Sean, I coulda sworn I told you my Astros story at one time. I thought I even told you in person.

Anyway, here's the deal: When I was in 8th grade (1974), my best friend Mike Miller went to Houston to visit some relatives. While he was there, he went to a game or two at the Astrodome. When he came home, he had all kinds of Astros gear, etc. Since he was my best friend, I said "If you're an Astros fan, then I'm an Astros fan." So I started following the Astros as much as I could in the papers, etc. He went to a different school the next year and I've pretty much lost track of him for the past 34 years. However, I continued to follow the Astros into my college years. That was the first time they had ever made it to the post season (1980). In the early to mid 1980s, I went to my first baseball game at Shea Stadium to see the Astros play the Mets. When I got out of college and got my first engineering job, I had plenty of cash being single and living home with my parents so I bought one of those 10' satellite dish antennas. Back then, you could get all the premium movie channels for free and EVERY baseball game every night by watching the feeds. It was great, no commercials! It was funny because the commentators figured they weren't "on the air" so you could hear them talking with one another as they figured no one could hear them. Anyway, in the mid 1980s I was able to watch Astros games every night. Then they started scrambling everything, first it was HBO, Cinemax, etc., then the bastards started scrambling the baseball and football feeds. So, for a long time, I didn't get to watch Astros games anymore until just a few years ago when the cable companies started offering the mlb.com package.

I like the White Sox because I LOVE the city of Chicago and George is a White Sox fan. I've never really been a Cubs fan but I do have a couple of friends in Chicago who are Cubs fans so at least I'm now to the point where I don't purposefully root for them to lose.

LMAO! You say you'll never root for the White Sox, the Red Sox and the Cardinals. Sorry Sean, I like all of those teams. I even can tolerate the Mets BUT in 1986, they beat the Astros for the AL pennant and beat the Red Sox in the World Series so I guess I never really got over that! Before 1986, I used to got to quite a few games at Shea Stadium. In those day, you could walk up to the gate and get a $2.00 general admission ticket and sit in the back of the Loge and sneak down to the field level. If you got caught my an usher, all you had to do was give him a couple of bucks and he'd seat you in the field level, no questions asked. When the Mets got good in 1985, 1986, etc., I pretty much stopped going to games because I couldn't get tickets.

There are a few teams I don't like, I can't really give you a good reason as to why, I just don't really like them:

The Braves
The Padres
The Giants
(Those three probably because of the old NL West when they were huge Astros rivals)
The Brewers
The Devil Rays (or is it the "Rays" now?)
The Pirates
The Diamondbacks
The Marlins
The Mariners
The Rangers
The A's

The Cubs used to be on that list but I took them off for the reasons I posted earlier. Detroit, Minnesota and Cleveland don'd do much for me either unless like this year, the Twins played pretty amazing ball this past September and the White Sox were already out of it.

I'm also more of a National League fan at heart anyway.