Wait... the Astros are good?

Seriously, what in the name of Terry Puhl is going on here?
I follow baseball pretty closely.
And not just the Red Sox and Yankees.

I've written 6 or 7 posts about the freaking Marlins this year.

So I like to flatter myself that I follow the game pretty closely.
Well, I guess I should have been following it closer.

All year it seems like the Astros have been a mediocre, uninspiring sub .500 team.
And you'll forgive me for thinking that, but they no longer have Bagwell and Biggio and they went from 1 1/2 games out on May 27th to 10 games out on June 10th.

I wrote them off as a May pretender.
Can you blame me? They were a sub .500 team on August 10th and the Cubs and the Brewers were a good 2 weeks of games ahead of them.

They were at .500 on August 26th... 16 games out of first... 11 games out of the Wild Card.

I hope you will cut me some slack that I didn't go rushing to the Astros box score in the morning.

Since that loss on August 26th they are 14-1.
Read that sentence again.

I didn't know that until I just looked it up.
They almost won half a month of games.

Did YOU know that?
Did you know that they are only 3 games out of a playoff spot?

Did you know that after making up these Cubs games lost to Hurricane Ike and a series in Florida they will be playing nobody but tomato cans the rest of the way?
The Pirates? The Reds? The Braves? Are any of them going to put up a fight?
(Then again, I didn't think the Nationals and Marlins would offer much resistance to the Mets last year!)

But with the Brewers playing the Cubs 6 times, and currently 3-8 in an uninspired September... could the Astros make the playoffs this year?

And how the heck are they doing this?
Is anyone else noticing that Lance Berkman should be in the MVP discussion?
Has anyone else seen that the trio of Roy Oswalt, Randy Wolf and Brian Moehler are as good a 1-2-3 in the NL?

Or Jose Valverde has had a scoreless save in his last 10 appearances?

Shouldn't Cecil Cooper be getting some talk about manager of the year?
Especially since he is doing this without Carlos Lee and starting the year 6-12!

And with the NL so wide open (the Mets with their bullpen woes, the Phillies and Dodgers inconsistencies all year, the Cubs and Brewers shaky September and the Diamondbacks stunning collapse) who is to say that sneaking in via the Wild Card couldn't mean a trip to the World Series for the hot team?

I mean what in the name of the 2007 Colorado Rockies is going on here?

In the light of Hurricane Ike, I won't ask the fan base their my typical questions...
I hope that the folks at Crawfish Boxes, The Space Race, Plunk Biggio, Chip Bailey, Cliff at Astros Home Plate, Lisa Gray and everyone in Houston is safe and comes home to find their home intact...

And their team in a race.

I've noticed.