The dogdays of August--or, why is my favorite team sucking right now?

Hmm. The Astros just lost their third game in a row. I think that either they've invoked the wrath of (the baseball) God by being too cocky, or they've started to believe their own press, that part about how they can play with any team. The thing is, I believe it too--but the operative word is PLAY. When they were doing so poorly back in May, they were getting a lot of bad breaks. Not that they were playing all that well, but they weren't getting any breaks, either. They started playing like they had to create their own luck, and they started winning. And amazingly, they started getting some breaks, calls going their way, errors by the other teams, etc. I think they've maybe gotten a little complacent--yesterday evening, before the game, Brownie and J.D. (the Astros' TV announcers, for non-fans) even went so far as to say that the Astros could go ahead and put a "W" in the win column, since Andy Pettitte was pitching. Thanks, guys--we were shut out. Methinks the boys need to get back to being a little bit hungry, before things get too far out of hand. Yeah, yeah, I know--we're still 8 games over .500. But we're only 1/2 game ahead of the Nationals for the Wild Card. I would so love to see us have a nice lovely cushion there.

We'll see how this blog thing goes. It will actually be about more than just baseball, although baseball certainly occupies a lot of my time. I blogged for awhile back around the first of the year, but then found myself with precious little free time as I started a new job. I decided I enjoyed reading other blogs more than I did keeping up with my own, so I freed up that corner of cyberspace. Speaking of time--time to go!