DIK I CHOOSE THE ASTROS, OR DID THEY CHOOSE ME?

Four decades of fandom leading to Houston

I’d only started to sink roots into this swamp when some friends invited me to see the Astros play the Cardinals on Oct. 17, 2005. You might remember that game, the one where a man tried to launch a 5-ounce satellite into space using a wooden wand instead of rocket fuel. My memory of that game, sitting in the upper deck, was informed by anxiety that had nothing to do with baseball. In the eighth inning, a guy carried a box on a catwalk overhead in the upper deck of Minute Maid Park. He was dressed in a nondescript way, but then so was that team, still stuck in the terra-cotta uniforms as though attempting to meld into their surroundings. The logo for those Astros was an incomplete star. In my line of work, you call that a metaphor. And as metaphors go, it’s a hanging curveball.

But back to the park. Having been through a particularly horrible day in New York just a few years earlier, I found my anxiety stoked by people with parcels milling about places they shouldn’t be.

I watched this guy through the eighth, though in the ninth my attention was grabbed by the home run Albert Pujols hit off Brad Lidge. The man then picked up the box and walked back down the catwalk. Maybe it was a Newtonian physical reaction to the life leaving the building. Some force — air conditioning? — blew across the box, and one solitary piece of ticker tape broke free and did a sweeping, cradleshaped motion from above Minute Maid Park’s upper deck all the way to the field.

To me, that moment was like a photo slide: It had all the information about Astros ineptitude condensed into one small, square image. For those who have suffered with this team for a half century, it wasn’t just a slide: It had dropped from the carousel into the projector, and a light source projected it onto a movie screen.

It was an endearing introduction to a team and its fans.

Songwriter Todd Snider years ago told me he was a Kansas City Royals fan. This was before the Royals started winning. He liked seeing them in the early 2000s. He said he could watch baseball, which he liked. And the stadium was sufficiently empty so that he could smoke pot by himself without being hassled. We all have our needs.

People bemoan losing teams, but I’ve always enjoyed them. Tickets are cheap, and, well, nobody on a 100-loss baseball team ever dogs a ground ball. So I enjoyed the Astros rebuild in which a bunch of players to whom I had no attachment were dispatched to other teams for draft picks and to dump payroll.

I like the idea of young ball players trying hard. Sure, the numbers alone can be oppressive. Losing anything 100 times in a year is spirit-crushing. But I guess it builds character.

And like Snider, I was something of a free agent.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, where the local team was the Cincinnati Reds over in Ohio. There was no familial baseball birthright. My grandfather grew up in Mississippi, so like many Southerners, he gravitated toward the Cardinals and Stan Musial. By the time I was a kid, the South had the Braves, who could be seen on every TV in Ashland, Ky. I believe to this day the Braves were despised by every TV watcher in Ashland, Ky.

There were good and bad years for Reds fans in my lifetime. As my skull began to harden, the Big Red Machine needed oil to move. And, frankly, Marge Schott was difficult to reconcile — for those who think racial disparagement dissipated after the civil rights era, just recall that she referred to a pair of players as her “million-dollar (expletives).” In the ’90s. Leaving Kentucky made it easy to leave that team and its Nazi-sympathizing owner — I don’t fling that term around lightly — behind. I found myself in New York in 1995 and watching a Yankees team that wasn’t bad. But not great, either.

It nurtured young talent — guys who don’t dog it on ground outs — and I was swept up in a new city with a new team. I was aware the team’s owner was a monster, if not quite a Schott monster. I do think people fail to credit George Steinbrenner with being the single greatest scout of waning talent in baseball history. He must’ve just loved sunsets.

But that was my team. They won a lot. They lost some, too. I still have a Pavlovian reaction to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight,” which was the interstitial music in the 2001 World Series when the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees on the flimsiest game-winning squib in baseball history. If Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run was an aging lion’s roar, Luis Gonzalez’s flurp was a mouse’s fart. But the box score is the equalizer, right?

Anyway, I can’t justify the means of the Yankees’ success in those years, but despite all the pricey free agents, there was for years a core of players who came up in their 20s who kept me tied to that team, even after I left New York. But a few years ago, the last of those guys retired.

One of my favorite sports books is “Bloody Confused” by veteran sportswriter Chuck Culpepper.

The gist of the book is that Culpepper — burned out on the “take ’em one day at a time” routine of American sports coverage — moved to England to go find a soccer team to root for in the Premier League. He did research and visited a lot of towns and took in a lot of football.

If one moment in the book stands out, it’s when he left a match and was explaining his mission to a couple of kids on the tube. He suggested he was there to “choose” a team. The kids nodded as if they understood, and as they exited the train, one said something like, “You don’t choose.”

That’s a damning thing to say. The implication being that it’s a natural process, not one overseen by the fan. There’s no control, there’s no agency. That’s how I feel about the existence of my oldest Astros friends.

And that’s why I’m not writing about sports here. I’m writing about fandom. Ours is a more transient culture in the 21st century. It was actually more transient moving into the 21st century, too, with increasingly fewer people sticking around their hometowns. At 13 years, I’ve been in Houston longer than New York (nine years), and longer than my two years in Virginia and my four years in San Antonio. My 15 years in Kentucky still holds the top spot. That’s a basketball state.

But I gave up college basketball because it’s a vile operation, and I also felt foolish at one point — at 39 — screaming at a kid on the University of Kentucky basketball team on the TV who, if I’d made different choices in life, could’ve been the age of my first-born.

I’m still older than everybody in Major League Baseball. But at least they draw a salary that isn’t dealt under the table.

I trade messages with a pal who lives next door to a pretty significant Astro. They often take their garbage out at the same time. My friend recounts how he asked about the game. Even in a loss, he’d get an accounting of his stat line. “Tell him the only numbers I care about are the wins and losses,” I said.

“He’s a lot bigger than me,” came the reply.

Even in our transient culture, nobody wants to be a fairweather fan, no more than he wants to seem a bandwagon jumper — whether it’s for a band or a baseball team. Though I think that matters increasingly less these days. My Yankees affinity has all but dissipated, though I’m happy they returned to at least consider the concept of talent development. But follow a team through 416 losses in four years, and you’ll know where your allegiance rests.

After the years of cheap tickets and watching kids hustling down the first-base line, it’s been heartening to see this Astros team get good. Who doesn’t like improvement? A reader once sent me this email: “Hey, (expletive), if ‘it goes without saying,’ why say it?” He could’ve been more elegant in his message. But the criticism was accurate. And I’ve never used that phrase since. I’m not saying that’s the same as Jose Altuve’s lower swing rate as he’s grown as a hitter.

But it’s the closest I have to a modern metric for what I do.

So I probably chose this team. Disappointment feels nearly inevitable — that’s just baseball — but not necessarily guaranteed. But that feeling of having skin in the game is exciting, even if my tenure is one-fifth that of the real diehards.

“Hope springs eternal” is a funny cliché to consider in a city with no winter.

So I like to think of that piece of ticker tape as a glistening fishing lure. Maybe the team chose me.