"You know, that guy's still there."

You would never know it, if we were to talk about National League baseball today, but I had aspirations to be a Houston Astros fan once. True story: it was 2003 and one of my dearest friends was blogging about them from Houston and, you know, I thought they were sort of endearing? What did I know, I'd never followed a National League team before.

In retrospect, I blame it all on Roy Oswalt.

Most people don't know this, because they're less crazy than I am, but Roy Oswalt has one of the lowest active ERAs in baseball, second only to Pedro Martinez. Roy Oswalt has had multiple 20-win seasons. Roy Oswalt cannot swing a bat at a baseball to save his life but he'll hit you in the head with it, motherfucker, because Roy Oswalt takes shit from no man. Roy Oswalt is now, and always has been, six feet of smoking southern bad ass technology, even while recovering from re-occurring groin injuries that laid him out for over a season.

Roy Oswalt is sort of amazing, although I might be biased; he non-ironically drives a tractor, he throws like a machine, and he looks a lot like my brother. In my head, Roy Oswalt is like the Chuck Norris of baseball.

Roy Oswalt's ferocity and drive and 90 mile-per-hour fastball made me love him, absolutely and completely. They made me care about his team, made me want the tshirt and the cap and the kool-aid and the whole goddamn Minute Maid Park experience, until his team turned around and signed my favorite pitcher out from under me. The Astros and I, we've never really been able to move past that because I wasn't a National League fan -- I'm an American League fan. I am a Yankees fan, born and raised in the Empire State, and while Don Mattingly is the first athlete I remember, Andy Pettitte was the first Yankee I ever loved.

Fast forward four years.

These days, everybody knows Andy Pettitte is back in New York, sans a new championship ring, because Houston wouldn't give him the contract or the money he wanted, and New York was just desperate enough to offer him both. Roger Clemens rode Pettitte's coattails back to avoid separation anxiety, or something? The television wants me to believe it's because he doesn't have a Cingular phone? Obviously he just needed 27 million dollars to buy one!

Roy Oswalt, through all their shenanigans, has stayed in Houston. He's a rock like that. The immovable object in the face of the irresistible force that was the Clemens/Pettitte hypothetical baseball homosexual circus in the middle of Texas, and now it's blown over and his team has fallen apart and he kept on keeping on, trying to hold the pieces together.

I watched the Astros/Dodgers game tonight; it was hard for me. But I was drinking and Roy was pitching, an experimental method to achieving awesome good times, and it worked: he threw 109 pitches and held the Dodgers to one run for eight innings and the bullpen didn't blow it in the ninth, he earned his 13th win for the season. He was pretty awesome. It was all pretty awesome.

During the fifth inning (although I can't be entirely certain, I did not TiVo), the cameras did the long pan down the visitor's dugout while the ESPN announcers discussed the futility of Houston attempting another playoff run. At the far end of the dugout, at least six feet from any other member of his team, sat Roy Oswalt. He was slumped forward with his elbows on his knees, watching the Houston at-bats, and after every portent of doom proclaimed from the booth -- the injuries, the anemic bats, the exodus of starting pitchers, Brad Lidge: great headcase or greatest headcase -- the camera would re-focus on Roy's face and one of the guys would say, "that guy's still here. He's going out every fifth day, and he's doing all he can. They don't even deserve it, but he's giving them everything."

That guy's still there. Fuck, I love him. Maybe I should try to learn something from this! Stand by your boys, even after they kick you in the fruit stand! But seriously, not if they're the Houston Astros. Those dudes will screw you over every which way they can, from stealing your players to sending them back again, without signing any draft picks in between. You know, I thought the Yankees signing Andrew Brackman was bad. Roger Clemens and Andrew Brackman. Sheesh.