Buzzfeed has a post up entitled "In Defense of Bad Baseball" where, predictably, the Astros feature prominently (and Carlos Lee is the poster-boy)...
There's a limit to this, of course — if good-bad baseball feels languid and pleasantly buzzy, bad-bad baseball feels more like a sinus infection, with everything happening entirely too slowly and painfully, and with the existential suck-factor dialed all the way up. For instance, the Houston Astros — a team that has made maybe two good baseball decisions since Barack Obama was elected President — are a bummer. They don't put out a competitive product, but they charge fans competitive prices for the right to consume it; their domed stadium features so much fake old-timey gimmickry and inauthentic quirk that it might as well be a gated community called Olde Baseballe Acres; much of Houston's Major League roster appears to have been spit out of a Random Athlete Name Generator, and the organization's player development strategy in recent years has been 1) short guys, 2) players who are related to former Major Leaguers, and 3) short guys who are related to former Major Leaguers. This is unfair to their fans for a bunch of reasons. It's unfair, too, to people like Chris Johnson and J.D. Martinez — real baseball players on the Astros, promise — who are good enough at a very difficult sport to make it to the Major Leagues, but still get goofed on at BuzzFeed for their implausibly generic names. Broadly speaking, this is not good. It's bad.
Prediction: Media will drive us to insanity long before the Astros do...
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
