Aren't we to the point of enlightened fanhood that people can look beyond that and realize that his .895 OPS makes him a snub?

Grievance: Alfonso Soriano and Kosuke Fukudome are starters- Fan voting is stupid and unreliable. We say that every year. This year, these two are the reason.

Other snubs: Carlos Lee (unless he wins the final vote but let's be honest, dude's got no chance against David Wright).

Shawn Chacon was wrong to attack Ed Wade last week. I know it, you know it, and -- now that he's been released -- Chacon knows it. But does that absolve Wade's role in the altercation?

Wade has remained tight-lipped about the incident, but hearing Chacon's side of the story doesn't paint the general manager in a very positive light. Wade approached Chacon in the clubhouse and requested a private meeting. Chacon declined, saying they could talk right there. That's when Chacon says Wade began "yelling and cussing." As Bill McCurdy of the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame told Bloomberg News, that's also what guaranteed that this exchange would not end well.

``You treat a grown man like that in front of his peers and something's going to happen, but it's not going to be good,'' McCurdy said. ``There's no way for him to suddenly get up, if Wade raises his voice at him, and slump silently away to the office like he's being sent to the principal.''

It's been quite a first half for JR Towles. He opened the season with the Astros, billed as one of the best catching prospects in the majors. For all of April and May, he hit like a cheap version of Brad Ausmus and earned himself a demotion to AAA. In AAA, he mashed to a .278/.380/.574 line, with eight of his 17 hits going for extra bases. Now he's back in Houston after Humberto Quintero went on the DL with a concussion. From the Houston Chronicle:

"Reality is reality," he said. "I wasn't doing very well. Certainly, I was disappointed and frustrated. But I realized I wasn't helping the team. They felt the need to send me back down to get things back straight. I feel good. I'm here to take advantage of the opportunity."

[...]

"I've made some adjustments, and hopefully things will go well," he said.

With the Astros badly sliding right now and sitting 11 games out of first place, they're going to be better served playing Towles than Quintero, concussion or no concussion. Towles and Hunter Pence represent just about the only young talent that Ed Wade has to build around, so they might as well figure out if Towles is the real deal as soon as they can.

In what has to be the early leader in the "least surprising news of the week" award, nobody wanted to trade for GM-choke-slammer Shawn Chacon. He officially cleared waivers yesterday afternoon, meaning he's free to sign with any other franchise who thinks his mediocre pitching is worth the hit to the team's image and/or GM's face.

(I don't know about you, but I'm hoping the White Sox show interest, just so we can see what happens when Chacon disagrees with strength and conditioning coach [and former professional wrestler] Dale "The Demon" Torborg. But I digress ...)

Big league contracts are guaranteed, but the way the Astros see it, choke-slamming your boss is grounds for breach of contract, so they've decided not to pay Chacon the rest of his salary. Considering he's still owed nearly a million dollars, Chacon went running to the players association, which officially filed a greivance today.

With a good 16 hours to digest the insane idea that a baseball player choke-slammed his general manager yesterday, there's still a ton of lingering questions. I mean, Shawn Chacon nicely admitted to the act, which is a surprise in this day an age, but now what? Chacon's "indefinitely suspended," but what does that really mean? Let's run down some of the options and how likely they are.

Chacon will pitch again this year for the Astros: Uhh, this isn't going to happen. I'm not going to say I'd eat my hat if Chacon pitches for the 'Stros again this year (I just bought my hat and hats taste bad). Let me put it this way: Barry Bonds will play for the Astros this year before Shawn Chacon does. You just don't keep players that do stuff like this on your team.

Chacon will pitch for someone else this year: Slightly more likely, but I don't think the odds are great here, either. For Chacon to pitch for another team, someone would either have to trade for the GM-choker, or the Astros would have to release him. We'll rule a trade out since Chacon already kind of sucks and he just destroyed any value he might have on the trade market. If I'm Ed Wade, I think I'm kind of content to keep him suspended and not pitching for anyone this year since I'm paying him either way. It might be a little vindictive, but Chacon's earned it.

Last week the Astros demoted Shawn Chacon from their rotation and he intimated that he wasn't very happy with the move. That's understandable. No one really wants to be demoted. Still, most people find a way to take something like that in stride and move on with their lives. Shawn Chacon is not most people. He confronted GM Ed Wade today and the incident ended with Chacon grabbing Wade around the neck and driving him into the ground. Seriously. The Houston Chronicle has Chacon's version of the events:

"He started yelling and cussing," Chacon said of Wade. "I'm sitting there and I said to him very calmly, 'Ed, you need to stop yelling me. Then I stood up and said 'you better stop yelling at me.' I stood up. He continued and was basically yelling and stuff and was like, 'You need to (expletive) look in the mirror.' So at that point I lost my cool and I grabbed him by the neck and threw him to the ground. I jumped on top of him because at that point I wanted to beat his (butt). Words were exchanged."

I love how cooly Chacon admits that he chokeslammed his GM. He claims that Wade started the whole thing by swearing at him when he refused to go into Cecil Cooper's office to meet with Cooper and Wade to presumably discuss his anger at being demoted to the pen. But still ... pretty unacceptable behavior from Chacon. He's suspended indefinitely and he probably won't pitch for the Astros again. That's just me hazarding a guess, but I feel pretty confident with that one.

Having had the pleasure (that's not really the right word) of seeing Shawn Chacon pitch over the past two seasons in Pittsburgh, I was kind of surprised when the Astros signed him this off-season and decided to put him in the rotation. In the past few years, Chacon has been awful as a starter and fairly passable as a reliever. Unsurprisingly, he's been pretty bad and he's going back to the pen. That doesn't mean he's happy about it, though. From the Houston Chronicle:

"I think it's horse (expletive)," Chacon said. "That's pretty much how I feel about it. Sums it up."

[...]

"I didn't expect him to be totally happy because he came here because he had a chance to start," Cooper said. "I'm not concerned that he's unhappy because I think he'll do whatever he needs to get it done."

Nice to know Cecil Cooper is concerned about his players. The most hurtful part of the whole thing for Chacon? He's losing his rotation spot to Runelvys Hernandez. Did you know Runelvys Hernandez was still in baseball? He hasn't pitched in the bigs since 2006, hasn't been relevant since 2003, and washed out of minor league stints with the Pirates, Red Sox, and Yankees last year before getting his stuff together in AAA Round Rock in '08. Losing a rotation spot to him? That stings.

At the end of May the Houston Astros were holding steady at around seven games over .500, only a game behind the Cubs in the NL Central. That was in spite of pre-season doom and gloom prognostications from just about everyone. Last night they were celebrating like Little Leaguers in the clubhouse over one measly win, albeit one that broke a seven game losing streak:

"It's nice to hear loud voices in the clubhouse, it's nice to smile for crying out loud," reliever Doug Brocail said. "It's just one of those things. The load was so heavy."

Honestly, that quote from Brocail is one of the saddest I've heard from an athlete. Even with the win, the Astros are still 4-12 in June and much closer to the last place Reds (a half game) than the first place Cubs (12 games).

The good news from last night's win? The 'Stros finally got a decent start out of Roy Oswalt, who's struggled all year. He went seven and two-thirds and limited the Rays to just two runs on seven hits with five strikeouts to pick up his sixth win of the year. If there's any chance the Astros are going to right the ship, they're going to need Oswalt to get it done.