Everybody was Justin shock. We'd never heard of a 28-day road trip."
25 years ago, the Republican National Convention at the Astrodome sent the Astros on a historic odyssey, the likes of which hasn't been seen in baseball's modern era
The arrangement to host President George H.W. Bush, the presumptive nominee as the incumbent, in front of a home crowd forecast lucrative revenue streams for Houston and a maelstrom of controversy for McMullen.
McMullen, who had lost interest running the team and put it up for sale in 1990, had signed the RNC deal without consulting the Major League Baseball Players’ Association. The union filed a grievance, but it could not prevent the inevitable. The RNC required three weeks in August to prepare the dome for four days of preening at a podium.
As a result, the Astros had to play 26 games in 28 days on the road.
Their 9,186-mile odyssey entailed: five time-zone changes, eight cities, nine airplane rides and 56 bus rides to and from airports and ballparks, 4,471 minutes of play and countless room service-club sandwiches for Jeff Bagwell.
The ’92 Astros added an epic to the canon of baseball road stories. Fear lingered in Los Angeles longer than an earthquake tremor. Cow udders challenged fine motor skills more than a split-fingered fastball. A jock strap remained unwashed so long as one player’s bat stayed hot. A life-size sex doll latched on like a friendly hitchhiker. Nudity emboldened one player like it was his suit of armor.
Except for one near-strangling of the travel secretary, the team grew closer as it ventured farther from home.
No one on the Astros predicted that the longest road trip in nearly 40 years would end so
triumphantly.
When manager Art Howe first learned he had to steer his merry pranksters for almost a month on the road, he had one immediate thought: “Oh, no.”
Off-field turmoil
The Astros were bad in 1991. They finished in last place with 97 losses and attracted fewer than 1.2 million fans.
Then, McMullen avoided signing a slew of free agents in favor of pushing the youngest (average age 27.12) and cheapest ($12 million) roster in baseball.
Aside from outfielder Pete Incaviglia, a former power-hitting wunderkind that vaulted the minors for a middling run with the Rangers, reliable reliever Joe Boever and mustachioed changeup wizard Doug Jones, who signed for a team-high $1.65 million salary, the Astros put out the same youthful core as before.
Third baseman Ken Caminiti and Bagwell, who had been named the 1991 Rookie of the Year, were emerging at the infied corners. Craig Biggio was making his transformation from an All-Star catcher into an All-Star second baseman. Luis Gonzalez, Steve Finley and Eric Anthony played outfield. Pete Harnisch, Darryl Kile and rookie southpaw Butch Henry propelled the rotation.
This litter of pups needed more training. They struggled on the road in 1991.
“You’re really scared that, man, this could be disastrous for us,” Howe said recently.
“Everybody was just in shock,” left fielder Gonzalez remembered. “We’d never heard of a 28-day road trip.”
It marked the longest scheduled trip since the Philadelphia Phillies played 27 road games in 28 days in August 1944. They went 10-17.
The 1899 Cleveland Spiders were forced to complete the season on the road after 27 home games with meager attendance. They finished 20-134, the worst record in major league history.
“It’s like (McMullen’s) saying, ‘We (couldn’t) care less if you win,” Bagwell told the Hartford Courant.
McMullen admitted as much to general manager Bill Wood.
“The guy never talked to me about money except one thing that stuck in my mind,” Wood said recently. “The year that we lost 97 games … he said he made the most profit that year, more than several of the previous years.”
McMullen criticized the press for misrepresenting him, but the New Jersey engineering mogul — who also owned the NHL’s Devils in his home state — lived up to his reputation as a carpetbagger.
“Can’t people see that we’re going to bring $80 million to the economy of Houston?” McMullen said of the estimated revenue generated by the RNC. “They won’t even let me leave in peace. Even Grant let Lee keep his horse.”
By spring training, McMullen was more eager than ever to sell the team and walk away with maximum gains.
“It’s time for me to go,” he said.
“LOOKING BACK,” Astros owner John J. McMullen said, a year after agreeing to lease out the Astrodome for the 1992 Republican National Convention, “I wish I had told them to go to hell.”
They won’t even let me leave in peace. Even Grant let Lee keep his horse.”
I was an ex-player. I knew that goofy things would take place.”
“It’s not baseball that I’m tired of. I’m just tired of the situation in Houston. I got into this for fun.”
He suggested declining seasonticket sales indicated Houston might not be able to support a baseball team.
“Frankly, our club has become a public relations disaster,” Wood had admitted in the wake of McMullen’s comments.
Although McMullen — who died at age 87 in September 2005 — could not salvage his public image, he let the Astros begin the season peacefully. He had settled the grievance with the players’ union by donating $125,000 to two youth baseball programs.
McMullen also had agreed to provide Astros players one firstclass ticket for a guest to attend the mid-August series in Chicago — a conjugal visit for their month of confinement.
Gearing for the grind
By the time of their departure date, the Astros had yet to figure out life on the road — they were 13-27 in their previous 40 away games — but they played loose.
“At that age, they were more interested in proving themselves and playing,” strength and conditioning coach Gene Coleman recalled, “rather than sitting around and whining about it.”
The Astros, who played in the six-team NL West, were scheduled for visits to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia. They would get one day off after the Atlanta series and play 17 consecutive games until they could savor another on Aug. 17, by doing some laundry.
“My first thought was how do you pack for 28 days?” Incaviglia said recently. “It was a legitimate concern. There’d be a lot of jokes that we were the first homeless major league baseball team.”
Barry Waters, the travel secretary, dolled out $1,652 of per diem in three installments, so that a player sent to the minors could not take the whole loot with him.
“I remember getting that big wad of money,” Howe said.
“It’s a different generation now as far as salaries,” Gonzalez said. “Guys were more frugal. A lot of guys were eating in the clubhouse.”
Waters also handed out an encyclopedic itinerary.
“This thing’s like a novel,” starting pitcher Jimmy Jones said.
“Yeah,” Waters replied, “you can’t wait to get to the last page, right?”
The team was more excited than anxious when they readied for liftoff at Hobby Airport on July 26. The trip didn’t end until Aug. 23, although some players briefly went home Aug. 17 on an off day.
In a discussion with the late Houston Chronicle beat writer Neil Hohlfeld, Bagwell quoted Bluto, John Belushi’s character in “Animal House,” who accused the Germans of bombing Pearl Harbor in his rallying fraternity speech.
“Let’s do it!” Bagwell said.
Young and wild
The Astros channeled a college fraternity spirit. Mischief on the trip ranged from playful to unchaste.
“There are probably a lot of things we shouldn’t speak of because of FAA regulations,” Boever said.
“I let that be their space,” said Howe, who supervised with a grandfatherly tenderness and a blind eye to tomfoolery. “I was an ex-player. I knew that goofy things would take place.”
The plane offered a sanctuary for beer-fueled poker and target practice for pranks. Players fell asleep and sometimes woke up with a lit cigarette or strand of gum dangling from their lips.
“Usually the cigarette would finally wake ’em up and they’d start coughing and hacking,” Jones remembered.
There was at least one dustup. The plane would not take off until Incaviglia calmed down and buckled in. Waters tried to discipline Incaviglia. Incaviglia put his hands around Waters’ neck.
“I was about an inch and a half off the aisle of the plane,” Waters recalled. “I had bruises around my neck. It was no big deal. He apologized to me afterward.
“I’m like, ‘Inky, you almost choked me to death.’”
“I don’t remember that,” Incaviglia said. “But I wouldn’t put it by me that I picked him up and put him back in first class.”
At other times, group behavior was “zany,” said Larry Dierker, a broadcaster then and eventual manager. A flight attendant dolled up some players, including Bagwell, with lipstick. “It was off red,” Waters said. No player pushed boundaries farther than Casey Candaele, a utilityman, shameless court jester and quote machine. He wrote daily dispatches published in the Houston Chronicle during the 28-day saga.
When the team charter reached an inclined angle soon after takeoff, Candaele zipped down the aisle from first class, like an alpine skier with the slick backseat safety cards beneath his feet. And when the team wagered whose luggage at baggage claim would appear first, Candaele tumbled down the chute and into the carousel instead.
He snuck into the vents of the Astros’ weight room and waited to strike teammates like a bombardier.
“He would drop medicine balls on our guys like a squirrel running around dropping nuts,” Coleman said.
Candaele never used a comb, might dress slovenly some days or pair a leather tie with fake zebra skin shoes.
Teammates expected Candaele to pack light for the epic trip.
“He was pretty comfortable with no clothes on most of the time,” Incaviglia said. “I don’t know why.”
Candaele had been more brazen inside the Astrodome batting cages when the team needed levity during a slump. He took his Sunday swings wearing only a helmet and cleats.
“It was hard to keep a straight face,” said pitching coach Bob Cluck, who threw batting practice, “but that’s the way he took it.”
Mixed results on field
The Astros had mixed success to start the road trip. They took the first two games from the Braves, the defending NL champions, but then lost four of five on a skid through Cincinnati.
After getting called up from the minors, Shane Reynolds won a calf-feeding contest as part of the Reds’ Farmers Night. Boever and Henry kept the momentum going by beating Norm Charlton and
It was hard to keep a straight face, but that’s the way he took it.
Darnell Coles in a cow-milking competition. The Astros fell short of agricultural supremacy on the corn toss.
The Astros then headed to the West Coast. They still felt shaken from their previous series in Los Angeles a month before. The Landers earthquake, the strongest to strike California in 40 years, had roused them from their Hilton beds before 5 a.m. with quakes measuring 7.4 and 6.5 on the Richter scale and hundreds of aftershocks.
Because the hotel was on rollers, Howe had watched plaster fall from his ceiling and Cluck had felt his room shift three to four feet. Outfielder Gerald Young had sprinted from the hotel without bothering to dress and backup shortstop Rafael Ramírez immediately hailed a cab to Chavez Ravine.
When some players had poked out from their rooms in a panic, lefty reliever Rob Murphy could not resist the chance to call out down the hall: “Did you guys feel that orgasm I just had?”
“There were a couple guys that were freaked out by the earthquake,” Incaviglia remembered. “Like, scared to death.”
“For the rest of the year, we got rooms on the second floor,” Jones said.
On their return to L.A., the Astros split a two-game series. Caminiti had four hits and raised his average to .317 in the second game.
“This is the best groove I’ve ever been in in my life,’’ Caminiti told Hohlfeld.
His personal hygiene suffered, however.
“Whenever I get hits, I don’t wash my socks or cup and holder,” Caminiti said to the New York Times.
Caminiti proceeded to go 1-for-15 in the following series, a four-game sweep in San Diego, where the Astros had gone 9-43 since 1987.
Astros players took this nadir of the trip more personally than their owner. McMullen went to bed before the completion of a West Coast game, but he required his general manager call him with the final score—and nothing else.
“He wouldn’t want to talk about the game,” Wood recalled.
Gaining confidence
The Astros rebounded a bit in San Francisco. Harnisch, the ace, got a particular boost to his confidence.
“He was known for being a horntoad,” Boever said. “Not really with girls, because we’d never seen him with one. But he always talked about them.”
Harnisch visited an adult entertainment store and filled
It was a turning point for our organization. He doesn’t remember when he told them, but Art Howe pulled Jeff Bagwell (below, exiting the plane at the end of the trip) and Craig Biggio aside during the 1992 season and asked them to assume leadership roles. “They went out there and started becoming team leaders, whether they wanted to or not,” he said. No one had any idea back then that the two players would be linked all the way from Houston to Cooperstown.
a basket with items like they were vegetables at a grocery mart.
“I’m a Catholic guy from Boston,” said Waters, who was walking to lunch when he spotted Harnisch and failed to persuade him from the shop. “I can’t think of somebody buying porn toys at 11:30 in the morning.”
From that day until at least the next stop in Chicago, an inflatable doll resided in Harnisch’s locker. Cameras caught his companion propped up in the Wrigley Field visitor’s dugout.
After 17 consecutive games, the Astros reached a muchappreciated off-day. Laundry mounted. Young held up a handmade cardboard sign asking his mom to send clean underwear at Wrigley. Gonzalez griped about paying $6 for a hotel to wash his jeans.
Candaele had joked about checking his refrigerator for sour milk and paying overdue bills, but he had a serious matter to investigate at home.
“The biggest surprise was that I didn’t get robbed,” he told Hohlfeld. “The last time we went on the road for a three-game trip, I got cleaned out.”
Humor never waned in the dreariest stretches, but the Astros were gaining confidence at a time when they were expected to wilt.
“What was important for us was that we started figuring out that we can win on the road,” Biggio told Hohlfeld. If we can finish strong in the last two cities, I think this trip will go a long way toward making us a much better team
The Astros were 8-12 on the trip and had six games to go.
“Once we did our laundry,” Howe said, “we were a much better team.”
A turning point
The trip finished triumphantly. The Astros dropped the last two games in St. Louis, but they followed with a three-game sweep at Philadelphia.
They managed to go 12-14 during their homeless stint and returned to Texas 56-68 over all.
“We started playing better the goofier it got,” Gonzalez said. “We had a good time because we knew we were going to be out here for so long and there was nothing anybody could do about it. ‘’
“I think (Harnisch’s) doll is still sitting at the bar at the Cubby Bear Lounge,” Candaele told the Chronicle.
“It really cauterized our team,” Jones said recently. “It brought a lot of those kids together and they realized, dude, we can play in the major leagues and be competitive. That’s what may stick out more to me than … the horseplay and the silliness that came with all these kids.”
Howe does not remember if it was during their summer travels, but he said that around that time he called two players into his office.
Quiet-types, in their mid20s, Bagwell and Biggio did not know then that they would be inseparable for the rest of their baseball lives, all the way to their plaques hanging side-by-side in Cooperstown.
Howe asked them to assume leadership roles. They worried their lack of seniority would hold them back. Howe did not give them a choice.
“They went out there and started becoming team leaders,” Howe said, “whether they wanted to or not.”
He watched the duo lead a team through the wilderness for nearly a month.
“It was a turning point for our organization,” Howe said.
The Astros finished the year on a 25-13 run, which raised their record to 81-81.
Dating back to Aug. 11, in the middle of the slog, the Astros had gone 33-17.
Finding success, stability
As a testament to the talent set adrift by the RNC in 1992, players on the roster would go on to make 26 All-Star selections and win two MVP awards (Bagwell in 1994 and Caminiti in 1996 for the Padres).
In 1993, the Astros improved by four wins. Adding starters Doug Drabek and Greg Swindell beefed up the rotation. The promising core developed into a balanced lineup. New owner Drayton McLane, a grocery and food service magnate, offered stability.
McLane had been negotiating his purchase from McMullen while the former owner stoked the 28-day controversy.
“It was kind of interesting, fun, different,” McLane recently said of the Astros’ odyssey, “and something that nobody else wanted to do again.”
Candaele had said the same thing at the time. He had revealed some of his chiding had to do with his own politics.
He can brag now, 25 years later, that the Astros’ win percentage on their trip (.462) topped Bush’s popular-vote percentage (.380) in a losing campaign.
On the brink of reclaiming the Astrodome, Candaele had fired off, perhaps, his best quip.
A new toilet was installed in the Astros dugout after the old one was removed to make room for a network TV facility during the convention.
“So we did get something out of this from the Republicans,’’ Candaele had said. “I can’t wait to get back and flush my itinerary from this trip down that toilet.”