Erstad - a gamer till the very end.

Too bad. I guess you have to consider this season a success--the offseason moves kept Houston fighting for a playoff spot up to the final weekend of the season.

Cecil cooper had a pretty good season. This team was as good as finished after that ugly June but clearly turned it around.

Oswalt getting healthy and being Roy Oswalt was the biggest plus. Coop sticking with Pence who refused to hit for four months was also a positive.

And they kept scrapping. Contrast that with the Cards who seemed to project an air of indifference with 3 weeks to play. Which is baffling since for 4.5 months Tony did some of his best work.

And then said, "Aw, scr#w it".

Very peculiar

No mention of playing the Cubs in Milwaukee as an excuse? That writer must not have gotten the talking points.

Cecil cooper had a pretty good season. This team was as good as finished after that ugly June but clearly turned it around.

As an Astros' fan, my view is that Cooper had quite a turnaround over the course of the season too. He made a lot of strategy mistakes early in the season. He had difficulty controlling his emotions sometimes in post game news conferences, and might say the wrong thing. At one point in the season (particularly around the time of the Chacon incident), the media questioned whether Cooper had control of the clubhouse. I will give credit to Cooper for a willingness to make changes in his baseball strategy when it becomes clear that it doesn't work. (After stubbornly adhering to a "run at all costs" strategy, for instance, he finally admitted that the Astros were running into too many outs and changed his tactics.) I think that reflects an open mindedness which serves well in the manager position. Obviously, if there were any issues between him and the players, he cleared those up. As much as everybody ridiculed Cooper for predicting a 90 win season in the midst of the Astros' low point in the season, I have to think that the players had to appreciate the complete confidence he showed in them. So, yes, I think this ended up as a pretty good season for Cooper.

Harveys,
To be fair to the Cardinals, they only really fell apart when Glaus's bat disappeared (in part because of injuries) and Ankiel went down more or less for good. Suddenly they went from having too many outfielders to playing Felipe Lopez and Aaron Miles out there. Meanwhile, their great young relievers started to tire, and they learned that there was no way they were getting Carpenter back.

There's never an excuse for dogging it, but I at least can sympathize: they'd overperformed all year long, defying expectations, and then everything seemed to fall apart on them--I could imagine having trouble focusing in that situation.

It's a credit to the Astros that they didn't do the same, though, and--barring some losses this weekend--a credit to the Brewers that they have at least played better ball this week when they had to. Here's hoping they make it.

I'm sorry, I can't give any credit to Cecil Cooper with the way he allowed a 2004 Cubs-esque environment of everyone's fault but us surrounding the Cubs games in Milwaukee. He played Dusty '04 for this team with the fingers being pointed at Seligula rather than Steve Stone, and allowed his players to tell themselves the games were lost before they began. He was a Dusty-like enabler and allowed the Astros to collapse down the stretch after an amazing run to get back into it.