St. Louis Cardinals 5, Houston Astros 3 (13)
August 25, 1992
The Back and Front of Cedeño's 1992 Topps Stadium Club Members Only (The 50) Unnumbered
The text of the card above did get most of it right. The game was in fact the first one played by the Astros after the month long road trip necessitated by the Astrodome having been picked to host the Republican National Convention. Although the convention was to last only four days, the Astros were told they had to vacate the dome for a month. It was, as Scott Servais called it, "the road trip from hell." The Astros entered the swing with the worst road record in the league, but did surprisingly well, going 12 - 14. And then the first night back at the dome, Cedeño goes nuts. He himself had missed some of the road trip, because he'd been demoted to Tuscon. Andujar tore it up pretty good at Tuscon, and was recalled just in time for the opener of the St. Louis series. Like the card says. Where they get it wrong is when they say it was ten-inning game. As you can see the game actually was thirteen.
Cedeño didn't build off this game, and finished the year with a .173. But the Astros really wanted him to be their shortstop, and gave him a chance out of spring training the following year, and Andujar won the job in March, and responded with his best year, a .283-11-59 affair that got a lot of Astros fans excited, yours truly included. It was in the midst of alll this hooplah that Bill James made his famous pronouncement that Cedeño would never hit .300 in the majors. James is annoying that way; he's very often right. Sure enough, Cedeño's average dropped 20 points for 1994 (although his slugging DID go up 6 points). But I think more critical was that his errors didn't drop. Cedeño's defense was tantalizing. He'd start spectacular double plays and snare frozen rope line drives going away-- and then boot the simple grounder. He made 11 errors in part-time play for 1992 and 23 more as a regular in 1993. Each year it added to about a .960 FP. It was that 96%, more than anything else, I think, that got him traded to the Padres in that Mega Deal. Andujar's numbers tanked even further with the Padres, and by 1998, he was out of baseball. Then two years later, he was dead, victim of an automobile accident on his home island of Hispaniola. His early death etched further into sharp relief the visions of what might have been. But for one night, anyway, the Dominican with the swing like a Sikorsky had no holes in his zone, or in his game.
St. Louis 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 2 - 5 13 0
Houston 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 3 15 0
