Houston Astros Memorabilia

In 1962, two expansion teams joined Major League Baseball’s National League—the New York Mets and the Colt .45s of Houston. Playing at Colt Stadium, the year began promisingly, with a three-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs, but the Colts, as some people called them, would finish its first season in eighth place, ahead only of the Cubs and Mets. Over the next few years, the Colts would do things a bit differently than other teams, such as starting an all-rookie lineup on September 27, 1963, and losing a game on April 23, 1964, by a score of 1-0 even though Colts pitcher Ken Johnson had thrown nine hitless innings. Things did not get much better in 1965, when the team relocated to the Houston Astrodome and renamed itself after what was then the largest indoor space in the world. In fact, the Astros would not play .500 ball until 1969, the year its fellow expansion team, the Mets, won the World Series. But Joe Morgan was proving a spark at second base, and in 1970, the Astros introduced the baseball world to a rookie named Cesar Cedeno, a centerfielder who batted .310 in his first season and was frequently compared to the likes of Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. Ten years after opening the Astrodome, the team shook things up again in 1975 when they unveiled their “rainbow” uniforms, whose horizontally striped colors shaded from orange to yellow to red. The team ended up in the cellar, but 1975 was also the year that knuckleballer Joe Niekro arrived from Atlanta. Niekro would win 21 games for his new team in 1979, and 20 the following year, which is also when Nolan Ryan became an Astro, for which he was paid a record $1-million a year. Joe Morgan returned from a number of very productive years in Cincinnati, and the team finished the year in first place of the NL West. Fast forward to 2013, when the Astros became one of only a handful of teams to switch leagues, losing 111 games in the process. But by 2015, the Astros had recaptured their winning ways, and in 2017, after racking up one of the best records of the year, the Astros made it to the World Series to face the Los Angeles Dodgers, and won!