They weren’t a team when they left spring training. They didn’t really know what they were.
They had an outfield with almost no big-league experience. They had a third baseman fresh off a bad year.
They had a shortstop coming back from an injury. The right side of their infield was baseball’s oldest.
They loved the front of their rotation and the back of their bullpen. They were unsure about the rest.
They’d gotten within one game of the 2004 World Series, but they were substantially different in 2005.
They were put together strangely. In Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Roy Oswalt, they had three starters good enough to win a championship.
But their offense might have been baseball’s worst.
They lost 30 of their first 45 games. No team in baseball looked deader.
Much has been made of the fact that the Chronicle buried them around that time. Fans rant about that sports section. Players laugh about it.
The thing is, no one thought we were wrong. Some fans thought we ought to support the hometown team. A few players thought it was more premature than inaccurate.
Not one stood up and said: “You’ll see. We’re going to the World Series.”
Manager Phil Garner believed his team was dead too. He won’t say it, but he thought the club needed to be reshaped if it was going to contend.
He was pushing management to acquire a veteran pitcher and two veteran outfielders.
So what happened?
How did the Astros go from 15-30 to playing Game 1 of the World Series Saturday night at U.S. Cellular Field?
Their strategy was both simple and courageous. They did nothing. They stayed with their blueprint. Their players continued to play hard hoping something would turn around.
Peel away this season a day at a time, and there’s no secret formula for turning a last-place team into a pennant winner. There’s no turning point.
Well, maybe one. Garner chewed out his players after a 3-0 loss to Milwaukee on May 27. The next night, they got three-run home runs from Morgan Ensberg and Adam Everett. They’re 80-45 since.
The White Sox are the popular pick to win the World Series.
They’ve got a deeper starting rotation. They may have a bit more offense.
The only problem with that prediction is that the people making them haven’t seen what you’ve seen.
They haven’t seen a team with a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. They haven’t seen a team do things that can’t always be measured on paper.
The Astros are a cliche, a team in every sense of the word.
They were stars like Clemens, Pettitte and Oswalt, but they’re also Eric Bruntlett, Everett and Brad Ausmus.
They probably don’t win without those guys either.
They probably don’t win if Craig Biggio doesn’t hit a three-run, ninth-inning home run off Billy Wagner in September.
They probably don’t win if Clemens doesn’t pitch 6 1/3 solid innings against Florida hours after the death of his mother.
They probably don’t win if Bruntlett doesn’t steal second and third, then score on a Jason Lane single in a 2-1 victory over the Phillies in September.
They probably don’t win if Ensberg doesn’t hit a ninth-inning home run against the Cardinals a few days earlier.
They certainly don’t win if their pitching staff doesn’t allow the fewest earned runs in baseball.
They probably don’t win without monster years from Ensberg, Brad Lidge, Oswalt, Pettitte and Clemens. They don’t win if Oswalt doesn’t come up huge in Wednesday’s pennant-clinching victory.
They clinched a playoff berth on the final day of the regular season. In the end, they needed every one of those victories. All 25 players contributed at one time or another. That fact surely has made this season even more satisfying to the players and coaches.
In the end, it was hundreds of things. Large things and small things. It all added up to a pennant for the Astros. The World Series begins Saturday.
