Hooks & Runs · A podcast about baseball, music and culture.

267 - The 1971 Astros and the Art of What If w/ Samuel Barrett

·53 min·3 clips

Barrett says the appointment of Speck Richardson was the single decision that cost the Astros more than anything else.

Hooks & Runs starts in familiar baseball-radio territory. Craig and Rex trade notes on coaching buyouts, the Penn State money story, and a Padres coaching retirement. That warmup leads into Samuel Barrett. Barrett joins with the résumé of an umpire and the perspective of a baseball lifer. He is a graduate of the Wendelstadt Umpire School. He has umpired high school and college games in the South. His first book was Umpire Diary, My Personal Journey and Experie.... The interview then moves to Houston. Craig calls Roger Metzger one of his favorite Astros from the 1970s. He pairs that memory with Cesar Cedeno, who is remembered here as the kind of young player people once talked about in Willie Mays terms. Barrett explains how Metzger reached the Astros in the offseason before 1971. The route ran through the Joe Pepitone trade to the Cubs. Pepitone came to Houston only after the Astros moved Kurt Bleffery. Bleffery had arrived earlier in the Mike Cuellar deal. That chain reaction is the real point. Keep Cuellar, and the rest of the path changes. Metzger enters spring training highly touted. The Astros thought he could be the piece they were missing to win the National League West: a shortstop with speed, defense, and enough bat to hold his own. Cedeno gets the same careful treatment. Barrett notes that 1971 was Cedeno's first full season. He had debuted in June of 1970 and hit .310 in a little over half a season. The later numbers make the early years look even better. In 1972 and 1973 he was hitting around .320 and driving in runs at a wild pace. The interesting wrinkle is 1971 itself. If you take out April and May, Cedeno's season looks much closer to the star level he showed later. The early slump matters because it changes the shape of the year. Barrett and the hosts keep circling that idea of possibility. A slow start can hide a player who is already becoming something larger. The conversation never gets stiff. It stays conversational, with quick corrections and little side turns, but it still lands on the central baseball argument. The 1971 Astros were built from a sequence of choices, and a few of those choices might have looked very different in another branch of the tree. The episode closes with the show's usual plug and a sign-off that sends listeners back to the next Thursday slot.

As heard by us

A conversational Astros what-if built around Roger Metzger, Joe Pepitone, Mike Cuellar, and Cesar Cedeno's early slump.

Hooks and Runs ties a guest conversation with Samuel Barrett to a Houston Astros what-if set in 1971, and it works best when it keeps its focus on the baseball machinery.

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Why you'd press play

You want the 1971 Astros story told through trades, timing, and a few what-ifs.

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