The way the two teams played the game Friday night, you'd have thought Kansas City was the team coming home after a long month in Florida, not Houston. Jared Fernandez couldn't throw the knuckleball in the strike zone in the first two innings, and Raul Chavez couldn't catch it there. . .or anywhere else, for that matter. The Royals jumped all over Fernandez in the opening inning for four runs, simultaneously putting a potentially irreparable dent in Fernandez's hopes of making the pitching staff and taking every bit of steam out of a Houston crowd of 20-25,000 on the way to an easy 7-3 victory over the Astros.

Unquestionably, the Royals have a lineup that can hit. When you have Carlos Beltran and Juan Gonzalez and Mark Sweeney swingin' for your side, you will put up runs; but Fernandez gave the Royals far too much help in the first inning. He had no clue how to coax the knuckler even close to the zone, and Raul Chavez couldn't handle it no matter where it was. A walk to Angel Berroa, a passed ball on Chavez, and a homer to RF by Beltran put the Royals on top (and the Astros behind) with depressing suddenness. I did mention that Thursday's slam by the Braves' Adam LaRoche might stay with the Astros for a while, and I did remind you that homers do fly out of the park in Houston. You might not have regarded what I said as a forecast of what happened tonight, but I wasn't just offering a glib statement of gloom and doom. The Astros came out terribly flat. Fernandez had nothin' out there, and the Royals weren't finished with him after the Beltran homer. A walk to Sweeney, a base hit to CF on 0-2 by Gonzalez, a wild pitch, and a sacrifice fly to CF by Matt Stairs, who seems to pop up everywhere the Astros play, put a third run up for the Royals. The Stairs out should have provided a kind of breather for Fernandez, enabling him to press on and get out of the inning with no further damage. It didn't. A walk and an error on 1B Jose Vizcaino for failing to catch a throw from Kent gave Kansas City its fourth run.

That first was exactly the kind of flat, lifeless, uninspired kind of inning I've come to dread during the Astros' annual final two-game tuneup at home before the regular season opens. Looking back at these end-of-ST games at home since 2000, the Astros have never played well in them. Modestly well, perhaps, in a stadium inaugural win over the Yankees in 2000, but even that game was a struggle. The rest of the time--against the Red Sox, the Rangers, and now the Royals--Houston's had its collective butt kicked in at least one of each of the two-game series. Certainly, the games don't count in any kind of standings, but this late in the spring that is hardly the point. What does count is to go into the regular season in a positive frame of mind, and the Astros might not be able to do that after the last couple of days. I also mentioned Thursday that these two games were games of recovery for the club. So much for that idea. It will be even tougher than you might think to recover and develop a positive feeling for Monday evening Saturday afternoon because of the bullpen-by-committee approach that the club will take in the game after Wade Miller leaves. It's understandable that Jimy Williams and Burt Hooton still need to finalize the bullpen's makeup, but part of me is asking myself, if not asking them, couldn't the bullpen issues have been resolved before the club left Florida? Was it so necessary to start Fernandez tonight, who will be, if he is anything, a bullpen man rather than a starter? The Astros played Friday as if they'd never seen or pitched or hit in their home park before, but that is nothing new--they've reacted that way at the end of every ST since 2000. If I were managing the club, I'd start my set rotation and my everyday lineup for the first four innings or so, and then bring in the reserves for needed work. The idea is to get the ballclub acclimated once more to the high-anxiety place where they play. To be honest, and again, some fans will discount this notion because the games do not matter yet, I am worried about residual effects from Thursday's loss and tonight's, and I will be worried about them win or lose Saturday afternoon. I know, certainly, about the immediate, palpable difference between an exhibition game and the opening of the regular season, but I am worried nonetheless about the club's frame of mind as we get closer to Monday. It's fine to say, "Well, the Astros will turn it on come Monday," and perhaps they will. They did smash Milwaukee in 2001's opener, I believe, with Hidalgo leading the way with two homers, but it's not so easy to turn it on, even when you want to, even when you've got an adrenaline rush to help you. The Giants, headed Houston's way, are not the Brewers.

I'd feel a little better if the offense had gotten it together tonight, but they didn't. Six hits, widely spaced, with only solo homers by Biggio in the third to cut the Royals lead to 6-1 and by Adam Everett in the sixth to make the score 7-2. The other Houston run was a freebie that came walking in on a balk. The rest, as Hamlet would say, was silence. No one was particularly sharp or impressive--not Brandon Backe or Brandon Duckworth or Mike Gallo or Dan Miceli on the mound, or any of the middle of Houston's order against lefty Darrell May and his own bullpen.

Clearly, Jimy Williams has a much different idea about how to prepare the Astros for the season than I do, and I won't fuss too much tomorrow if the guys come out and play hard even in a loss, but I do wish that Houston had handled this game a little differently all the way around, treated it more like the penultimate dress rehersal it truly was meant to be. It hurts the club in a PR sense, I think, to not play well in these final exhibition games at home, even if the total crowd is no more than 25,000 fans. I've felt that way going on five seasons now. The final exhibition games should be a serious matter. Granted, you don't want to get anyone hurt, but by the last two games of late March and early April, you ought to have your club's questions answered, your issues decided, and your club should be thinking and executing as a unit. The Astros have never played the last exhibition games that way under Williams, and they never really played that way under Dierker, either, so I'm arguing a lost cause here. But now is the time to be ready, and yet I wonder if the Astros are. The pitching makes me confident, but the hitting and the defense are both more than a little suspect as the season opens. The best we can hope for is that Oswalt, Pettitte, that Clemens fellow, Miller, and Redding can buy Houston some time for the hitters to work on their games at the plate and for the fielders to become reacquainted with their gloves.