Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Except for not resigning Roger Clemens, we haven’t done a thing.

Well, I guess you could say we signed Raul Chavez – you know, the backup catcher who runs slower than I did when I was 8 months pregnant with twins, the guy they sent down twice last year, the guy who stayed on waivers while 2 teams desperate for catching ignored him. 400 big ones – I guess, I HOPE, this is insurance in case Humberto Quintero’s broken hand bone (broke playing winter ball in Venezuela) doesn’t heal in time for spring training.

We signed 3 former #1 draft picks who’ve played a little bit of ML 3rd base, not very well, to minor league contracts, I guess to replace AAA 3rd baseman Mike Coolbaugh, who left. Eric Munson and Danny Klaussen are former Tigers – wonder if Phil had something to do with them getting contracts. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about them replacing Mo Ensberg. We sure don’t have real too much of anything in the minors.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the Arbitration eligible guys (Lidge, Everett, Ensberg or Wheeler) has signed a contract yet. After seeing guys like Loiza get 7 mill a year for 3 years and Burnett get 11 mill a year for 5 years and Kevin Millwood get 12 mill a year for 5 years, you think MAYBE McLane just might could regret signing Roy Oswalt for only 2 years last year? I HOPE they trying REALLY hard to get him signed to a longer contract. Because, let’s face it – he gonna get at LEAST 14 – 16 mill a year as a FA next year.

I notice that the beat writers in the Chron, Lopez, Ortiz and Justice are all, in my opinion, toeing the McLane line about lets not rush to find a bat, but wait to see what we’ve got after all we made it to the Series last year and the guys gonna be better, Roger or no Roger because we can surely replace his 13 W, right?

Wrong.

Just because St. Louis ain’t lookin real strong, and just because the rest of the NL Central rejoicing that Neifi gonna be batting leadoff for the Cubbies once more don’t mean that we can just not bother to find the bats we need and everything gonna be gravy.

I’m not exactly unhappy that we didn’t sign Jacque Jones or Encarnacion to 3 year contracts to play OF.

And I’ve read in a few places that we “inquiring” about Tejada, who, like I said before, I would LUUUVV to get.

One last thing – yall know that Alan Ashby, Milo Hamilton’s partner on KTRH 790 Astros broadcasts was suddenly fired last week and replaced by some AAA guys you never heard of. Ash was VERY good and as yall know, a longtime Astro. So WHY was he fired??? Could it be for the same reason Billy Wagner was thrown out on his ass (I mean, traded for some good fer nothing pitchers?) I don’t know for sure, but both Milo and Ash were VERY critical of Phil’s mismanaging during the Series. Did Ash make the bad mistake of saying something like McLane needs to spend some money on a bat instead of just raising ticket prices and pocketing the Series money? I wouldn’t be surprised – seems that McLane can’t take any criticism, especially of his (non)spending habits.

SO, if we keep not doing anything, I guess I can
1 – refuse to write until we do and take a nice 3 month vacation
2 – talk about the other 29 teams who are not hibernating like grizzly bears
3 – throw a whole lotta stats on our players at yall and see what sticks (and what stinks…)
4 – tell stories about my kidsss (yeah, Purpura, that’s a threat, so get off your duff and get busy)

Tags: Houston Astros, MLB

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 8:53 am and is filed under Astros baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.