Houston, We Have Liftoff

"Don't laugh," Johnson said. "I've had it done before."

Only seven innings into his Houston debut on Sunday, Johnson had struck out 12 batters, more in one game than any Astros lefty in 29 years. When the relentless Houston offense scored four times in the eighth inning with two outs, the Big Unit earned the victory in what became a 6-2 decision. "Man, I knew he was 6'10"," Hampton said, "but on the mound he looks like he's 8'10"."

"To be honest with you," said leftfielder Moises Alou, "I had goose bumps in the outfield during the game."

"The first pitch of the first inning," said first baseman Jeff Bagwell, "I thought, Wow—the Big Unit playing for us, the Astros."

So nondescript is Houston's major league history that eight months ago, when Hunsicker obtained Alou, a solid player but one who had never hit 25 home runs, he rightfully noted that Alou was the biggest name the Astros had ever acquired in a trade. Hunsicker topped that by getting Johnson, a Cy Young Award winner who was 75-20 from 1993 through '97 and through Sunday had struck out 10.5 batters per nine innings in his major league career. No one since Neil Armstrong had delivered bigger news to Houston—and this giant leap also left people recalling exactly where they were at the time they heard about the trade.

Bagwell was in a bar across from Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium with several teammates and club officials. After the Astros' traveling secretary received a message informing him of the deal, Bagwell bought drinks for everybody in the house.

Hampton woke up, groggy, at 6 a.m. in his hotel room to find the trade news crawling across the bottom of the television screen. After a stunned moment or two, Hampton realized he was actually awake.

Then there was Alou, who went to bed with no expectations that his team would add to its payroll. These were the Astros, after all, a team whose owner, Drayton McLane, had been one of the fiercest of the economic doomsday hawks of the 1994-95 strike, a team that made one trade all of last season—picking up Tony Pena, a 40-year-old catcher on his way out of baseball, for the pennant drive.

After Alou awoke last Saturday morning, he showered and dressed without having caught even a bit of sports news, then got on the team bus and said with a smart-aleck laugh, "So, who'd we get?"

"Randy Johnson," someone blurted.