Friday Morning Astros, etc. Round Up

I almost titled this post, "Cecil Cooper gets himself in hot water with the media, and then some other stuff." This will be formatted a little differently as we explore the Cecil Cooper v. Media debacle.

The story that started the snafu:  JJO reports that the Coop never congratulated Ivan Rodriguez on his record breaking game and that the players were upset enough that it lead to Coop calling a meeting to apologize.  Apparently this made Coop upset because he didn't think it was anyone outside of the clubhouse's business and was pretty terse with reporters after last night's game.  JJO fired back with this blog post:

It's one thing for him to lose the clubhouse, something he did weeks ago. But the media has never, ever treated him unfairly in Houston. He needs to grow up. Yes, grow the heck up and be a professional. Drayton McLane needs to talk to his manager and explain to him that he's the face of the club, and now the face of the club is coming off as an angry whiner.

To me, that's a pretty scathing indictment for a beat writer to go public with and to make matters worse, Richard Justice also chimed on the state of the organization, using the Cooper incident as a spring board to say this:

The Astros are like that except that they haven't actually won anything. Drayton and his baseball people convinced themselves they could spin something out of cotton candy, and every little glimpse of light, even one victory, feeds into the delusion.

Maybe it's me reading too much into it, but I feel like the bravado present in ripping on the Manager, GM, and owner in such a short span is both causally correlated.  Perhaps this will be a harbinger of calls for Cecil Cooper's head in the ensuing weeks? Or am I reading too much into this?

Ok, to the normal stuff:

• An interesting note from the first JJO piece from Ed Wade:

"We talked a lot about Bud when it became apparent we were going to DL (Mike) Hampton," Wade said via phone. "We discussed it."

• Michael Bourn got a nice feature at Astros.com, but this line frightened the bejesus out of me...I can already hear myself hurling expletives at my TV screen over the next three days:

"I've never seen Joe Mauer do it in person, but we're about to find out. He's good, though."

• BPro checks in on the Astros transactions and fills it in with some commentary (subscription required).  In typical BPro fashion, as of late, I'm left shaking my head at the regurgitated criticisms and overlooking/dismissing of the performances of some of our farm system guys.
• A different Clemens is making headlines.
• The Hardball Times checks in on whether NL pitcher's take it easy on the pitcher.
• Colin Wyers, at The Hardball Times, probes whether component ERA's (FIP, xFIP, and tRA) are good predictors of future ERA.