The Crawfish Boxes

With the announcement yesterday that our off-season is pretty much over, we Astros fans have got to find something to occupy ourselves for the remaining 98 days without baseball.  HLP's initial post on the subject of who was the most Astro-iest had a phenomenal response, and so we decided it would be a good idea to make it a battle royale for the title match.

What is Astro-iest you ask? I'll use HLP's words because I think they were pretty good:

Working Definition of Astro-iest: Not just who is the best player, but who embodies what it means to play baseball in Houston, Texas for the Astros (whatever you think that means). Did the player grow up in Texas and go on to success with the hometown team? Maybe he's from somewhere else, but became a fan favorite. Baggage or none, All-Star or not, who is the Astro-iest?

I took 32 of the most frequently mentioned names from that post and plugged them into a randomizer.  I then constructed a two bracket tournament to reflect the random assignment of the players, broadcasters, front office guys, and entities that made the list. The two brackets are the "610-Loop Division" and the "Downtown Division"—the two primary locations of Astros baseball in the Houston area (hat-tip to HLP who came up with them).

Without further ado, here is how the battle for Astro-iest will play out:

I know it's not the easiest thing to read, but if you click on it, you can see it clearly.

Voting will begin on New Year's Day for the 610-Loop Division's 1st Round and I think the voting should progress every other day.  The schedule will look like this:

• 610 Loop Round 1: Jan 1, 2009-Jan 2, 2009
• Downtown Round 1: Jan 3, 2009-Jan 4, 2009
• 610 Loop Round 2: Jan 5, 2009-Jan 6, 2009
• Downtown Round 2: Jan 7, 2009-Jan 8 2009
• Elite Eight: Jan 9, 2009-Jan 10 2009
• Final Four: Jan 11, 2009-Jan 12, 2009
• Championship: Jan 13, 2009-Jan 14, 2009