30 Games, 30 Astros
#25: Chris Johnson
For those of you who weren’t around in the dark days of the Astros, let me introduce you to one Chris Johnson. I just heard all of you say “who?”. Chris Johnson. He used to play third base for the Houston Astros. He definitely is nowhere close to the most notable Astros third basemen, but I’ve already shared my affinity for those Astros teams that couldn’t find a way to win.
Over the course of roughly four seasons with the team, Chris Johnson was a pretty productive player in what was an extremely below average lineup. Two of his four seasons with the team resulted in us losing over 100 games, so nobody was getting MVP votes by any stretch of the imagination, but he managed to always be above league average at the plate (we won’t talk about the defense). What drew many traditional baseball fans to Chris Johnson wasn’t even the production on the field, but his gritty and tough persona.
His best years weren’t even with the Astros. What if I told you that a career 0.248 hitter was the BATTING TITLE RUNNER UP in 2013? Wouldn’t believe me would you? Well, read it and weep nerds. Chris Johnson broke out with a ridiculous 0.321/0.358/0.457 slash line. I see what people are doing already. They’re reading that and saying, “Wait a minute, all he did was get base hits - he didn’t hit for power at all!” To that I’d say, you’re right. He didn’t hit for power at all. In his “breakout season” he registered 46 extra base hits.
I feel like in most of these blogs I have to defend myself and make sure it doesn’t sound like I am hating on the guy. He did break out in 2013 and earned himself a nice 3-year $23 million contract. This is the exactly what led to Chris Johnson being one of the most hated players on the Braves at the time. He had one solid season and got the bag. This is exactly where I would love to share some words of wisdom: don’t hate the player, hate the game. You got one great year of Chris Johnson hitting singles, he got $23 million from the Braves. Pretty fair trade.
In all seriousness, though, I always loved the goatee and, especially during this time, there wasn’t much to cheer about in Houston. Above average at the time made us think we had the next big thing, someone to be named with Biggio and Bagwell - Chris Johnson wasn’t that for us, but he got us a haul in return from the Diamondbacks (to maintain credibility I must note that the last statement was a joke: Bobby Borchering and Marc Krauss both never panned out).
(ps - sorry for the awful picture of Chris Johnson. You can’t find a quality picture of him in an Astros uniform anywhere - pretty fitting I guess)
