Major League Baseball kicks off the 2013 season tonight with the Texas Rangers, who have made the playoffs three consecutive years, playing the Houston Astros, who had the worst record in baseball last year, winning just 55 out of 162 games.
The Astros move from the National League to the American League this year, meaning that if they do as well as last year, the can boast they finished last in two different leagues in back-to-back seasons!
Astros manager Bo Porter refused to allow players to wear jerseys with their names on the back during Spring Training, because the players had not earned the right to have names on their jerseys.
3 Potential Unintended Consequences Of Astros’ Players Not Having Names During Spring Training
1. This may lead to confusion on Opening Night, when nobody knows anybody’s name. And learning the names becomes more confusing when the players realize the team has two guys named Jose and two named Carlos on their opening roster. If Abbott and Costello were alive, this would have been the perfect time to perform their “Who’s On First” routine, rather than any other time since the 1930s, when the joke seems stale after about the first three minutes of yelling.
2. The players may confuse themselves with the “Horse With No Name” referred to in the song by the band America, and start racing each other on the field. Which for the Astros, may lead to a better outcome.
3. If this jersey confusion madness went too far, the Astros could forget their current team name, and show up in jerseys with their team name from 1962 to 1964: the Houston Colt .45s. Which could be a public relations nightmare on national TV during the middle of a national gun control debate! Fortunately, the odds of this happening are zero, which is slightly better than the odds of the Astros winning the World Series this season.
