If the first five games of Spring Training for Houston belied the old March adage that pitching starts out ahead of hitting, Wednesday night's game in Kissimmee in front of 6,116 fans returned us to that venerable wisdom in a big way. The Astros edged the Mets 1-0 in a game in which both teams pitched so well that the lone run that did score scored without benefit of a hit. Richard Hidalgo crossed the plate on Jason Lane's sixth-inning double-play ball, and Taylor Buchholz and Ricky Stone held the line from there in improving Houston's Spring record to 4-2. Stone, battling for a spot in the bullpen (at least in his own mind) as a set-up man or middle reliever, earned a save in the ninth with a strikeout, but the pitchers before him--Buchholz, Mike Gallo, Dan Miceli, Octavio Dotel, and Roy Oswalt were also in fine form.

Oswalt's fineness is on display so often that we might tend to take it for granted, but I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I wouldn't. The man is a treasure, whether he's pitching in a game that counts or one that doesn't. He was good again tonight, allowing a simple single over three innings and notching one strikeout. His counterpart, Jae Wong Seo, was nearly as good, lasting four innings while giving up three hits and two walks and striking out one.

The difference was the Astros' relief corps. Octavio Dotel was a bit shaky in the fourth, walking two, but Micelli and Gallo were on their games. That was particularly important for Gallo, the pitcher of record after Hidalgo scored, because while Miceli has a guaranteed spot, Gallo does not. Buchholz, over two innings, showed again the stuff that's going to be hard for NL batters to figure out, as he struck out three and walked only one. What's interesting to me tonight is the order in which Jimy Williams used his pitchers. Buchholz was used in the seventh and eighth--innings that have some pressure, but not so much that a young man will crack, even in ST. Stone, who surely will be a middle man when April rolls around, handled the ninth like the veteran he is.

New York, for its part, may have found itself another pitcher in the resurrected career of Scott Erickson, who took the hill for the first time in almost two years and followed Seo's four innings with three of his own. Normally, a double-play ball is what you want in any spot, and the run that might score upon isn't going to beat you, but it did tonight because of what Houston could bring along to finish off the game.

Most observers don't rate the Astros' bullpen quite as highly this year as they have in the past for obvious reasons, but I've said all along that, although Houston's finishing kick in the games of 2004 might not be as strong as we've seen, the overall depth of this bullpen, both in terms of the men who make the roster on Opening Day and the arms that could be called upon during the season might make this the deepest bullpen we've seen in many a year. Couple that depth with a rotation that figures to go deeper in games much more often than in the past two seasons and Houston could do more with "less", so to speak, even if Dotel is shakier as a closer than we might forecast, a proposition I'm not willing to agree with yet.

Although Dotel is Houston's new closer, he's not new at the job. His higher percentage of blown saves than Billy Wagner had has misdirected us away from seeing that he has had success, too, in closing out games. When the bell rings, I think Dotel will bring his unhittable stuff right along with him five nights out of six, and the Astros will do just fine. We might even see a bit of a rotation in closers at some point. Between Brad Lidge and Brandon Duckworth, the Astros will have once again a trio of bullpen men with great stuff to call upon, but this year it would not be surprising to find the stuff of those pitchers concentrated in the ninth inning, rather than spread out over the seventh, eighth and ninth. Stone and Miceli, among others, are strong enough to get the game to the ninth if for some reason a starter falters, so I am, wisely or unwisely, less worried about the bullpen than other fans might be.If one "extrapolates" (a word that, come to think of it, should never be used about a baseball game on a lovely night in March) from what we saw Wednesday--one of Houston's best starting pitchers among four great ones, plus a combination of the bullpen that is (Stone, Miceli) with the 'pen that could be (Gallo, Buchholz)--then however differently Jimy Williams manages his pitching resources, the results will be, one would think, at least as good, and probably much better, than they were a year ago, when a staff with an all-time great closer gave up fewer runs than the division winner and lost that division by only a single game.