‘Bring it to Jerome’

Despite the Astros’ poor start, owner Jim Crane tells Jerome Solomon in his podcast that he tries to set the tone by staying cool, calm and collected as they sort things out.

It is mid-May, and the Astros are in last place.

But Astros owner Jim Crane isn’t one to panic.

“I’m not happy with the start, but I’m not nervous either,” Crane said in interview for the “Bring it to Jerome” podcast. “If I am, you won’t see it on the outside.

“Hey, if I’m nervous and, you know, running around my hair on fire, that’s not going to bode well for the rest of the group. So we try to keep everybody calm.”

Crane, 62, is cool like that.

“We have to stick together whether we win or whether we lose,” he said. “I learned that early on.

“We might have some problems here, but everyone knows they can come up here, shut the door and … we need to work it out and figure out what the solution is or say, ‘This is the way we’re gonna go, and everybody stay mad until they get glad.’ ”

As you can see, Crane doesn’t mess around.

He has been the man in charge since he founded Eagle USA Airfreight in

1984 with a $10,000 loan from his sister Jeanne. He had two employees — himself and a person who answered the phone.

“We started in ’84, and in ’95 we did $126 million (in sales); by 2000 we did $1 billion in sales and we bought another company … took us to $2 billion, and in ’07 … I was doing $4 billion in sales,” Crane said.

The Astros franchise is a relative small operation

compared to most corporations.

“This ain’t Exxon,” says Crane, but many of the same principles apply. “I’ve said many times that business is business, so a lot of the different components … those functions are similar. The real difference is this catches a lot more attention. It goes under a lot more scrutiny.

“When I ran a public company, probably not everybody looked at my share price every day, or cared. Kind of everybody

picks up the paper in town to see how the Astros are doing.”

Being noticed at restaurants and ballgames — he is a longtime Rockets season ticket holder — is something new for the rather private Crane.

“I’ve had tickets to a lot of those things for years and years and years before we bought the Astros. … I think even Les Alexander knows who I am now,” Crane said.