Anagrams for Dollars

For some reason unknown even to me, the Enron mess conjures up one of the looniest passages in Jim Bouton's oeuvre-not from Ball Four, actually, but from his follow-up book, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally (which, of course, most people did-and still do).

Sitting the Astrodome dugout one early 1970 evening, Bouton and teammates Tom Griffin and Norm Miller began musing about all the empty seats and what could be done about it.

"Midgets," Tom Griffin said. "People will pay to see midgets." "Not unless they're doing something," Norm Miller said. "How about dropping them from the roof in parachutes?" I [Bouton] said. "Not exciting enough." Griffin said. "How about nine midgets, one an inning, and only eight parachutes?" "We could sell it as a raffle," Miller said. "The fans who drew the midget without the parachute would get a prize." "Great," Griffin said. "We could call it Dollars For Midgets."

Astros fans may need promotions with such a macabre edge to them in 2002 as they attempt to purge themselves from the nightmarish occurrences in their home town over the past month. But, as George Vecsey points out in one of his best columns in recent memory over at the New York Times (Astros Should Give Some Money Back), there is a small problem that will plague them in such an effort.

The stadium, as you know, is called Enron Field.

Vecsey's column is quite good on this (and I'd say that even if he hadn't actually appropriated one of my lines in describing Bud Selig "and his merry band"), and explains how the Astros are stuck in a binding contract for naming rights that may leave them in a surreal pact with a dead company for quite some time to come.

However, given the absurd nature of the situation (as baseball itself continues to grind along in one of its looniest off-seasons ever), I'd like to meet the spirit of the times with some, well, impish "solutions" of my own. The factotums in Houston will probably not find these to be especially practical, but such matters are not our concern.

The only real choice with a chance to work legally, as I see it, would be to retain the five letters in the stadium name, but to rearrange them in some fashion to remove the offending memory.

The problem is that a name like Enron just doesn't leave us with much latitude in terms of anagrammatic reconstruction. However, never wanting to leave a challenge untaken, I have dutifully played around with these five unpromising letters and have discovered two alternate combinations that actually make usable words.

The first-and it's one that many of you may have already thought of-is NOREN. Now, I'm sure that lefty-hitting Irv Noren (he of the Senators-remember them?-the Yankees, and several other teams in the 50s) would be only too pleased to have a stadium named after him, even in this, er, "indirect" way, but-there's a problem.

While Irv's name does conjure up images of a good old boy, the facts are that he's a native New Yorker, and the closest he probably got to Houston was when he was (like so many other players during that time frame) shipped from the Yankees to their "farm team" in Kansas City.

Nope, I'm afraid this one won't work. Even though the name works, it's just too obscure. And if it's too obscure for me, I know that it's gonna be too obscure for you-and for the honchos in Houston.

OK, that leaves us with one other way out of the rats' maze. The other word you can anagram out of Enron is RONEN, which as an inveterately shady Scrabble player I will insist is the plural of the Japanese word RONIN, which stands for the order of samurai warriors whose code of honor and violence was so vividly depicted by filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi (in The 47 Ronin).

Now, it's a stretch, but we'll take one twice as long as Willie McCovey's to get us out this pickle. The Houston poobahs can strike a blow for multiculturalism and solve their stadium name problem with Ronen Field as their new name AND by scooping up all of the Japanese ballplayers they can get their hands on to give their team an entirely new direction.

Yes, that's right. The code of the samurai will take over a town drowning in the collapse of enervated oil-and-gas. All the 'Stros need to do is trade Lance Berkman to the Mariners for Ichiro! Suzuki and Shigetoshi Hasegawa. Then they can keep the blue wave of the samurai rolling to the Gulf by packaging overpriced closer Billy Wagner, fading righty Shane Reynolds and false hope Chris Truby to the ever-willing Los Angeles Dodgers for Hideo Nomo, Kazuhisha Ishii, and Adrian Beltre. (Yes, yes, the Dodgers still have to sign Ishii, but baseball's backroom is almost as creative as the one in Washington, so I have no doubt that something can be worked out. And, no, Beltre isn't Japanese, of course, but I figure the Dodgers need to keep up their tradition of giving up too soon on their prospects.)

The Astros can boost their samurai quotient by trading a prospect to the Giants for outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo, and then packaging up some leftover barbeque to send off to Montreal for pitcher Masato Yoshii. Like Enron, the stock of Hideki Irabu has fallen so low that he can be picked up for a blind pedal steel player to be named later.

So there you have it-in just a few bold, slashing moves, the Astros can retool themselves into a team with a new stadium name, a new image, and a not-so-new "high concept." The crossover effect into other areas of culture will become apparent at Ronen Field's concession stands in 2002, when the food courts are filled with "sushi bar-b-que" and a saki chaser for your favorite brew. It'll be strange bedfellows for awhile, but soon a new economic alliance will occur when Japanese carmakers realize that a whole new market for gas-guzzling Hondas is staring them in the face right there on the Gulf of Mexico.

And all it takes is shuffling a few letters on a few signs. It's amazing how such a simple change can have such a profound effect, ain't it?

So cheer up, Houston. Trade in those ten-gallons for warrior's robes, and you'll put all of this shame and perfidy behind you-thanks to a new slant on life. Lord knows you need one.