Not a good weekend...

...for either my home town or my adopted city. First, Houston is hit with a true monster of a storm. Then, its baseball team puts up 18 innings of 1-hit ball. A good portion of its multi-million dollar football stadium's roof is torn asunder, meaning that the Texans will face an even more brutal schedule. Much of Houston is without power.

The Saints lost (don't really care, but Reggie Bush put up a 2.8 yds/carry game, which is always hi-fucking-larious). The Green Wave got its second "almost-but-not-quite" upset of the season.

The lone good point: Matt Forte put up 4.0 yds/carry with the Bears on Sunday. Awesome. One of my friends has him on his fantasy team, so good for him. As he pointed out, Forte has all the markers of a great running back. He's got great speed. He's physically powerful. He's got good vision and intelligence. And he can catch, to boot. The only reason he was a surprise in the 2nd round of the draft was because he came from Tulane and not LSU, USC, Texas, OSU etc.

On the bright side for me: we got almost 100 people to sign up for the debate society. If even a third of that shows up, we're doing good. It looks like we're going to have a great year.

I'd like to talk a little more about Coop.

As I posted over at the Crawfish Boxes, Coop has really improved over the last year. He's no longer doing the "small-ball" shit that was helping to lose games in April. He still doesn't just sit back and wait for our hitters to score, and I think he still orders stupid shit like the hit-and-run play WAY too often, but he's managed well.

More importantly, he's kept the bullpen in good shape. He's been handed a pretty good bullpen, and he usually distributes the work fairly evenly. He gets Wesley experience and puts the ball in the hands of Sampson, Hawkins or Brocail if we're in a jam. He keeps the pitchers well rested. That's great.

And he sticks up for his charges. He knows when the Astros are getting fucked. There's nothing wrong if a manager gets thrown out of the game, and he's willing to go to line for his guys (hell, he chewed out the commissioner!).

That's all you need from a manager. You don't need (or really want) guys like LaRussa or Torre. You just want a guy who can manage the bullpen, keep everyone in line, and who will argue the bad calls so his players don't have to.