The St. Louis Cardinals should not be able to defeat this season’s Astros. Even with the Astros’ lousy pitching, the Cardinals offense is essentially only Albert Pujols. But the Astros and Cardinals have now played nine games this season, and somehow, the Cardinals have found a way to win six of those games.

Last night, Kyle Lohse, who wasn’t even signed by the Cardinals until midway through spring training, shut down the vaunted offense, limiting the Astros to one run, a Carlos Lee seventh-inning home run. Roy Oswalt, pitching perhaps his best game of the season, got the loss, the Astros not being able to recover from the two first-inning runs he surrendered or from Albert Pujols’ sixth-inning home run that put the Cards up 3-0.

Sports fans always talk about the trade that should be made, or the trade that was made. It’s just part of being a sports fan. So today I thought I would give you what I felt to be the five best trades in Houston sports history.

5. On April 6, 1975, the Houston Astros sent $35,000 to the Atlanta Braves for mediocre pitcher by the name of Joe Niekro. By the time 1980 rolled around, Niekro was the ace of an Astro pitching staff that also featured a guy named Nolan Ryan.

I’d like to thank Richard Connelly for grilling the new president of the University of Houston, Renu Khator. As a proud 1988 graduate of the UH Honors Program (now Honors College), I of course keep up with all things Cougar-related. So it disappointed me that Dr. Khator did relatively poorly with Connelly’s pop quiz – though I have to admit that I didn’t know who Lynn Eusan was either.

That said, I have come up with a few more questions with which to quiz Dr. Khator. I’ll give you the question, you fill in the blank. The answers will be at the bottom, so no peeking.

1. How many former Bond Girls have taught in the school’s drama department? For extra credit, name the actress(es), the title of the movie(s), and give the character name(s).

2. Forget Julian Schnabel (that was a bit too esoteric). How many Oscar-nominated actors have attended the school’s drama department? For extra credit, name the actor(s), and give the title of the nominated film(s).

3. This graduate of the Law School is currently best known for feuding with Barbara Walters. For extra credit, what is the source of the current feud?

4. This former classmate of mine was a candidate for President of the United States in 2004. For extra points, name the party he was candidate of.

But enough of those, let’s get to sports.

I’ve got a confession. I didn’t watch all of the Astros game last night. I’ve got money on the Stanley Cup, so I flipped back and forth between the Astros-Cardinals and the Red Wings-Penguins – go Penguins. But I did see enough to know that the Astros lost 6-1.

St. Louis’ Adam Wainwright shut the vaunted offense down, limiting the Astros to only three hits and one run in his eight innings of work. Wandy Rodriguez went 4.2 innings in his return to the Astros, and the best thing that can be said about his performance is that he didn’t look injured. He gave up six hits in his time on the mound, and the Cardinals scored all six runs off of Wandy, though only three of the runs were earned – Kaz Matsui tried to make a double play where the double play was not possible, thus accounting for the unearned runs.

My man Hunter Pence went hitless, but at some point in time the Cardinals are going to have to learn to not test Hunter’s arm, because he nailed another runner on the bases last night, and that kept the score from probably being even worse.

The Astros’ lone run came on a second inning Ty Wigginton home run into the upper deck. But there must be something wrong with the St. Louis fans in that the kid who got the ball didn’t throw it back onto the field, and the crowd didn’t boo the kid – they must not know how to act as true fans.

I’ve got to ask. Am I the only who watched this past weekend’s Astros games against the Phillies and wondered if the left field concourse is turning into Let’s Make A Deal?

For those too young remember, Let’s Make A Deal was a game show hosted by Monty Hall. Monty would roam the audience, looking for people in funny costumes, and then he would make deals with them. He might show one guy in a clown costume what was behind curtain number one, then offer to trade it for the contents of curtain number two, only no one knew what was behind curtain number two.

What’s this got to do with anything? Well, if you’re like me, you saw the left field concourse and all of those Los Caballitos people with their cowboy hats and toy horses, and right next to them, you saw The Little Pumas, which were people wearing puma costumes. The only thing missing was Monty Hall roaming the crowd and asking if they wanted five hundred dollars, or the contents of his pocket.

The Astros roared off to a 4-0 lead in the first inning last night, and the St. Louis Cardinals, despite a four-for-four night from Albert Pujols, could just never catch up, losing to the Astros 8-2.

Shawn Chacon, after setting the major league record with ten straight non-decisions to start a season, recorded his second straight win, and even though the Cards seemed to be hitting him pretty good, they could never put together a rally to trim the lead. And while Albert Pujols had a perfect night at the bat, I want to make sure and note that my man Hunter Pence was also perfect on the night, going five-for-five from the plate – his career high – while making a great throw in the fourth inning to nail Rick Ankiel at the plate, shutting down an attempted Cardinals rally. Pence, who got off to a slow start to open up the season, has now raised his average up to .311.

Chacon meanwhile went seven innings while surrendering only two runs. He lowered his earned run average to 3.95, which is the best ERA on the Astros starting staff.

Things have been quiet on the Team Rocket front lately. They were even rather quiet when the bimbo eruptions first hit. They were so quiet you might have thought Team Rocket was coming to its senses and was trying to find away to get out of this whole lawsuit business before anything else could happen.

Well, you might have thought wrong. Because last night, Team Rocket struck again, this time by adding another claim to his defamation suit against Brian McNamee. The claim being the intentional infliction of emotional harm.

Good news, bad news for the Comets. Good news is that they have sold-out tonight’s game against Minnesota. They’re in their new (and smaller) digs at Reliant Arena and this is the first home game of the season.

Bad news is that they are still the Comets. They lost the first two regular season games on the road (85-66 against Detroit, and a closer 69-66 against Washington). Add to that the preseason losses and the Comets have a four-game losing streak going.

Tina Thompson is the only player with double-digit scoring average with 17 ppg (she averaged 23.7 points against Minnesota last season). Matee Ajavon, who just joined the team, is scoring a respectable 9.5 ppg.

Tonight’s tip-off is at 7:30 p.m. – Olivia Flores Alvarez

One of the things I try to do over here is to spotlight the news that gets overlooked. And I’ve got an item for today that I’m sure many of you here in the Houston area missed over the Memorial Day weekend. One, because the story came out on Sunday, and two, because as far as I can tell, the dead-tree edition of the Chron has yet to mention it (Richard Justice linked to it in one of his Sunday blog postings). So, without further ado…

Late Saturday night, the New York Daily News posted to its Web site another in its long string of steroid stories involving Roger Clemens. But this one was a bit different. It linked another name to Roger Clemens. No, not another mistress, but another player. That player being former Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell, who, according to unnamed sources, was supplied steroids and HGH by Kelly Blair, of Pasadena, Texas, and the owner of 1-on-1 Elite Personal Fitness.

If the name Kelly Blair sounds familiar, that may be because he’s the one who supposedly supplied Tom Pettitte, the father of Andy Pettitte, with HGH, which Tom then provided Andy.

The Astros won two of the three weekend games against the Philadelphia Phillies, splitting the series two games apiece.

The Astros lost 15-6 on Sunday afternoon because Ed Wade has done absolutely nothing to fix one of the worst starting rotations in major league baseball, and the team lost because Drayton McLane felt it was more important for the team to acquire the ethically challenged Miguel Tejada than it was to make any type of move for starting pitching – or middle relief pitching, which this team needs a lot of because the starting pitching is so bad.

Jennifer Sey’s memoir, Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics’ Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams, is a brutal book. And I mean that as a compliment. It’s brutal in its exposé of the world of gymnastics. It’s brutal in its depiction of that world. It’s brutal in relaying the disturbing lives of the little girls caught in that world.

Jennifer Sey was born in the late-1960s. She was a young impressionable girl when the Soviet Union’s Olga Korbut charmed the world in the 1972 Olympics. And she fell in love with Romania’s Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics. And like little girls throughout the world, Jennifer Sey wanted to fly through the air like Korbut and Comaneci. So her parents took her to the local gym where her fearlessness and desire got her on a team of young gymnasts. And before she reached her teens she was competing in national competitions.

And as other girls of talent did before her time, and as they do now, she moved from gym to gym, from coach to coach, looking for the edge that would put her over the top. She was different from most of the young girls who watched Korbut and Comaneci: Sey had talent. She could do the flips and turns that most girls couldn’t. But as she moved from coach to coach, from gym to gym, from city to city, she began to lose something. She began to lose the joy that came from flying through the air on a dismount. She came to fear her coaches. Coaches who would shout obscenities at preteen girls, who would hit them for not sticking a landing, whip them for being a pound overweight. Girls who, like Sey, wanted only acceptance, wanted only to be loved.

The Astros lost to the Philadelphia Phillies by a score of 7-5 last night. But the major news flash is that Astros reliever Oscar Villarreal made it through an inning without giving up a run. And that, if anything, should tell you how sucky the Astros pitching staff is.

But he was about the only one who didn’t get beat up on last night. Roy Oswalt went six innings while giving up 11 hits and five earned runs, including a home run. Wesley Wright went an inning, and he gave up a home run. Fernando Nieve went a third of an inning and gave up a hit and a run, and Tom Byrdak went two-thirds of an inning without giving up anything.

If you spend anytime over at Chron.com, then you’ve probably read the comments to the writers’ blogs. And it never fails to amaze me that there are people out there who think the Astros can win a pennant with this crappy pitching. Once again: It doesn’t matter how many runs you score if you can’t stop the other team from scoring.

I made a bit of a mistake yesterday: I turned on sports talk radio for about ten minutes. The station was 790, the time was about nine a.m. And in those ten minutes, I heard Brad Davies tell me that once you move from a city, even if that city is where you grow up, you can no longer pull for that team to win. So if you were born in Chicago and moved to Houston for a job, you can no longer pull for the Cubs or White Sox. Or if you moved here from Boston, or St. Louis, or Cleveland, or New York, or anywhere, it doesn’t matter. You can only pull for the Astros.

Following this, Davies told me that he was pulling for the Lakers to beat the Spurs because he is bored by the Spurs. Not bored by the Spurs’ style of play. Or by any of their players. He’s just bored of seeing San Antonio win the thing all of the time. Now, I’ll let Jason handle the whole Spurs basketball thing, but I just want to ask: What kind of stupid decision is it to pull for a team because you’re bored by another team? The Rockets are out of the playoffs, and I really don’t watch the NBA much anymore, but the Spurs are a fun team who are well-coached, can play fast or slow, are good at the fundamentals, and are basically everything a basketball fan should want from a championship team once the hometown team is out of the running.

Being a longtime observer of Houston sports means that I’ve seen an awful lot of uniforms. Some good. Many bad. So I thought I would give you what I consider to be the five worst uniforms in Houston sports history.

5. Houston Astros, Home Uniforms, 2000-Present.

I hate these uniforms. I can’t stress enough how much I hate these things.

I hate the colors. I hate the pinstripes. I hate the hat. I hate what they’ve done to the logo.

The colors are dull and boring. And they kind of look like pajamas to me.

Damn Drayton, if you wanted to go retro, you should have gone retro with the unis and gone to the late-60s/early-70s look.

Shawn Chacon finally got a victory last night. His first decision of the season. He looked like crap, but he got the win, and the Astros won the game 5-3.

Somebody tell me, how in the hell is this team winning games? The pitching sucks. The defense is awful, especially if the ball is hit around third base or into left field. I haven’t seen much to impress me about Cecil Cooper’s managing. So how are they winning games? Is Miguel Tejada injecting the rest of the team with his supply of steroids?

Who knows? But the Astros won two of the three games against the Chicago Cubs and in so doing improved their record to 27-21. The Phillies are in town, and Roy Oswalt is going to try to pitch tonight, injured or not.