The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Astros Get a Win vs Guardians, Rockets vs Lakers Game 2!

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Astros Get a Win vs Guardians, Rockets vs Lakers Game 2! 

is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. A Tuesday edition of the Matt Thomas show with Ross from Los Angeles. This is Sports Talk 790. So that's for sure, but when you get the Ohio players involved, when you're in Ohio, the song fits. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Sports RV. How the hell are you?

Doing fantastic, Matthew. How are things? I'm nervous. Really? I need a win. tonight. I mean, I really need to win tonight. You're talking about the Astros. You want the series win with Ryan Weiss on the hill.

No question about that. Okay, good. You need series wins. If you're going to get back to 500, you need series wins, for sure. Yeah, well, maybe just float around 500 because the division's so bad, and then get the reinforcements. Yeah. Get your horses back? Yeah.

Yeah. Get Hunter Brown? Yes. And Jake Myers and Jeremy Pena. Taylor Tremel. Keep going. Nick Allen Joey Lopapito Tatsui Mai, Christian Javier

Josh Hader, don't forget him I just named basically the entire roster Could you imagine being an opening day a few weeks ago Which a lot of folks probably were the list of the show I was there And they ran off the entire roster And if you like

Picked them up and took them off the field Because they're now hurt How long that line would be now? It would be very lengthy It's not good But they won. Yes. And I'm going to assume the 10th inning last night.

We had a lot of energy, a lot of positivity on the phones. Oh, man. It was just hours and hours of calls. Yes. I'm excited about that. Everybody was just thinking, yeah, they're turning it around. Yes. Mm-hmm.

And this win was the catalyst for another ALS championship. You know what? Small steps, my friend, small steps. Hey, 92. Joe's spot is happy. I'm happy. You didn't have to use it. Well, I don't even know who your leverage guys are at this point, but you didn't have to use those guys.

No, there's no such thing. It's all hands on deck. Okay. Well, one of your hands was Jaden Murray and he got six outs. That's good. He did. Yeah. Erigetti gave you five, which is for an Astro Starter, is exceptional.

He is your ace. He's your ace. He's your ace, who pitched his first three games of the year with the space cowboys is your ace. Game two starter Mike Burroughs Game three deciding the wild card game winning Lance McCullors,

Jr? Why don't we do this to our selves? I'd probably go with an opener or something honestly. Yeah. All right. Stephen Okert in an opening role. What a weird game. I did watch probably be 80% of it last night because I had it on the phone.

Was there anybody at the game? I mean, I know the Cavalers were playing next door. Yeah, there was a fan that was screaming at Jose Al-Tuva and talking about trash cans. He had been. more airtime than Jeff Blum did last night. It wasn't even close, really. I mean, whoever that dude was,

first of all, his material was not great, but I gave him credit because he just basically yelled louder than anybody else among whatever they announced crowd was yesterday. I mean, if I'm giving him credit, it's for being world's biggest jackass. Yeah, it was... There's nobody that wants to hear you scream the whole game.

Even Guardians fans. Yeah, I mean, first of all, 39 degrees at first pitch. That's not great. Yeah, well, that's why nobody's there. Then you have loud, boisterous fan who is just, I mean, if I'm the Astros TV broadcast and I don't know if I was on radio yesterday,

but if I'm on TV, I probably turn down the crowd mics. I just, you know what? You can hear them on radio too. Yeah. There's no crowd. We need a crowd mic for. That's right. That's exactly right. The loudest thing you heard off the crowd mic was the back cracking. And, hey, Issoc Perthes did it a couple of times yesterday.

Yes, he did. So maybe moving around for position, position wasn't that big a video after all. Yesterday. Oh, man, maybe he's moving around too much. No, it's fine. He's just slumping. It's baseball.

You get into Cleveland. It's like 39 degrees. You're not supposed to be hitting there. He's playing third base, and then he hits two home runs. Hey, am I one more victory away from Terry in Ohio's lunch? I think so. Yeah. Is he going to fly down to have lunch with us, or are we going up to Cleveland?

Because, I mean, look, I like Cleveland. It's kind of an underrated city, honestly. but you and I are not flying up there to go have lunch. No, we're not. We should do this. We should buy ourselves lunch and then send him a VINMO request. Do you think Terry's got VINMO? There's no chance.

Yeah, probably not. He's going to try to pay with his checkbook. Maybe he'll send us some gift certificates. Yeah, I write a check. Hey, I wrote a check. It's got a bunch of numbers on it. Numbers are good. Thanks, Terry.

You know what? Stop making fun of Terry. I'm sorry. You started it. I apologize. No, you brought him up. That's true. Terry in Ohio, I appreciate you.

Shout out to you, my friend. The entire state of Ohio, not just Cleveland. He said he's a wounded vet, Matt. Put some respect on his name. Yes. We only respect him for that. But we, you know, again, he does sound like our former president. And for that, if you sound like, like yesterday.

And again, I don't. think many of you that are listening to this show watch Minnesota Denver yesterday. It was an amazing basketball game. I mean, absolutely unbelievably exciting. And Minnesota won the game, so they're even at a game of peace. But one of the guys on the broadcast, Brian Scalabrini, who I know a little bit because I've been on his radio show, he does a serious NBA show, and he does also the color analyst for the Celtics.

He sounded like somebody last night when he was calling him, like, I can't pinpoint what he sounds like. So I went to Twitter and I put in his name and everyone's like, yeah, that's Jesse Ventura. Oh, really? That's not good necessarily? I don't think it's great. I don't know if Scalabrini is a guy that would search his name on Twitter to see how people were talking about his performance.

That's not a compliment. Certainly. So then I saw that and then I listened like, oh my God, that's Jesse Ventura. So. Hmm. Just throwing that out there. Thank you. Did you watch you in that Minnesota, Denver?

I didn't catch it, unfortunately. Oh, my God. It's so good. Yeah. I'm missing more of the playoff action than I would like. I should have put it on. Well, I want you to nap tonight. I mean, as soon as the show goes over with, I don't care.

I don't know if Gordy's got you doing something. I'm doing pre and post game show for Rockets. Okay, but you can write that during the show today. No, I'm going to stay up. You're not going to nap at all? No. Oh, God. I feel, I feel.

I don't like napping because then I'm going to be up to. to like 3 a.m. They're going to be tires. A vicious cycle. I hate it. Oh, I'm Team Knapp. Oh, my gosh. What?

Look who we have on the phone. We have Terry in Ohio? We'll take him. I don't care. That's great. Friend of the show, there he is. All right, let's take a look here. Terry in Ohio, Terry, are you coming down to Houston to take us a lunch or are we going

up to Cleveland to see you? No, I'm going to fly to Houston. First class or coach First class Yes Isle or window Window Do you take your shoes off on the plane?

Yes or no? No All right What else you got today, Terry? Yeah, why do you think you only need one more win? It's a series win We're betting a lunch on a series win Two out of three ain't bad

Remember like meatloaf said No It was best out of six Well, what if we go 3-3, then nobody gets to eat? Well, I'll still meet you in Houston. I got her cousin that lives in Houston. All right. We'll just go out and we'll have lunch.

Perfect. Can you do a 205 lunch? Where on the air? Was that more dinner time for you? Oh, no. Terry, don't listen to Ross. No, 205's fine. Perfect, 205.

Thank you, Terry. Good luck. Go Rockets. Go Astros. One step closer to a two-on-five. Don't go guardians. Go guardians. Don't go guardians.

No. Maybe that was Terry screaming in the crowd last thing. We don't know. I should have asked him that. Shout out to Terry. Shout out to all of our Cleveland listeners in Ohio. I think we're number one in the Cleveland market. We're crushing, actually.

Yeah. All right. Ross, we got gut feelings today at 1130. You ready for that? Don't. Oh, you're hymn and hon. I'm scared about that. I'm feeling better.

after the win. I mean, after the win, rather than losing 12 out of 14. I know. I let you're saying you're feeling better after watching Kevin Durant practice yesterday a little bit. Yeah, practice videos look good. Let me ask you this. I did put a hashtag out for today on the pre-show tweet. Will it gain any traction?

My guess is the answer is no, but I'll try. It's hashtag pray for KD. Knee. The knee of KD? I've already put it out there. Oh. I'm going to say it will not. Yeah, it's fine.

I did this tweet like late, late last night. That's okay. And they're throttling everyone's impressions on X if you don't subscribe to their verified program. I can tell. I'm not going to do that. Just regular tweets I'm putting out getting like 10% of the impressions they normally do. I'm pretty sure they're throttling something. Or maybe my tweets are really bad.

But I would say even just regular like, hey, the post game is starting stuff that would be just rather innocuous. Seems to me like there's there's a, they're throttling. All right. So the last seven days, I'm looking at my Twitter account right now. The last seven days I've had 82,000 impressions.

Okay. That's, is that low, high, mid? Well, how many times? I don't know. How many times have you tweeted? How many? No. I mean, I'm probably two to three a day, maybe. I'm not here to calculate your tweets. You tell yourself and look at what your own history. I was asking you.

you, I wasn't like trying to start. I mean, there's no context for me to answer that question. Okay, so then say, Matt, I have no context. I can't help you. Man, I have no context. I can't help you. That's good. That's good.

We got that. All right, 713, 212. 5790. 713, 21, 212. 570. We'll get back to sports real quickly in a moment, but I got to tell you, the Michael movie is getting absolutely annihilated on Rottenadoes. Not that it's everything, but as we'd like to say here on the show, it's a metric.

It's a data point. It's one data point. It is. Data points can be off. Yeah, that's exactly right. 27% on rotten tomatoes. Well, it's a lot to overcome. Well, I'll say this, and I think you could back me up on this.

Rotten Tomatoes pretty much gets it right most of the time. Yeah, and certainly, unless, I don't know, something political is involved in either one way or the other. they do what they call review bombing people do. Can you imagine how sad your life is? Is that you disagree with the political stance of a movie? So you go and review bomb them. So you go and write reviews on a website and spend your day doing that? That sounds insane, but people do that.

Yeah, so people are petty about political beliefs of others. Yeah, it's insane, right? It's crazy. Wake me up on that one, yeah. But, I mean, this one looks pretty bad. Because my son, my middle son, Peyton and I are big biopic fans. So you've been talking about seeing it? We've been talking about seeing it.

And so he sent me this and I just checked on Twitter during the break. So apparently, and again, I had heard this to the grapevine or, you know, a couple things I read that there was a lot of things that were not necessarily omitted, but just didn't even get into it all. They didn't recreate, you know, look, part of Michael Jackson, the Michael Jackson goodness is obviously one of the greatest entertainers, maybe the greatest pop entertainer of all time in terms of impact, ticket. No, he is. Yeah. Record sales, influence, all that. I mean, there is a handful, and he's probably at the very top of the list. A global icon.

But if you're going to do a biopic, you've got to show the good side and the bad side. And apparently they stopped at a certain year. Oh, they're going to be sequel? I don't think so. Michael Part 2, The Whitening? Is that what the next one's going to be? Or Michael Part 2, what happened at Neverland Ranch? That's a little wordy.

I know. But point being is that, you know, he had a troubled life outside of the music studio. And apparently he was not discussed. And so I did see a tweet yesterday that kind of cracked me up. They'd be like doing an O.J. biopic and then stopping when his NFL career ended. You know what I mean? It was obviously a tremendous amount of things that happened in his life post-playing. And O.J. walks off into the sunset.

Yes. He finished his career as a member of the 49ers of the San Francisco 49ers. and went down to a successful career selling rental cars. And that's the end of the movie. Yeah. It ends with him like on set for naked gun. Well, yeah, I mean, the reason why I was hesitant to begin with is because isn't it his nephew that plays his role of Michael Jackson? Yes.

I mean, I can't imagine anybody in the Michael Jackson family would want to go into the deep dive of what went wrong in Michael Jackson's life. Just saying. Yeah. If the Jackson family is controlling this, it's not going to have to do with any of that stuff. Yeah. is that one of the reasons it's getting so negative? What about besides that? Is that why it's getting negative reviews, or is it just the movie's not good either?

What I just glimpsed it just a minute ago during the break, it is largely based off of the good, sweet narrative of this young family out of Gary, Indiana, rising to such prominence. I mean, again, I probably will see it. Ross, just kind of suns having to read what people are saying, go and sing it myself. But remember that Jackson Dad was not a particularly good,

person. Yeah, Joe, as Joe just whipping up on him for the first 30 minutes of the film? I mean, again, if you have the Jackson family doing this, wouldn't you scale it to a more friendly side of things? Yeah. I mean, he is, as you said, that he's the biggest pop star of all time. Of all time. Like, I mean, I loved Ray, but you saw a bad side of Ray.

Ray was great. Walk the line with the Johnny Castro. You saw the good and bad of Johnny Cash. Walk Hard with John C. Riley. Incredible film. Yeah. I mean, it's my favorite genre, frankly. Really? Just about music guys, though. You're not a Malcolm X guy, are you? Or Reggie Bull? I would watch it. I would watch it. Goodfellas is a biopic, Matt.

Wasn't there a Muhammad Ali biopic, too? Yeah, it wasn't great. Okay, I didn't see that one. It's kind of forgettable. I just think you're going to do it. The whole time you're like, this is just Will Smith doing an Ali impression. It's just not, that's weird. Because when it's like Jamie Fox, you're like, this is Ray Charles. Absolutely. It's obviously a big challenge.

And it showed his drug use. It showed his womanizing. I mean, you saw, I mean, you saw things about Ray you never knew about until you watched the movie. It's got to be the biggest blind womanizer of all time, right? Yeah, I don't know if there's a huge list. I mean, would number two be Stevie Wonder? I don't know. You tell me.

I don't know. Was he Feliciano getting down back in the day? I'm just saying, but he's blind. I mean, I don't know. Is there a group that called Blind Philanderers? I don't know. I want to say philanderers, but I'm just saying. He's spreading his seed.

I think Ray Charles ended up with a lot of kids, too. Okay. I didn't mean to go off on that tangent, but I just was like... It's okay. You're disappointed because you wanted to bond with your son over a great movie, and it sounds like it's terrible. Yeah, it's just... When Rotten Tomatoes, again, I don't use every metric,

but Rotten Tomatoes usually does a pretty good job of giving us a pretty fair indication. Yeah, a lot of times if it's like a five, it could be a good movie. Like one of my favorite... West Anderson movies, it's like a six or something like that. So, yeah. But if it's a, yeah, 6.4 Asteroid City, which I love. And 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But if it's like 27%, there's almost no chance. Like I said, unless there's a political slant, or which could be a little bit of the case here because people are upset, it's not addressing any of his transaggressions. Or alleged transaggressions, I should say. We love Michael Jackson performer, but we also are not naive to what he was. I mean, or allegedly

he was, right? You know what I mean? Of course. all right so doing the R. Kelly story and then just stopping. I mean, when is the ditty story going to come out? I mean, it'd be like doing the ditty story and then stopping when he collaborates with notorious B.I.G. Right. Right. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like it's a, it works. Don't worry. Thank you. All right. On the phones next, we're back to sports. I swear to God we are. We're happy at the Asteros 1. We need the rockets to win. Anything else we need today? I'm trying to think.

Lower gas prices would be nice. That'd be good. Yeah, they haven't gone down. You said it was going to happen if I followed you on Instagram and the prices keep going up. Thanks. You lied. 401K took a dip too. I only checked because of you.

This is... Did you really? I'm sorry. I swear. I will bring it up again. I was changing up my elections. Okay. Well, there you go.

All right. 713212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-79. a lot of energy in the air for an Astros win in an empty ballpark last night. I'll tell you what, I could go for 5-10 first pitches every day. That's not terrible. Okay.

It's not really like a pressing. This is a great tease question. But I have a baseball, Hmm. Astros' opponent-related question to ask you. Let me put it that way. And we got that. We got our buddy Bill and Kate.

Does Bill know we don't play believe it or not until $150 today? Is he okay? Is that D Bill? Yeah, I think so. he calls in occasionally we love the guy yeah like once a quarter it's it's the bill and katy quarterly report coming up yeah because he's usually him

him and our friend uh who's our other guy uh the big prize for roger roger yeah bill and roger like they should like own 25% of believe it or not it's true 1029 ross back to you on 790 713 212 5790 if you want to join us today 7122 719 we've got feelings gut feeling coming up at 1130. News at noon. We've got, believe it or not, at 150. Do we do Billy Donovan, believe or not,

leaving today as the coach of the Chicago Bulls? That can work. I mean, it's a possibility. It's in the possibility. I like that we have even something on the table this early in the show. I know. I'm on board.

All right, so what is your baseball question? All-time Astro Killers. Of course, we start with Albert Poo-Holes, and then we can go on down the list. Do you need to put Jose Ramirez on the list. Jose Ramirez, it feels like just throughout the last couple years especially,

I just, every time he comes up to the plate, I mean, I can think of certain guys. Like, I don't even necessarily feel that way with Mike Trout or like Aaron Judge who's had some issues. I maybe put Giancarlo Stanton on the list. But man, I just want to Stapmuse. Okay.

283, 64 hits, 10 homers, 31 Ribbyes, 31 runs scored in 65 games against the Astros in his career. Now this is stat Musil. Yeah. Ten homer. I mean, that sounds probably about around his averages. But I just get scared when Jose Ramirez goes up there.

He just feels like an astro killer to me. And that's just my gut feeling without looking at the numbers. So that was my question to you. Is he on the Astro Killer list? 10 homers? 13 years. I would lean no. But you could give me a compelling argument for it.

I mean, I can't go to nothing. I mean, 10 homers in 60. You said 65 games? 65 games. Okay, so that's like under 30 a year. Yeah. It just, it just. 283 is good.

It's above his average of 279. Okay, so if he had 64 hits and 65 games, he would, if you did that, you would, that would be 160 games. 160 hits in a season, and that's good, but usually the elite killers are 200 hit guys, you know, in a particular. It just feels like the last couple of years. He's, and, he's, and. He only got on base twice yesterday, but still. I just don't like seeing him in the opposites batting box. See, to me, I think it's fair to put him in there because if we, look,

Aaron Judge, Mike Trout's hit some home runs against the Astros, but Mike Trout probably doesn't do very well collectively against the Astros. Right. All time. Well, except for this year. He was kind of on fire this year. Aaron Judge, hits home runs, but I wouldn't say he's prolific against the. the Astros. Agreed.

It's kind of a short list, honestly. Yeah. I mean, you could go a big dumper, but he was doing that against everybody last year, so it wasn't just the Astros. Mm-hmm. I just think about, when I think about guys that kill the Astros, I think

about guys that, you know, play them 12, 15 times a year. You know, Guardians and Astros will play six of the very most. Yeah, especially for someone out of division. Yeah. How about Nick Kurt's, Astro Killer? Can we put that on the draft on the draft list.

He's on the provisional list. Yeah, like, we're putting his stats on our email. We're not sending it out just yet. Yes. I like that. All right. Let's talk to Bill and Katie. Bill, do you realize we're giving away nothing at this point?

Man, you're wrong with it. Hey, man, I do love y'all show. I listen to y'all every day, dude. Come on, man, you're a break, man. I'm not a pH, man. Yeah, you are. It's not a pH. It's a P-W.

Well, you're all down. Well, you're right. P.W. You're absolutely right. But, Matt, y'all wrong for, well, Ross is wrong for what y'all said about Terry, man. They got to call in. It's talking about having lunch for you guys. And Ross said, well,

you said, what about 2 30? Ross said that during the time for you. Dude, I almost hit the floor. I mean, he was wrong for calling me. And not like that. But anyway, I was calling to ask you about, I can't think about, I can't think of that call that call. you guys that take it a long time.

Is it Jerome or Leroy or Tyrone or something? Gerard? Yeah, like whenever he comes on, it's like y'all go to take a restroom break, y'all go to eat, and y'all come back and he's still talking. I just want to ask you, and I'm a hang up, how do you feel about Doris Burke? Because when she, when she has to,

you know, I go on TV and talk, do she reminds me that guy so much, I just turn me the volume down, I go to the restroom and come back. She's still talk. I can't stand, Doris Burke. Just give me a talk. take what you think about Doors, and you have a good thing. That went in a variety of different directions. First of all, we love Girard.

Yes. We love people. I'm going to tell you all something. Girard may be a little long-winded, but he calls us and talks about things that we'd like to talk about. So it's okay with us. I'm going to tell you, I cannot count on my hands and toes how many times he's been the only caller, especially in the 20 lost seasons. and a lot of these post-game shows

I work with the Rockets. There have been some lean years, folks, and Gerard was there for me, so I'll be there for him. Gerard can always call any show I'm ever on. You can call me from the nursing home. Yeah, we met Gerard once or twice. He's come to a couple of our appearances over the years.

Gerard's got carte blanche, and yeah, have we gone to the bathroom? Sure. Have we called our mother to say how she's doing, how they're doing? Yes. Have we ordered lunch, went downstairs at the lobby, you picked it up and brought it back yes those things are all in play yes but he calls he's passionate

and i for that appreciate now of doris burke i like doris i might be the minority on this uh i don't think she's long-winded i know people do get bothered by her because i think people get bothered by everybody in the world and when you get bothered by somebody instead of just keeping it to yourself you're under your social media and tell the whole world how much you hate somebody uh i've talked to her a handful of times over the years uh she went to providence college and my daughter was being recruited by Providence to play volleyball, so I asked her a couple things about the school. So we kind of have a...

Oh, wow. We're not like friends, but every time I see... No, I would say every time I see her, we talk and say hello, and she's done a handful of Rockets games over the last couple of years. Now, she did get demoted to the number two crew, and so there is that, but I think I... Legler does a better job.

It is what it is. Tim Legler, he's excellent. Yeah. Love Lake. really, really good on the air. Richard Jefferson's fine. Mike Green's still, you know, it's fine. Yeah, I love Mike Breen.

I mean, yeah, that's never going to change for me on that, but, but yeah, I think she's fine. Yeah, I mean, no, no issues there whatsoever. I'm going to quote that. Matt thinks Doris Burke is fine. Always trying to make it salacious, aren't you? Yeah, I'm putting that out of context on social media.

Oh, no. I'm trying to get my interactions up. I got to sensationalize everything. I'm going to subscribe. to this free website and then I'm going to get a bunch of impressions up is what you're trying to do? I got you. I don't even know what impressions mean. What does that mean?

Did you get to... Somebody's looked at it? It's an impression. I haven't gotten a check from anybody, so it doesn't really matter how you know how many impressions like that. Because you don't pay for it. Apparently, Gordon, got a nice check recently because something he had was, one of his bad takes was going viral. Did he hear you say that? Yeah, he's in the... I see it. Of course.

That would be rude if I would talk behind his back. Oh, so you're doing directly to him. Yeah. If there's anything I've taught you over the years, Ross, insult somebody right to their face. It's a lot easier. Yes. It was an RIP Chuck Norris post.

Oh, that one too. Okay. Is he in studio with you or is he in the other studio? No, he's in the producer's studio. So I don't think he must be coming in and try to talking about something. No, we have you with technical issues. I'm shocked. Oh, well.

All right. I got a poll question up about the NFL draft. I want to discuss when we come back. Yes, sir? I have a full admission. I must tell you about. at 11 o'clock when it comes to the Rockets in this series of the Lakers in 12 minutes. Okay.

It's not salacious. I wish it was salacious, but I just, I'm not brought up that way. Okay. I open an honest opinion about this coming up. So I have to bear my soul to you at 12 o'clock at 11 o'clock, and it's going to be heartfelt. Okay. Genuine. Oh, wow.

It won't be artificial. Won't be for the bit of the show. Okay. Hot takey. It's just me, pour my soul to you. The people that spend some time with us listen to this radio show for that.

Thank you. All right, real quick, before I go, the phones. Poll question is up today. And I don't do a better job of this because I think sometimes poll questions are fun.

Sometimes it just, I do it for kind of like what I think you all want to talk about or what you do want to get into. And as Ross has brought up a lot of times, you know, did you watch Super Bowl? And you go, well, everybody watched Super Bowl, but really 50% of the people

didn't watch Super Bowl. So you take poll questions with a grain of salt. Just one is, as a kid said, just one metric. I said draft excitement, especially as it relates to the Texans. Three options you have to vote, and there's not a lot of votes. If you want to go vote on it, give me a better sample size. At SportsMT is my Twitter account, if you want to follow it there. Three options are fired up.

I can't wait. Option B is I'll tune in. It's fine, meaning it's just there. Or C, Matt, waiting until September. 59% of you, and again, it's a very small sample size, but please go to my Twitter account and vote, so I get a better feel of it. I'll tune in, it's fine, meaning, you know, it's on Thursday. It'll be nothing else going on.

The Astros are off that day. The rockets aren't playing. So it's a day to kind of sit in front of the TV and kind of see what's going on. 23% are fired up, can't wait, and 18% are, eh, waiting until September. So, to each is own. But I just kind of like kind of get a feel for things. Mm-hmm. So, I think a lot of that obviously depends on where you're drafting.

If you're the Las Vegas Raiders and you're about to get a franchise quarterback, you think, or the number one pick, like, for instance, if I put this question up five years ago or four years ago, we're also when the Texans had, you know, two, in theory, top five picks, people will be losing their mind over this. Yeah. When you pick 28 and it's, eh, it's fine. And when you got 83% of people tuning in? I would hope so. If it was like 23%, I'd be really nervous.

there you go. By the way, draft show Thursday, Big City Wings marquee location. So Wax is going to go from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on the air? I don't know if I don't know exactly the exact schedule.

I guess I need to talk to Gordy about this. I'm just going to show up and eat and go on air whenever they tell me. Yeah. And you'll have your draft guide in front of you so you can sound halfway intelligent when you can. Yeah. I mean, I've been studying up. I've been watching tape. Have you really?

I'm very happy for you. Yeah, I got to. No, you can't sit next to Adam Wexler and not know any prospects. Because he's going to try to son you. He's going to start trying to throw a bunch of names you never heard of at you and try to throw you off. No, that's not nice.

That's not a good teammate. Like, Ross, do you know who the third? Can you give me three linebackers that would be particular? Oh, linebackers? I don't know if they're going to the linebackers. No, I can't. Can you give me three quarterbacks? Quarterbacks?

Yes. Fernando Mendoval. Ty Simpson and No, no, no, no. No, no. I'm glad you asked that, Matt, because I've really been trying to look at a bunch of the quarterbacks, so I thank you for asking me about that.

Yeah, okay. We figured out you. We figured you out. You better get studied. I'm studying right now. You can't ask me in the middle of study. Yeah, I'm tuning you out and I'm studying. Jonathan.

Sounds like you trying to study for a class at SFA. You're trying to take the test and study at the same time. Well, at SFA, didn't they all, it wasn't everything open-notes it is? No, you know, there's some, I can't say the word on air, some professors over there that you, they're just, they're just some,

I'm a PG-13 here. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. We gotta ask, we gotta do this on the Jonathan Off-Air show. Yeah. Podcast. It's called Rip-on Jacks, J-A-C-S,

apostrophe. Terry, the posth of the first. Yeah. Terry on 790, good morning to you. Good morning, guys. I'm a loyal tip clocker, so I'm putting that out there. Thank you.

Hey, real quick, a couple of notorious astro killers, Hi, France, and Kyle Seeger, man, those guys every single time, it seemed like they would just light us up. I don't know why. Those are good names. But those two jump to mind real quick. With Durant, do we have any sort of feel whatsoever if he, you know, instincts, whether he's going to play tonight, if not, and they lose again? Are they done?

Or where are we at with that? Game time decision. They're going to shoot around. They're leaving the hotel here in about 45 minutes. and I just know that he has been an intense rehabilitation, working with the trainers, trying to rub the soreness out of it. And as he may said yesterday at practice here in L.A.,

it's going to be a game time decision. Okay. I wish I had more information than that. Okay. No problem. Hey, real quick, I had a question for you, Matt. We obviously hear a whole lot about the Cougars, the men's basketball team, but we never seem to ever hear about the women's team,

or are they just not very good, are they not competitive? Like, you know, like Texas men's and women's teams are both very good teams, but we never hear about U of H's women's team. Why is that? Well, how do I delicately put this? I don't think they've been good for 30 years. Okay. And so that's number one.

In fact, I'm going to look at the standings here. Ross, I did not have U of H. Women's question on my bingo card. The lady coogs. They last made the tournament in 2011. Oh, okay. Well, I was off then by. Well, I mean they made the tournament. It doesn't mean they were that good, maybe.

Houston last year in women's basketball was one in the big 12. What? What? Yeah. Sorry for laughing. And 7 and 23 overall. Honestly, it would, if Terry, for anybody to talk about women's college basketball in our community, they'd have to basically go to the final four. It's just not going to be a conversation piece. Okay. I got you. Now, I was just curious since, you know, they seems to do really well recruiting on the men's side. I thought maybe, you know, their, their, they're, they're my. be some sort of, you know, something for the women, for the ladies to, you know, similar, you know, that it would be like a draw for, you know, women to come here and play at you of age. I cannot speak intelligently about this, Terry.

I'm sorry, I just have no frame of reference. I did one of their games this year. One of the ladies had a half-court shot. It was kind of cool. Thank you, Terry, for the phone call. Thank you for being a 10 o'clocker. Did they lose the game? I imagine they did.

I have my heartfelt conversation by the Rockets, and I've got a little bit of breaking news that's irritating me here. Breaking news, that's irritating you. Yeah, at the top of the hour. Oh, we're going to do it right now? Or when we come back? We come back. I got to do my heartfelt rocket plea first,

and then I go to the breaking news. So we've got that, both those things coming up in the next segment, after Ross tells you where he wants you to eat and drink. This is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. Right, small bit of breaking news first. It's not really breaking. It's just a story that pisses me off. Go and give me one sounder. There it is.

Vanessa sent this to me via text. Joe Buck is closing in on a deal to host ESPN Jeopardy. ESPN Jeopardy? ESPN Jeopardy. Like Sports Jeopardy? Yep. Hmm. Expected to run on Hulu and Disney Plus and may also run on linear TV on ABC and ESPN streaming platforms this summer, sources said.

This is from front office sports. Wow. What's wrong? He'll do a good job. What's the problem? I want that job. Were you up for it? I didn't know it was available.

Do you apply for it? Didn't know it was up. Didn't see that, didn't see the job. Matt, you want one of these jobs? You got a higher agent or something. Nobody's going to come to you and say, hey, Matt, do you want to host ESPN Jeopardy? Why not?

Why not? I'm a respected sports broadcaster, NBA play by a play band, friend to all, lovers to many. Lovers to many. Well, I'm in my family. You know what I mean. I don't just say lovers to your wife.

I wish for my wife and my kids. I mean, so what, Joe Buck has done 15 or 20 World Series? So what if he's done a couple of Super Bowls? So what if he's making $11 million a year doing 20 games a year? I mean, there are probably names that came up, and then there was negotiations. Matt, you got to get your agent, and you got to get your agent in the fray fighting for you. It's not going to just fall into your lap.

All right. I need a sports agent. I need an agent, period. You need an entertainment agent because you want to be the show host. Yes. All right. So if anybody knows anybody that can get me a good, I don't want like a B-list agent. I need a highly respected, what is it, CAA, William Morris kind of people.

Ask Vanessa. She's probably got an agent. You know what? I'll ask her. I still want to host the price is right. That's my real jam. Sports Jeopardy is fine, but it's a bunch of, nerds on there.

I think you missed your window on the price is right. You know, because Drew Carey's never giving that up, isn't it? No, I don't think so. It looks like he's in pretty good health too. Yeah, I lost weight, which is disappointing. I know, I'm sorry. By the way, you have to watch

there is a two episode, I think it's on E-network. It was kind of the behind the scandal of the Price is Right with Bob Barker. Okay. You need to watch it. Not a huge fan of African-American people, which is sad.

And apparently a huge fan of Diane Parkinson, one of the Barker beauties, until she wound up being with other men, and he didn't look particularly like that. But he was okay with being with other women. And then he fat shamed one of the girls, and they, you know, it's just ugly. It was terrible.

There you go. Watch that, enjoy that. I'm sorry, you, but it's not good news to find out your hero was a racist and a bad person. Yeah, not the best news in the world. Not at all. I'm sorry, Matt. But he did, I mean, he did get a Barker Beauty for a long time.

It was the hottest of the Barker Beauties, too. I mean, he did okay for himself. There's a few lines in the story that I cannot tell over the air, but Diane Parkinson was not afraid to tell the world what she was doing to Bob. And on that note, all right, here comes a heartfelt message from me to you, the great people that are listening to the show. so I have when you're a kid you have dreams

and the dream one of the dreams was to be the radio voice or a broadcaster for the Houston Rockets and I've been able to live my dream for the last 10 years and it's been fantastic and I love every minute of it I love the call of the game I love the drama I love going to these beautiful places in the country and calling these games and these insane nice hotels and fancy

I mean all the lifestyle it's a really really rewarding experience So it's a great compliment to being able to talk to you guys every day for four hours. So I live two really, really fun lives. I don't want it to come to an end. But things do have to come to an end. And ultimately, the end would be a world championship in June. The reality is, and Ross has kind of put me, ground to me,

no one in the world thinks that Oklahoma City is going to lose the rockets, if the rockets advance the second round. There's nobody in the world except maybe the guys that are wearing a rocket. a gear that think the Rockets can be the Columbia City. And I want to believe that. But they would be heavy, heavy underdogs. Correct, Ross? I mean, yes.

We'll be the series price on a Rockets Thunder series. I'm going to say, like, minus, let's see, the Rockets are minus 800. I'm going to say minus 700, somewhere around there, like 7-1, if not more. Okay. So, in my mind, Ross, I know where this team is and what could be, and I know where its ending point would be. And unfortunately, probably a second round exit. I hope I'm wrong.

but in order to be wrong, you've got to get past the first round. So I come to you at 11.07 on a, I don't know if it's glorious back home, but it's beautiful here in L.A. I come to you saying, for my mental health, I need them to beat the Lakers this round. And because I want to know what it's like to play Oklahoma City. I want to know how far the rockets need to go. Are you sure? Oh, you want to know what it's like to get in the ring with Mike Tyson, too? Yeah, but I can be Buster Douglas.

Right? No, you can't. Damn it. You can't. Kevin Durant can. Kevin Durant, maybe. I mean, Thompson can. I guess.

Upsets happen. Seven game upsets a little bit different. Okay, okay. All I'm telling you is, I don't, I'll be nothing short of crushed if we don't beat the Lakers. You'll be over in like two days.

Are you sure? Yeah. Because Luca is not here. Austin Reeves is not here. And I just don't know if I want to watch three more games where the rockets shoot sub-40% from the floor. They're going to be better. I hope. That's what I'm saying.

I'm just openly pleading. Please be better. You have my personal guarantee. They're shooting over 37% tonight. That's not a great kind of guarantee. You have my personal guarantee T as well. Luke Kinnard will not make every single three he shoots. Thank God.

But if he goes six for seven, we're still screwed. That's true. And it is possible. So I'm just telling you, it's like, you know, it's almost like a, how would I, I'm trying to give an analogy on this. And you know me, I'm Mr. analogy. Uh-huh.

I mean, how about you work so hard on a project, a big sales presentation, and you think you've got the deal, you got the sale, but you're not sure that other person's going to buy what you're offering. I mean, I just, yeah, like, you've got the sale and it falls through. Or how about your, you're interviewing for a job and like, you know, you know somebody? Then they already told you like, hey, man, you got the job. Like, this is just a formal. This, this interview is a formality. And then you don't get the job. Yes. That happened to me once, but. I don't, Ross. I do. I think you're underestimating how depressed I'll be if the rockets lose this.

I think you'll move on fine. I know why you're really going to be upset and you'll be fine. I mean, I do have a high school graduation party to pay for. You want to come? No, I don't think it would be fair to your son since I didn't make it to there, so I got to keep all things equal. Okay, so you're okay. That's so I have to abstain. No, but I mean, I do enjoy this.

I mean, for the interest of our radio show, it's good to have local teams competing because I got news for you, Ross, and you know this better than anybody. When the Rockets are done, we're not talking NBA basketball except passing along a score. Am I wrong? Well, it's not like we're buzzing with Rockets calls right now. Oh, yeah, we are.

I'm seeing the phone lines right now. There's six four lines. Please beat the Lakers. That's what I'm saying. Please beat the Lakers. I'm going to tell you why as well. I know we argue over a must-win game. This is a must-win game for my sleep tonight.

Because if they have 9-30 and they play until after midnight and they lose and I'm taking calls until like 1-30, I'm not going to be happy. Just human nature. We get more calls when they lose and they win. That's anybody. That's fine. So please Rockets win so I can get to bed at a decent hour. Please Rockets win because I would like to have Rocket people that listen to show and enjoy the call and say, hey, that was a great game last night. I can't wait to go get a ticket to be in the arena and scream and yell Friday night at 7 o'clock.

I have bad news for you. Even more. Even if Durant plays, that's no guarantee of a win. I mean, five and a half, four and a half point favorites? You're still on the road. You still got to take care of business. LeBron is still good. And then the team around him is solid.

If they play well together, they can get you what's going on. Well, what happened in game one? but the good news is your offense could, it can and will be better. It will be better. Hall your shot. A rocket, you know what? I will.

Rock, save it for 1130. Fine. My fault. You put your name on it, the 1130 can. Got feeling. Okay. I'm putting my name on it. Okay.

Good. I got to do for mental help. I just do. Yeah, that's fine. It doesn't matter. So what, Luke Conard had occurred, playoff high 20s? So what?

The Rockets had 21 offensive rebounds. So what? The Lakers. All right. Turn this guy's microphone off. 66 field goal attempts. Few us in NBA game in three seasons. 66 attempts.

1130. Got feelings. Put my name on it. Here we go. 713. 2.12. 5 is 790. 7.13.

212. 5.790. Joe Espadaeuxa joins us at 1230. I'm going to ask you, question, Ross, and I want to ask Joe, and I want you to roll play for Joe. Okay. And we'll do that coming back. Real quick, if any of you are OG

basketball fans, I just watched the documentary Ross yesterday on the jailblazers. He was on Netflix yesterday. It's about 70 minutes. Very, very interesting. Really? Yes. Who's your favorite? Can I get a jailblazer power rankings?

Who is the most unruly? Probably Rashid Wallace. He just set a record for 10,000 a season, and It's still record of this day. I thought it was Roshweed Wallace. Damon Stademeyer, who was part of that, Bonzi Wells, who kind of got caught up in it. Yes.

And they kept playing the Lakers every single year in losing. It sounds like us with Golden State. Yeah. It's not fun. They should have had them that one year. What was it? Where they had game six at home or something like that? Yeah, like 98, 99 somewhere in that range.

Once the calendar turned to the decades, the 2000. It didn't turn out well. But yeah, really interesting if you're an OG basketball fan. And was Arvita Sabonis getting mixed up to? Yeah, apparently he was the recipient of a few punches from teammates and whatnot. It was an ugly group. Oh, no, I mean, was he he wasn't like breaking into Ford Taurus's and stuff?

No, no, no, no. He wasn't robbing old folks and making the dash. Was he running into Tarnie's steel Subaru just? Is that what you're thinking to? I guess he's not so inconspicuous. It's 7 foot 2 in like 350 pounds. And couldn't move either. I mean, you can remember that.

That stage of his career. Arvita Sabonis is one of the great what-ifs. Yeah. Well, he was a great international player. I know like Jonathan, have you ever heard of the name Arvita Sabonis? Never in my life. Okay. He was like an incredible player from Lithuania, I believe.

And he played for the USSR so he couldn't play professionally in America. He didn't get here until he was like into his 30s. and he was still really good, great passer, seven foot three, seven foot two-ish, big man with one of the best court visions you'll ever see. And his son is a good NBA player, DeMontas. DeMontas. The bonus, yes.

Yeah. So. But yeah, definitely if you're in the doc mode, because I've just come down to the fact that documentaries to me are just so fast. Again, that's why I'm a biopic guy. I love looking at old stuff and reflecting on things. So if you're an OG fan, the Joe Blazers doc on Netflix is outstanding.

Let's go to the phones and talk to the great people. Houston. We've got gut feelings coming up at about 10 minutes. Joe is spot at 1230. And I have a question that I want to pose. I want you to role play Joe for a minute in a little bit here as well. Let's talk to Mike on 790. Mike, good morning to you. Okay. That's a bonus comment of a big. He kicked in two cars, right? That was one of the funniest things of the year so part. But you know, I love you guys like family, except for a plan. He's kind of like a red-headed step, stuff. But you guys are still in love with the year. And I just don't see how you're going to be so passionate about this product.

And I know you have reasons. Both y'all have reasons because the NBA is nothing like it used to be. Yet I really don't like the way y'all's downplayed the quality of basketball we saw in the front of them this year in college basketball role where guys actually played defense and everything. I just find it very hard. And I believe rocket red over the years. Rudy and all the guys

I just can't be as passionate about this and I just don't feel that talking amongst my friends that there's the same passion that all of you share and I know you're all very much more invested personally or nationally whatever you're the voice of the rockets

but yeah but I was a fan let me let me let me make a comment and I'll give you a chance to comment first of all before I was the voice of the rockets I love the rockets I mean I just that's the team I grew up with. Number two, I've been a fan for since I was eight years old, so if you're a fan of something for 40 or 50 years, you're going to love it.

Now, again, I am not blind to the fact that perhaps Ross and I have more energy for the NBA than the average person. That's why we don't spend a lot of time talking non-rocket stuff. We don't get into a deep dive of how great Minnesota Denver was last night because, again, frankly, most of you didn't see it. Or did you watch Atlanta, New York? I get that. But if you're going to try to tell me that college basketball is this fluid art of poetry and science, that's ridiculous.

College basketball sucks, Mike. It really does. 35% shooting, a lot of turnovers, a lot of stoppage and play, miss free throws. College basketball is a very hard watch. So if you want to tell me that you're not a fan of the NBA, I can respect that. But don't tell me that this thing called college basketball is a work of art. It's just not. In the final, the team that won the national champion,

ship shot 38% in the final and 13% from three. The team that lost said 31%. You're just not paying attention if you're saying the college product is better than the NBA product. And maybe, you know what? Trust me. My dad took me a sheep, Pistol Pete played when it was the New Orleans Jazz. I love to that point. I watch Calvertie beat somebody up.

A center on the, there were no TVs back there. I love the sport. And I don't disagree. Maybe I'm slanted because, like, she penned my money, gambling on the tournament. But I do, I am a fan of the Cougars. I'm a fan of watching, you know, SEC college football, college basketball. I just, for me, it's more interesting, but you're right. It's not about the shooting.

But I guess LeBron has really killed it for me as far as just being the drama queen. And, I mean, I loved MJ, the 90s basketball. You know, that was just the apex for me. and just, sorry, but I would definitely watch college basketball over any NBA game. I just can't. I mean, I do. You're not, look. I love them.

Yeah, I can't tell you, Mike, what you like and don't like it. And thank you for the phone call. You're not the only person's ever told me that. Or, you know, it would be others that do that. I mean, I run to this all the time. I run into this all the time, and I get it. All I say is, okay, I'm sorry you don't like it. It's okay.

I'm not going to try to browbeat you to it. I'm not going to say that your sports take sucks or you have no idea what you're talking about. I just, I happen to enjoy it. And again, if you sat, if you were late night, if you were a night out last night and you had nothing else to do and you put the TV on, and you watch Minnesota play Denver, that was a hell of a basketball game. That was great shot making. That was defense. That was runs.

It was everything that, again, didn't have a dog of the fight. I enjoyed it. and I enjoy the NBA. And again, we're not going to over the head, knock you down with it. But if the rockets are involved, I would hope as a local team you'd at least watch that. Now, I do love my Houston Cougars.

I do love watching them play college basketball. But I'll be damned if I'm going to watch Syracuse versus Georgia Tech. That ain't going to happen. So that's just my thoughts. Yeah, like you said, Matt, watching Anthony Edwards and Nicola Yokic go at it, Yokic is like going to ascend into the top 10 all time.

Anthony Edwards is one of the great faces of the league. And neither of those guys, none of those teams are even the top level championship contenders. And LeBron James, I guess the crybaby stuff and some of it's political or whatever, but if you're watching the basketball, what he did on Saturday night at 41 years old, he played 38 minutes, he had 13 assists, he was backing down and destroying Jabari Smith Jr. guys that are half his age. And Tari Isson, he's destroying them in the post. He's finding guys off of double teams.

He's knocking down deep threes. Like, the basketball that he was playing is incredible. And I get there. And like you said, man, he's not the only one that thinks LeBron's a crybaby and the NBA is horrible now. But if you actual watch the product and the level of skill that these guys have, I just, of course, disagree. And I also want to say, I have zero financial interest.

in the Rockets being good. I volunteer. This is a little secret for you, folks. I volunteer to do these Rockets games. Okay? I don't get paid extra. I love doing Rockets pre and post game shows because I love basketball.

It is a labor of love. So if you want to come on this show and tell me that I have a financial investment in the Rockets being good, you're wrong. I have a financial interest in the Rockets being good. I'm flat out telling you that's what I have.

But I was this way before I was doing games. You know that. I've done every playoff game since 2017. I've got paid extra for zero of them. So I love NBA basketball. I love doing Rockets pre and post game shows. It's important to meet.

Yeah, and I did them before I was doing the games. I did the post game show to 1.30 in the morning when Damien Lillard hit that shot in Portland. I wasn't calling the games. Remember Ross? I was at Toyota Center Memorial Day when the Armageddon, the floods came into our area. That was good times. you were giving you were giving you weather updates more than you were in anything else yeah i was weather i was weathering traffic guy and talking to dwight howard on the floor

so i mean look i know politics has hurt sports but politics has hurt hollywood too i don't know yeah i get it has i mean you can't be oblivious to it there are people that are now how many people that is i don't know nobody nobody would possibly be jibari alpringinging Alpern Shingoon, Josh Akogi, Amin, Thompson, Reed Shepard, J. Shantate, Tari, Easton, Clint Capella, Aaron Holiday, Kevin Durant. Who's like, who's the huge...

No, room for the home team? That's what was like, who are the guys that I named that are making, like, these huge political statements? No. I mean, I can do it, but not everybody can. I understand. It was DeAndre Aiton campaigning for someone,

and I missed it. Luke Conard was. Yeah, was Luke Conard on the trail? And I don't know. Is he running for comptroller? Yeah, I'm not. not going to let LeBron's beliefs off the court impact what I watch

on the court. That's it. I'm not going to George Clooney thinks politically to if he's, if he's an Ocean's 14 and the movie's good, I'm going to go watch it. Is it 14? I forget what number it is these days. I think they're I thought it was a prequel. So they're doing Oceans 9? No, now I'm confused. Yeah, now they're doing a

prequel, I think. Or are Danny Ocean's parents or scammers or something. Yeah. But we're, look, we're in 2026. I understand. And political beliefs will affect television viewing. It affects sports. It just does. I'm not oblivious to that. The NBA is the first sport

where people love to tell you how much they hate it. And that's even people who watch it. And frankly, and I will say this, and we're going to get to a break here to get the gut feelings. There was the people that were saying last year. If you watch Charles and Kenny and Shaq, the most entertaining pre-game halftime post

game show in the history of sports in terms of pure entertainment, they do more hating on their sport than anybody else. And I think that does impact how people think it is. Yeah, and it's not the perfect sport. Foul issues, foul baiting. Tanking.

Yes, tanking. The league has some serious issues. It does. But last night, in Los Angeles, in my very comfy bed, I watched the game, and I was like, this is a knockdown, drag-out, awesome basketball game. And hopefully the Rockets will give us some of that tonight. Just a knock-down. No, drags out.

Just beating by 30. Yeah, that's right. But, yeah, what I, you can't, Indiana versus Minnesota basketball, two teams combining to make 39% of their shots. I gave you,

I gave you the actual literal championship final, 38 and 31%. Yeah. I know. All right, gut feelings time. Plus, I want you to roll play Joe a spot.

It's going to join us in one hour here on 790. 11.30 is our time. If you want to join the conversation, you may do so. 713, 2.12.7.90. We need your gut feelings. What is in your gut? How the Astros are going to do this week against the Guardians. The Yankees coming up this weekend. Anybody want a gut feeling on that?

Just asking for friends. Gut filling on the Rockets Lakers. Got feeling on anything in the world of sports. Gut feeling I will ever get to host the prices right? Don't answer that question. 713-212-5-790. 1131. It's Matt and Ross here in L.A. Sports Talk 790. 7-19-1-3-21-5-7-90. Call in right now with your gut feelings.

Listen up, girls and boys. This has been so appealing. You know, they got a good feeling. This is their gut-feeling on the Matt Thomas show. 212-5-7-90. Real quick, Ross, roll play. I'm Matt, your Joe. Skip.

Is it going to be 16 players on the injured list again? How does he answer that? Yeah, look, Matt, this is just something that we have to deal with. It's unfortunate, and these are some punches we're going to have to roll with. We've dealt with this before. These guys that we have are going to have to step up, and we have a resilient group, and we have guys who are going to fight and battle, and that's all we can do right now is get on the field and give it our best. 1230 today, sports talk 790 right there.

I really I legitimately feel bad for him Me too Horrible start in 24 Everybody in their grandma injured in 25 and now it's like everybody in their grandma and their other grandma and their aunties and uncles hurt In 26

All right I want you get a pen in front of you Yes Here we go I'm going to start listening to make sure we get the exact number Okay Taylor Tremel Oh gosh Nick Allen You want to write the names down or no just write

Just put it dashes Sure why not Okay Taylor Tremel Nick Allen, Josh Hader, Jeremy Pena, Bennett Sousa, Nate Pearson, Zach DeSenzo, Christian Javier, Tatsuya Emi, Joy Lo Perfito, Cody Bolton, Jake Myers, Hunter Brown, Renele Blanco, Hayden Wisniewski, Brandon Walter.

That's 16. 16. Now, not everybody on that list was on the opening day roster, so it's not nearly as A lot of them, most of them? A lot of more. A lot of more. You say Josh Hader, right? Yeah.

Okay. Terrible. It's just, it's frankly not fair. It really isn't. And I don't know if that's going to give him or Dana any saving grace at the end of the season. Because they're both on lame ducks. There's no other way to say it. I mean, I'm not thinking, you know.

EMI threw a bullpen yesterday. Okay. Cody Bolton threw live BP yesterday. Okay. So that's some good news there if you're looking for it. All right, there it is. Got feelings time. How did we do last week?

Well, Matthew, I'm glad you asked. Last week, you said that the Astros would be worse than 500 under 500 by the end of the month. Jerk. Terrible. What are they now? 9 and 15. You said the Rockets will win the Lakers Series in 5, so they need to win the next 4. Possible.

Could happen. Yeah. You also had the Rockets winning game one Comfortably I didn't have Kevin Durant hurt, did I? No, you did not And that's what I have for you I had 500 ball for the Astros rest of the month

I don't think I'm doing so hot on that No, because that was No, they're two, they're three and three and four since you said that So I'm close You're close I have five, no, I don't think that I think they'll only won two games

But I digress Oh no, you're right three because they won yesterday. You're right. Okay, so I'm close. I'm close. Five and a ball, baby. Just keep this thing afloat. I said the Astros will win the series versus the Rockies.

Dub. Rockets in five. Whoops. No, possible. Whoops. I said guaranteed win Tuesday for the Astros. They held on. They did.

7 to 6. By the skin of their teeth. Yep. All good there. I said they would score at least three runs. they scored seven, I believe. There you go. I said the Rockets would cover game one.

Whoops. Whoops. And I said Thunder over Celtics NBA finals. To be determined. Yes. How'd Jonathan do? Jonathan had the Astros going 400 the rest of April. I hope I'm wrong.

And he had the Rockets winning a close one in game one, 117 to 115. So that was the closest one on Turner's prediction. You all have them lung at water. Well, Kevin Durant didn't play. That's fair. I'm not. Yeah, you ought to predict that. No, you're still gloating.

Go ahead. Don't be bragging about that. Oh, yeah. Hold on. You know, it's just observation. Come on now, gloater. It's just observation. All right, Matthew.

What do you got? Rockets by 6 tonight. Ooh. Cover. Cover. Even with, does Durant play? Got a feeling on that? Yes.

Oh, man. Now, do I think he's going to play 36 minutes? No. Okay. If that's the case, he is the most miraculous 37-year-old from a guy had a very bad knee contusion to playing 37 minutes. That'd be quite a change of pace. Rockets by 10.

Whoa! What's up? Love it. Let's go. I ain't scared. Good. Jonathan? I'm going to say,

they win the next two rockets. I can give you a score prediction. Okay. Friday and Sunday, or today and Friday, sorry. What's the weather in Cleveland today? 71. Jeff Blum was talking about it yesterday. Okay.

Now, from the man that brought you Quality Start Plus? No, nobody accepts that. That's a narrative that you made up. From the man that brought you Quality Start Plus, I now bring you the light quality start. What? Light quality from Ryan Weiss.

Light quality. Like five innings of two-run ball. It's like a light quality. Like what Arrogati gave you last night. No, no. It's either quality or it's not. No, yeah. It's like a rare.

Medium rare. Folks, light quality start. Do not allow this fraud to make up metrics. No. First of all, quality starts made up. If you get a quality start, you got a 450 ERA.

It's not like you're incredible. But we didn't make that up. That's been long. No, it is made up. Show me in the baseball rule book where it says this is a quality start. We made up. I'll Google it'll show up. You're going to Google it.

It's not going to show up in the rulebook. Abner Doubleday wasn't talking about no quality starts back in the day. Okay? So I'm telling you, it's like when you get the, you know, light ice on your drink. It's like a light quality. All right. I got a metric for a high like my steak. Good.

Rare, medium well. That doesn't make any sense. Exactly. I didn't say it's a light quality start plus. Then your analogy works, Mr. Analogy. It's a light quality start. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. No one knows what you're talking.

Well, Spencer Arrogati gave you five innings of two-run ball yesterday. How was that? Did you hate that? I didn't hate it. Was it bad? Nope. Was it a quality start? Not by the rules.

It wasn't, no. So it was a light quality start. Light quality from Ryan Weiss. It was like a quality start zero sugar. Exactly. All right. People make sense. How about that? Diet quality start. Okay.

Oh, my God. All right. I mean, come on. I'm trying to be optimistic. It's Ryan freaking Weiss. Astros in the next five games. Two with Cleveland, three with the Yanks. Two and three. Yeah, that feels about right.

I don't want it to be, but I got a deal in realities here. Is it going to be? but colors versus the Yankee. Positive. You know what? You know what? He shows up for big games.

Yeah. It's a big one. Not a must swim, but it's a big one. And for like big opponents. Like he can stymie the Dodgers on the road. Yes. And the Mariners too.

Maybe he'll carve up the Yankees on Friday. Against the Marlins, not so much. Yeah. All right, John, what do you got? If Astros do not win both of these series, we're going to have to have some conversations to see about if they might just have to go back and build up a new roster.

Blowing up the roster. You're saying blowing up the roster, they don't win these series? Next two series. The conversation will start getting more serious. You obviously have not checked out social media in the last. Yeah, they want two hours. People want Yorda on off the team. ready. I'm just saying that that would be a serious

and it wouldn't be an overreaction because there's got to be something going on. Okay. How's Yordon pacing, by the way? Oh, he's well over 130. Well over 130. Let's go, baby. All right. We get your gut feelings next. 713-212-5-790.

About 40 minutes ago, Mike Vrable, the coach of the Patriots, addressed the media in Boston. I'm going to send the, I can't see if the audio is good enough to air. it's a long statement if you transcribed it so if we can try to play the audio we'll do that coming up in the next hour but i'm going to send it to jonathan the scene to figure out whether the quality is good or not but he did address um frankly some mistakes he made and um did you see it

real quick before i go the phone is you about draft picks or what is he talking about his little ex-girlfriend is that sidepiece side piece Yeah. Did you see the story that apparently the owner of the Patriots? What's his face? Robert Kraft. Robert Kraft was trying to hide the evidence. No, I did not see that story.

Matt, is this reliable? Is this off your 4U tab? No. In Ballsack Sports. I have long muted them. Okay, good. I can't get in trouble with them again. So, yeah.

Jonathan, who said this? What's that? Who had the story about Robert Kraft covering stuff up. I want to say TMZ did maybe. Oh, really? That is not confirmed, but I just, I happen to see it. But there is multiple reports that had Vrable and Rusini talking to each other about how to

properly cover up the story and make sure their stories were straight. Oh, really? Which is that comes a zero surprise, right? Hmm. In touch magazine, apparently. In touch of what? It's all over this. Let's go to the phone.

Isn't that a tabloid? It's an offshoot of people, I think. Okay. Yeah. Let's go to Easy. Easy 1153. Easy, what's in your gut this week? This week, the Astros is weeping the series against the Yankees.

You heard you hear first. Wow. That's a hot tape. Number two, Jonathan will be Mr. Freeze before you get on the prices rate. and I'm in a little gentleman. Thank you, Jason. That's rude. Are you an easy related, Jonathan?

Be the, tell the truth. Not at all. We've got a brotherly love back here. I mean, he said his numbers are better than the freeze. I've got to take him at his word on that. You can just look me up on T-Fers. T-Fers. We need to get you a cost.

If you're going to go against the freeze, we're going to get you, what would be your name? I mean, hog nuts? I mean, is that what you want to go with? Hmm. Hog nuts versus the freeze? Doesn't sound that compelling. Hognuts sponsored by a peach basket.

Hey, hey, hey. I like that. Are they playing in Atlanta or in Houston this year? Oh, the Astros and the Braves? The Astros, yeah. For Dubon's homecoming? Does he get a video? Oh, no.

Oh, no. What? Don't bring up Dubon to the Houston Astro. Why not? It was their mind. Well, at least Nick Allen's playing great and he's healthy, right? No, and no. Both of those.

Oh. Let's see. They play Atlanta at home at the end of the season. So it could be for a playoff spot. September 18th. It's the third to the last season of the year. Atlanta at home, then they go on the road to Seattle for two and on the road to the hated A's in Sacramento for four.

Why do the Astros always play the A's in the last week of the year? I always feel like it's never going to turn out very well. Yeah. So you got to watch out for those plucky A's. All right. Last call for a gut feeling. You need you tell me you got one person this town's got a gut feeling about something?

Y'all just afraid to put your stick your neckouts, aren't you? Is that what it is? I think we've got to do draft gut feelings. Oh, okay, that's fine. Yeah, absolutely good call. Draft coverage presented by Bud Light will be at the Marquis Center location of Big City Wings starting at 6 o'clock.

Myself, Wex, Cole Thompson, Dan Matthews. How may be there? One, Texans trade out of the first round. Okay. And they will go defensive tackle. Really? Yeah.

Okay. Texans take an interior alignment was in their first two picks. Okay. I could see them trading up or out. I will just say, can I just say trade up or down? They don't stay? Sure you can. Of course you can.

Yeah. Okay. There you go. There it is. Draft coverage, Thursday night, here on Sports Talk 790. Yeah, I won't be there, unfortunately. Big City Wings.

Marquis location. Okay. It's double boneless on Thursdays, right? Yeah. How are you all going to all talk at the same time? We don't have four microphones available. They're not going to be, we're not going to be all four on. It's going to be in shifts.

Will Adam take his headset off for a second? I will be on 8 to 10. Ooh, you get the last. late shift? Of course. I'd start late. Well, I guess Adam Wexler starts latest, but he'll be on as well. Yeah, but that'll be the good spot, because that's one, because the draft doesn't even really start until seven. So you're going to be in a good position there. To have your immediate gut reaction of the Texans trading out of the first round. You want to give me a name of a prospect, and I'll make it up, and then I'll throw it

at Cole and Wex. Okay. That feels rude. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to go into your little cheat game. I wasn't going to do it anyways. people used to do that to a guy named Joel Bushbaum way back in the day when he was calling on in KTRH. It would call in with these prospects and they would make it up, you know? No, I don't want, no, we're better than that. Or not, but for the sake of the show, we're not. All right, you know what we got to do? We've got to hear some Ohio players.

You ready to hear that? Yes. Because the Astros made some Ohio plays. Joe Espott is going to join us in 35 minutes here. Love it. On Sports Talk, 790. Our time is 1158. Let's get to that top of the hour.

The news at noon. And John, did you listen to that Vrable? How's the audio? It's not horrible. Okay. Well, I think we should play it because I want to hear, as compared to us, reading what he said, be just easier to, you know, run a few seconds of it. So we'll let you hear what Mike Vrable had to say to address the,

hmm, how do you want to describe the recini or late? I mean, sidepiece reporter gate? Is that what we're going to call it wrong? I don't even know what's called. Trist, yeah. Sedona Gate. Seduction in Sedona. How about that?

Oh, I like that. That's what the documentary will be called. Yeah. Get a rotten tomatoes terrible score. Or like the TV movie available only on Hulu. Yeah, it won't be on the Hallmark Channel. I can tell you that for damn sure. Why not?

They're going out of business? There's nothing Hallmark about that. That's like, that's got to be least case. Lifetime. Lifetime. Okay. I'm getting confused. I don't watch them.

channels so I wasn't getting your references. You're a better man than I am. Sorry. All right. 1159 on Sports Talk 790. This is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. Hoskin gets thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double and that is the ball game. Proud of 2000 were there, I guess. Maybe 1,500. That one Gibroni kept yelling the whole time at El Tubei.

Sorry, say again, man. Now I was just talking about how cold and miserable it was. It was cold. He scored nine runs in the cold. It was nice. Maybe we're better when the Astros are playing in temperatures less than 45. Three hits for Correa, three for Walker, three for Parreras. And the stash that Christian Walker's done in now?

Yes. All part of? Letoos a noon? Oh, I love this, I love this. I love this one. A 9 to 2 victory for your Houston Astros. Now 2 and 9 on the road on the C. season. As I mentioned, three hits for Kare. A couple of runs batted in. Walker with a two-run shot to start off things.

Esoc Paredes with two home runs, solo shots to the left field. By the way, 23 solo shot home runs for the Astros. Most in baseball. Let's get some more guys on base, fellas. Spencer Arrigetti with a light quality start, five innings pitch. Stop. What? We're really going to put this into existence. If you really, look, everything I try doesn't work either, but I will. support you. If you want to call it a light quality start, I'm not feeling supported right now. You're in. I'm supporting you. Five hitting pitch, two earn runs. He did issue four walks, ran up the pitch

count a little bit. Only three strikeouts after 10 in his previous start, but hey, all as well that ends well, 96 pitches for him. Season ERA, 2.45. Erigetti is your Astros ace, Matthew. Game one starter. Playoffs.

They're 9 and 15, Matt. Game two starter would be. whoever's on their couch. And game three. Lance McCullery, Jr. All right. What else you got? I guess.

Rockets in action in Los Angeles. The word is that Kevin Durant is a game time decision. Vega seems to think that he will play. Holding right now is a four and a half point favorite, but who knows that could fluctuate depending on Kevin Durant's availability. In game one, there were two and a half point favorites with Kevin Durant out of the game. We'll see what happens.

in game number two. Some calling it a must win game. I am. Sure, why not? If they lose, they're not going to fold up shop. They can still win. They've got to win four out of five. City of Houston might, though, sadly. No, the stands will be full on Friday at the Toyota Center. It might be full of Lakers fans.

Hey. But it'll be full. I'll be ready to go in the city of Houston as the Rockets take on the Lakers tonight. 9.30 late start. I will be at the Little Woodrow's East downtown location for the Rockets launch pad come check it out as it'll be

Clux the Bear, Cluck City Dancers, Rocket's official watch party in East Downtown. All right, elsewhere, we got a bunch of news going on, Matt. Did you see who's joining the NBC as an NFL studio analyst? I did, but tell the audience, please. Mike Tomlin,

joining the Sunday night pregame show Football Night in America as a studio analyst. sources have confirmed to ESPN. How do you think he'll do, Matt? He'll be great. He was always very glib. Yeah, he'll be just fine. Now, it's a temporary thing.

He's going to coach again. I'm firmly going to believe he's going to coach. Wait for the right situation. Or maybe he'll like retirement. We always thought Bill Cowher is going to come back and some other. Well, I guess. I bet you what year are we in 2026? Mike Talton's coaching again by 2030.

Easy by 2030. He's got to find the right situation. He'll find it. And the right piggy bank. First thing, you find somewhere with a quarterback that's underperforming, making the playoffs. But they feel like they feel like they need someone to get them to the next level. Okay. Yes.

Mike Tomlin, apparently the talks between he and ESPN picked up steam in Augusta, Georgia. Sources tell ESPN's Jeremy Fowler. Okay. Billy Donovan is stepping down as the Bulls head coach after six seasons. Bulls announced Donovan's decision today, saying they wanted a long time. coach to remain in Chicago, but added they respected his choice. Sweeping changes being made in the Chicago Bulls front office, Billy Donovan, available for your college or NBA team.

I thought he was really going to go to North Carolina, but he didn't go. Michael Malone's going there. Apparently, they got impatient, UNC. Yeah. Because they weren't sure if what kind of decision he was going to make. That's a great question. Where does he land? I don't even know the answer to that question.

Well, maybe a coach will get an incident with a staffer and then threaten suicide and get arrested and fired, and then Billy Donovan could step in. Wow, that was dark and very detailed. I mean, it happened at Michigan. I don't want to usurp your news at noon, but I think we need to. This will be the first time ever in the history of the news at noon,

which is going on a couple of years now. Hannah and Cal are making a statement, and we're going to play it for you right now here on the news at noon. When my parents brought football back home to Houston, their goal was simple. They wanted to win on and off the field the right way, and that still holds true today. Over the last 20-plus years, we've shared some incredible moments together, and we know there are many more ahead of us. The 20-26 season will be a special one, as we officially. celebrate 25 seasons of Houston Texans football. Back where it all began at Reliance Stadium.

Thank you for being a part of our legacy story since day one. Our legacy fuels us. Our future inspires us. And together we continue to build what it means to be the Houston Texans. Go Texans. Nine comments so far. One is I'm proud to be a PSL holder. Let's go win a Super Bowl.

It's nice. Patriot South with no quarterback. Awesome. Y'all should do something for the day one fans. I'll take a Super Bowl, please, and thanks. One, it says, draft an O. Lyman. One is, We love you, McNair.

And then another one says, is this AI? That's not AI. There's no chance it's AI. That's them. Now I'm going to go to the retweets and quotes. Let's see. Bringing attention to the 25th anniversary just makes me remember what a garbage organization has been. 25 years, no AFC championships,

bad GMs, bad ownership, you ought to continue to cheer. That's fair. And then a bunch of repost. People that have blocked me or people that are our competitors. Okay, there you go. I don't know that it's AI, but it looks a little weird

to start. I've looked at it a few times. I don't think it's anything crazy. Okay. You always get tricked. by A. That is accurate. And I just...

25 seasons of Texans football. Let's go. I mean, Hannah can do it without a teleprompter, but Cal probably can't. Our legacy story has been great. Thank you for 25 seasons of Texans football. In Greenbow, Alabama.

No, it's not Gump. It's not Cal Gump. Sorry. That's rude. It was. You need to say, write that down for Friday Sars. You're right. I'm sorry to the McNair family. I'm just jealous because he's a billionaire and I'm not. I'm trying to get a discount for Torotown.

What kind of discount? They're not charging entrance fees. No, but they're going to charge higher prices. I don't think so. Do you think Casario Bot will be patrolling the streets of Torotown? Casarobot is going to have restaurants. I am. Cicabot.

Broccoli with no salt. pepper on it. Brown rice. You may trade your brown rice for broccoli. And of course, the salad would be a word salad, of course. Hmm. It's got like alphabet cereal? I don't know what's good.

Like SpaghettiOs? Yeah. Hey, big draft party. Huge. Us. Massive. I think we're the only station in town doing a draft party. As far as I know.

Yeah. Brought to you by Bud Light. Mm. Cold. Crisp. Refreshing. You go. Joe Espada joins us in 15 minutes here on Sports Talk 790.

713212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-7-90. We've got Joe Espanaugh coming up in 10 minutes here on the program. Real quick. Not worthy of audio. I just want to just read it just a couple of statements off of what Mike Rable said to the media up in Boston today. Quote, I've had some difficult conversations with people. I care about it.

I care about with my family, the organization, the coach is the players. Those have been positive and productive. In order to be successful on and off the field, you have to make good decisions. That includes me, and that starts with me. Generally speaking, I'm looking at Twitter during the break here, Rossi. It feels like that he has been as forthcoming as he's going to be, not necessarily shying away, not giving a lot of details, but he obviously feels some remorse about his actions.

That's a good sign. I mean, it's compared to just going up in front of a camera and just saying, I don't know what you are talking about your line. There's no such thing. Nothing happened. You know what I mean? I mean, there's just too much evidence that says that that would be a flat-out lie. And that's what, and that's what Rucini did.

And she ultimately paid a price for that. Yeah. I mean, he didn't really say anything, though. I mean, I've had some difficult conversations with people. Well, what does that mean? Oh, I think, I can read the context on that. You can. Yeah, I would probably, if I was a PR person, I would say the exact same thing.

Don't announce anything. Don't mention her by name. don't mention exactly the acts or what you did and what kind of relationship. But if you want to say, I think difficult conversations is a nice, generic way of saying, yeah, I goofed up and my wife's telling me how bad I, you know, what I did was wrong. A private and personal matter. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's, I think it's, I'm not that he needs me to approve of what he says and doesn't say,

but I think that's probably what you needed to say without getting into too much detail. It's embarrassing, right? It's, you know. It's pretty crazy. They were hanging out at a pool together. No, I don't think we can get confirmation as to who paid for the photos. We know that TMZ paid for the photos from the person that took him. Or page six.

Oh, that's a New York Post. Excuse me, not PMZ. You're right about that. It's weird that a New York paper would want the goods on a Boston coach. Is it weird? I guess it really would matter. If Mike Vrabble was the coach of the Panthers, would it be any different for them? I don't think it would be a little bit.

But, I mean, well, page six is just, I thought it was like a tabloid or something. It is a, yeah. It's within the paper itself, so. Yeah. You know, again, I applaud him for release saying, look, I cannot out lie to y'all. I can't say nothing happened. I'm not, I'm not applauding him. I mean, I'm not applauding his act, but I'm saying I'm at least applauding that, you know,

There was nothing. You can continue. I mean, the people have lied all the time. People lie all the time. Even when you got all the information. I mean, there's just, you know, it's like it's, you know, like it was like with Raphael Palmeiro, Mark McGuire. Didn't you use steroids?

We didn't believe you then and you went in front of us a subcommittee and the Congress and said as much. We didn't believe you then. You were like almost double downing on the transgression. But, you know, who knows? How do the players feel? I mean, like, bro, we understand or goofed up and don't. and don't come after me when I make magnate my five of them.

I don't think there's anybody high-fiving. The number one thing that's come out of this whole thing, and not that we're going to spend any much more time on this, is that a lot of women in the industry are like, damn, as hard enough as it is for us to get credibility to begin with, and mis-sorceania, you're not helping to cause here. Mm-hmm. So, you know,

not much more, more concerned here. Yeah, it's just a crazy situation. Yeah. Yeah, not at all. But the memes about Adam Schaefter holding hands with him. Pretty funny, I'll be honest with me. Oh, I didn't see those. Oh, yeah.

People are superimposing a lot of things here, Ross. I don't know if you knew that or not. I don't know. I didn't know that. It's very easy to do with AI these days. Yeah, like the Rossini and Mike Brable holding each other at a co-play concert. Oh, I saw that one. It's pretty funny.

Not bad. All right. 1225 on Sports Talk 790. I'm here in Los Angeles for game number two tonight. We'll be on the air at 830 with 3. the launch pad. 930, it's over on KTRH. Are we going to put it on 790 when the rockets are, when the Astros are done?

Yes. Okay, we will join in progress. Okay. When the Astros are done. We'll see how long that goes. Well, hell, what is it, a 510 first pitch? That's not bad. Mm-hmm.

I mean, I would do the same thing if I was in the East Coast, too. It's too cold. People don't want to be out in cold weather than the month of April. I think I was done with Postgame by about about 9 o'clock last night. That's not terrible. Yeah. Not terrible at all. But the Astros to get a win.

We'll talk to Joe about it. Taylor-Termal, and as soon as he got to third base yesterday, I was like, something's not right. Yes. Joe said he heard himself going from first to third, I think. Yeah. So it's 16 once. Is everybody now fishing on the injure list that we need to?

I mean, or we get 16 full here. We counted it earlier. Yes, 16. So, and I'll bring this up to you again for the second time before we talked to Joe about this. If you're Jim Crane, are you like, are we doing something wrong? Are we not preparing our athletes well enough? Because this is the second straight year of double digit.

And unlike last year, Ross, it feels like to me, this is happening a lot sooner than even happened last year. Yeah, this is lightning fast. It's April 21st. 16 people on the I.L. We can go back through the list and see how many have gone on this year, but it feels like about 10 of them. God, it's just I mean, I legitimately feel sorry for the organization. I feel sorry for the

training staff who's probably going, man, we didn't do anything wrong, we're brand new, I feel it matter for the manager, the general manager is having all this pitching surplus now is now it's mid because you're having to go to so many guys. I think the optics are going to look, yeah, the optics are bad

and worse than they should be, especially for fans who aren't necessarily paying attention and they're calling for everyone's head because they just look at the final scores and they look at the standings. Yeah. I mean, a smart baseball fan is figuring this out. No team, even the Yankees, even the cash-flush Dodgers,

wouldn't be able to survive a long term with 16 players on an injured list. No organization. I don't know if you're spending $300 million or $30 on players can withstand 16 players being out. It's just too many. Yeah, the back end of the lineup is Taylor Tremel, who got hurt. This was yesterday. And then Yonner-Diaz has been struggling. Dustin Harris, who literally just got off of waivers.

and then Bryce Matthews, who is a scuffling prospect. It's crazy. All right, Joe Espotted to join us next here on Sports Talk 790. 1230, Matt here in Los Angeles, getting ready for game two of the Rockets and the Lakers. A couple hours before that. The Astros, hopefully will get another victory in Cleveland against the Guardians, joining us right now, as it is every Tuesday at 1230. We are pleased to be joined by Joe Espada.

Joe, I'm telling you, first and foremost, I hope the weather's warmer. I felt bad for you all yesterday. It was like 3,000 people in the stands at like 35 degrees, and you had one A-hole just yelling at Jose Al-Tube for three hours. Man, it was cold, but much better today. Today will be mid-60s. So hopefully, you know, we don't, we owe this, more cold weather here for a bit.

But it was pretty chilly last time. Well, apparently your bats were super hot, which is great. Paredes, a couple of home runs. Christian Walker doing his thing again, breaking out of that little slump he was in. Isak was asked about the movement in the infield, and he hasn't done a whole lot. I mean, but you've had to do a part of it because of injuries. How much conversation do you have about his flexibility or movement around the infield defensively? I know the bat's going to start to come through, but what about his work defensively?

Yeah, and you know what? I think he's done a really nice job, you know, adjusting and giving us the the coverage at second and third and first base actually played it really well. That versatility is valuable for us as a club. And, you know, we've been talking about it. We talk about it during the off season, during the offseason, during spring training and during the season. It's just something that we need for the well-being of our team and be able to keep all, everyone healthy, keep all these really good bats in the lineup.

But I think he's done a nice job, you know, adjusting defensively. and the bat's going to come. This guy's been a really good hitter for a very long time. So it's just a matter of time for him to get hot. You know, what he did yesterday, you know, his OPA is already in 700. Like he's going to be a really good hiter. He's going to hit. Needless to say, we generally feel sorry for you in the organization

because the injure list, again, is just so incredibly deep. I don't even know what to ask you, Joe, honestly, about this. a snake bit. I know that you take those guys and you work them out properly. You're down in Florida for six weeks. It's not like you just ramp them up with a week to go before the start of the season. But are you in a head scratching mode right now about, man, can we just stay healthy for four or five days in a row? Yeah, you know, we as a staff and, you know, this including front office and our training staff and our SNC department,

we always looking for plans and how can we do? where can we be better at, right? And, you know, cutting down on some of the work that we do early, we, you know, we've been pushing buses back on the road trying to get these guys to stay more time and, you know, resting and recovering. And then when we come in, even though we spend more time in the weight room, doing, you know, stretching, we, you know, checking their, you know, hydration level. We are checking where they're at, you know, where they're nutrition.

Like we're doing all these tests daily just to monitor where can we help them to stay on the field and then, you know, everybody would be healthy. You know, like Tremel yesterday, you know, he's one of those guys that's constantly in the weight room, getting his treatment done just to just maintain his body. And then, you know, what happened yesterday just unfortunately that just continue to happen now. But, you know, we have to continue to figure out a way to keep these guys on the field, you know, I've won this to, you know, don't, we quickly not use this. That's an excuse. We got to get ready and play because nobody's going to feel sorry for us, man. We got to, we got to get over the hump and continue to do the best we can with the players we have available for us. You know, Joe, and I know we know that the next couple of days when it comes to pitching,

but it feels like to me you've had to do more of the, hey, media, I'll talk to you tomorrow about who we're starting tomorrow or the day after that. You're just putting on a scorecard as one thing, but how about the athletes themselves preparing knowing that they may not have the full notice of being a part of your rotation at this point? Yeah, you know what? I don't really, you know, the pitchers who are going to start the games, they know, but they're also know about constituency plan, right? If I'm if I use certain amount of pictures today, I might be able to use some of those

guys that we're planning to start in the bullpen the next day. Like it's so, so it's not, you know, we, we go into a series of the previous series, like we have our rotation for the Yankee series, but you know, we have to make sure that we cover the next two days so we can not put the part players we have in the current roster in jeopardy, right? We know if our starters, when they cover five, six innings, it's easier for us to, you know, finish a game and use the pieces that we have available. But when we don't, you know, our starters don't give us the five or six innings,

that when we start putting some of our, you know, long, long inning relievers in a position where we might have to ask more of them and then it puts our rotation in a much tougher spot. So thankfully, the last couple times out, Spencer Araggetti has done his job for you. What's been so effective for him early on, did you like to see him keep doing? And then how concerned are you about it? It has been four walks in his two starts. Yeah, you know what? I think he did pitch out of trouble yesterday, and that's important.

Traffic is going to happen. You know, he is throwing the ball more in the zone. in the zone. You know, this is a guardian lineup that they will, they work the count. They, they, they are no for making you earn every single pitch and, and

we have to do a better job just throwing the ball, not so much on the edges, but kind of inside the box and force these guys to swing the bats. And, and I think Spencer did a really nice job yesterday, escaping from trouble by, you know, his breaking ball has been, has been

his two-go pitch. We need more that more consistency, getting ahead in the count so he can then put hitters away using his stuff. But you cannot do it. You can't do it if you're not throwing strike once. We need to be better at throwing strike on. Astros manager Joe Espada with us here on Sports Talk 790. Are you going to encourage any slumping player for the rest of the year to go with a Christian Walker mustache? That was sweet.

You know, I don't know if people notice too. you know, Carlos Korea, I went pints down to just trying to change things up, Christian Walker, the stash. That was nice, man. Yeah, you know, whatever it takes, we get hot. I might grow a mustache myself. Wow. It's been impressive, of course, with Christian Walker and how important he has been for your offense.

What has led to the turnaround in your mind? Man, I think he just built up from what he did last year. Just, you know, a lot of, if you look at a lot of, if you look at a lot of, the ball team played, the hard hits he's gotten, he's all middle of the field. And then, you know, when something stays middle in, he reacted like he did. Yes, there was like a little hanging change up and he just hammered that thing. And also he's in a much better place this year and year two with the Astros. You know, father and, you know, he knows, you know, he's, you know, he's plays in these

organization and how valuable he is to us. I see him actually just more happier, man. Like he's really enjoying the position he's in, and he's been a workforce for us, man. This guy posts, and he loves to play, and he plays hard. A couple more minutes here with Joe Espada, the manager of your Houston Astros here on 790. I think the numbers are about two miles per hour less.

I think those that measure this on Brian and Brayu's fastball. And, you know, you're going to have to tell me, Joe, is that a major sign of concern? and I know that if you're checking on him athletically that you would have said something by now, but does that make that a factor in perhaps some of the struggles he's gone through this year? You know what?

One thing that we know, he is healthy, I think there has been some inconsistency with his mechanics where it's affecting his velo, but when you look under the hood and when you're looking at the shape of his pitch, it's just the shape, the way the ball is moving when he leaves the hand And when he enters his zone, the shape of his pitches are similar than where last year. Now, those pitches, like, he especially his slider, he hasn't been that competitive, and he was last year.

Like, they're two out of the zone, and he's not getting the chases he got because their balls wants the ball to leave the hand. Hitters are giving up on it because they never get close to being a strike out of the hand. So those are the things that I think we need to, we really try to help. him with. Once we get in line and he's consistent with his delivery, I think you see the spike, you will see the spike in the fast, but you see the 97, 98 constantly. But until we get there and we find that consistency, it's going to be, you know, for him, hard to get the, you know, get the, you know, get the results that he needs right now. But we, we are working with him and I'm going to look for some spots to use him and get his confidence back. Because, you know, the reality is,

we need them. We can't do this without them. It's imperative that we have to Brian Obrill that we've seen in years past. You mentioned consistency, and you'd like to see a little bit more of that from Yainer Diaz. Throughout his career, he's been a guy who he can be prone to bad slumps, but then he can just get on a hot streak where he's hitting everything.

What does it take for him to, what is happening for him going well when he's able to get on one of those streaks that he needs? So I think like the last two days, you know, he's got a double at home, and then he got the single few other way yesterday. He's actually, you know, swinging at pitches up in the zone. I always tell people, like, you won Yanir-Diaz. He's bread and butter, his pitches up in the zone.

Like, even outside of the box, you know, on top of the zone, those are the pitches that he drives. Anything knee, like, waist down, that's where he struggles because he, you know, he puts the ball in play, but he's going to put the ball and play on the ground. We want him to hit the ball in there. We wanted him to drive the ball in the air and stay away from the weak ground ball second base or the weak ground balls to shortstop. It's getting him to understand that and it takes him time to do that.

And we, you know, we, we, we continue to, I gave him those two days off at home. And now he's starting to get in a pretty better position he hit. And, and hopefully we could, we could, you know, we, we hope, you know, we open something up here and we could get them hot because we, you know, we, you know, we, you know, we, you know, we. We need his production. Enjoy the warmer weather, Skip. Thank you for the time, as always. And safe travels back to Houston. And a big series of the Yankees coming up this weekend.

And we'll talk again next Tuesday. Thank you for the visit, as always. And good luck to the Rockets tonight, man. Enjoy the game. Thank you, friend. Appreciate it. That's Joe Espott of the manager of your Houston Astros. In Cleveland, game number two of the three-game series.

We'll have it for you here on 790. On deck starts at four first pitches at 5-10. And then when that is over with, we'll jump into Rockets' coverage. And we'll start the game over on 740. the Rockets and then shifted over to both 740 and 790. So a lot of sports tonight, hopefully two victories for our city. Astros looking for a series win. And by the way, that also did not

snap a nine game Astros road losing streak or eight or nine games, something like that? I think eight. Yeah. It's bad. It was their second one on the road all season. I know that for sure. They're two and nine. Yeah. Yeah, they had one win in Sacramento and then one here, including yesterday. Yeah.

All right. You want to comment anything that Joe had to say? We're here for you. 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-7-90. Ross, which is today's edition of Believe or not, coming up at 150. Sedona, actually. Hmm.

Billy Donovan? I don't know. Oh, Sedona's good. I think Sedona would be a great question. Mike Tomlin? Places to go to have Trist. Sedona. Places don't go.

Yeah. Thanks again. to Joe for joining us as he does every Tuesday at 1230. Matt and Ross with you here until 3 o'clock. 2 o'clock, excuse me, 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-790. Let's continue on the phones. If you'd like to join us, we've got that coming up until 1-50.

We play, believe it or not. Anything out of the ordinary or something caught your contention by our visit with Joe at all? I don't think so. I mean, what can you say when everybody's dropping like flies and you've got 16 guys on the IL? We've got to go out there. You've got to play. The games, you know, the Cleveland Guardians aren't going to go, all right, guys. Well, we'll regret this schedule the series when you guys are a little more healthy.

No, you've got to go out there. Ryan Weiss got to go out there and do his thing. The top end of this lineup, especially, which they did yesterday, they have to do your thing. You're not going to get three hits a piece every day from Correa Walker and Paratus. but, you know, Jose Altuve and Yorndon had a couple of warning track shots, so he was hitting the ball hard, but he only ended up with one hit. Those top five guys are going to have to carry the offense a little bit for stretches because you're just not going to expect much out of Bryce Matthews and Dustin Harris and

those types of guys. And now Taylor Tremel even went down. Cam Smith was supposed to have the day off yesterday. So I literally, and I think I did a little bit of this. last year, but it feels like I'm even doing it super early this year. They are calling up players and

playing them, and I've never heard of them. Well, Dustin Smith was literally claimed off a waiver, like a couple days ago. He's the former White Sock, right? Yes. And then who they, we brought up a guy yesterday. I've even forgot his name

already. Oh, Famke Frankie. The kid that's from the former Aggie from Wadah, Texas Wada, Texas. Simki. I don't remember.

I'm sorry. No disrespect to his family. No, I mean, no. Look, if you get four hits today, we'll remember your name, I promise. You had a career batting average of 118. Braden Shoemaker. There you go.

I know there's a K.E. on the end somewhere. Braden Shoemake. not an enterprising young man. Not yet. Can be though. Can be. I just know that if I was ahead of a company, I'd be losing my mind that this is happening again.

And again, I'm trying to dumb it down to its lowest common denominator, okay? And that is, if you work in professional sports, you've had some sort of experience, knowledge, expertise, that you would not put, I mean, if you hire a nutritionist in a sports masseuse and strength and conditioning, this is, being what the Houston Astros ain't your first job, right? Correct. Safe to say? Yes.

So, they're getting plenty of water. They're eating the right meals. Right. Joe's even to alter. when we talked to Joe during spring training before that at Astrofest, he was going to set the veterans back a little bit and let the younger guys get some of the work in. Right.

They're not just throwing things against the wall saying, hey, let's try this today. It's seated in sports science. Yeah, they're not putting leeches on them and giving them mercury. They didn't go to price line to go get a strength and conditioning staff. They didn't go on the Craigslist. Hey, how would you like to work for a major league team? Do you work at Rannett-Ritness?

Come work with us. Yeah. Not that Rannettness was bad, but yeah, I'm just throwing it. Well, we're just going to give him some ginger root and rub some leeches on them. I don't think when Taylor Tremel got the third base and was hurting that they put some windex on his thigh and said, hope you feel better. Put some vapor rub on it. Yeah. Be all right.

That's crazy. It's just bad. Look, I know people don't want to hear this, but it's bad luck. Because we as humans, we like to make sense of everything. sometimes it doesn't make sense. But it's killing the franchise. And it's going to, and it could cost people their jobs. I think it very well could have.

Because I just, I don't know. Jim Crane, he's not, he's not like a rash guy. But, I mean, he let go his general manager, literally after they won the World Series. So he's going to do things his way. I'll put it that way. Yeah. But Jim's not dumb. I mean, Jim is not fly by the seat of his pants.

He's not overreactionary. Has he made some missteps going back to the click situation? Yeah. You can't avoid the contracts. You can't avoid letting a general manager go. I think egos got in the way. And sometimes egos do cost you. I mean, I can't.

You go find a CEO of any business and says they've let somebody go and it was a mistake. It happens. It just doesn't happen in a public atmosphere like burning a major league baseball team does. when the general manager is one of the most highly profile positions in sports and address the media and roster constructs and build your drama. I mean, and then you go get a guy who's never done it before and, you know, and not the click that had a lot of experience doing it to begin with, but it wasn't like the Astros were necessarily behind the eight ball

because James Click was running the baseball side of things. Yeah. And obviously, yeah, the interpersonal relationship deteriorated for whatever reasons. Yeah. And Dana Brown's here. what Dana needs is he needs somebody he needs Bryce Matthews to get to 300 he needs Walter Yonick let's go 250 first with some pop you know what I'm going with this on this

you know what I was saying you're talking about on base or average all right he needs Walter Yonik to take a drastic step up because the honor Diaz stuff while again it's been very spotting this year you drafted him in the first round for a reason did you not you didn't do it because you were looking to replace Christian Vasquez you wanted Walter Yannick who was a very accomplished very good hitter at the college level

elite defensive player to at least give you a professional a bat and at this point he cannot do that yeah Bryce Matthews is a 28th overall pick it's it's hard to crush for that and I'm trying to figure out oh wow it was 28th overall as well for Walker Yonick

it's not like a bunch of can't miss dudes. I know, but you got, I will push back a little bit. You can live without your first round pick being a star, but that means you because you really hit the, the bullseye with the seventh and eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, seventh, eleventh round picks, and that just hasn't happened yet. No, it hasn't, but on, I just, those couple of picks aren't necessarily an indictment of. Well, it doesn't help when those are your guys, and you were judged, frankly, by

your first one of them. Yes, you are. You just, you know, I'm not the one I'm not the judge and jury on this but the active roster is and the active roster needs some help. It just does. All right. Final hour of the show. What?

I don't we go one more hour. It's already hour four? People love us so much to sit down with Matt and Ross. Let's do an extra hour. I'm good. Four is good. You have to. Four is good. I know I'm saying four is good.

I thought you made more than four. Yeah. Four is good. Pre and post. You've got the game. Yep, we're good. And I'll be ready to do some more Astro post-game shows. Hopefully in July 1st, when the Astero, when the Rockets won a championship.

You keep deluding yourself. Let me have this time, please. You know what? Small victories. Rockets win tonight. Okay. I'll put my name on it. Put my name on it.

You what? I'm going to get the file out. Are you putting your name out or aren't you? I put my name on it because I'm biased. Period. I hope you're right. Could you imagine me come out on their show and say, you know what are I?

Guys, I really want the Rockets. I get the Lakers. Is there a, I hate L.A. song? Is there a song about how L.A. is horrible? Maybe Hotel California. Well, that's a great question. Is there a derogatory L.A. song? Maybe play police sirens?

I hear that a lot here. Let's look at your latest names on it. Malik Willis will never be a service whole NFL quarterback. I feel confident about that. AFC championship or bus for Nick Serio. You feel good about that. Oh, and on June 3rd of 2025, this must have been after the Durant trade. You said Rockets won a championship within the next five years.

Yes. Must have got plenty of time on that. One o'clock on sports talk. Your dog never plays 130 games. Drive-Thru Lunch Bet. You know what? I'll upgrade it for you. I will buy you something nicer than that.

That's fine. Drive-through's good. This is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. Here we go with the final hour of the program. Believe it or not, is coming up in about to 45 minutes from now. You may join us if you'd like to do so at 713-1-2-1-2-5-790. Astros with a very nice win against the Guardians yesterday. A lot of guys that were in little mini slumps came out of it,

which is a nice sign to see. And again, Cleveland's a middle of the pack team in the American League Central. They are 13 and 11 now. And they are currently, well, they're in first place in the AALs. I'll tell you what, of all the years for the Astros to kind of be well underperforming, this might be the year. They are 9 and 15, and they're only 3.5 out of first place. The A's are in first place at 12 and 11. Not looking like any world beaters at the moment in the AOL West.

So that's good. Yankees have won three straight. They're 13 and 9. They have the best record in the American League with 591 winning percentage. Astros only three out of the wallet card. That's not bad. Positive signs.

Probably the ALS is going to be their path to the playoffs. Yeah. But nobody's, nobody dominant right now, except for the Dodgers. Yeah. Oh, the Atlanta Braves are playing 700 baseball too. Jesus. Boy, the American, the National League is going to,

It's stacked. It's kicking everybody's ass. Atlanta is 16 and 7. They lost their closer for a while. The Reds are 15 and 8? Who knew? Go Reds. The Cubs are in fourth place in that division.

Oh, how about this? The worst record in the National League Central are the Milwaukee Brewers at 12 and 9. They have a 571 winning percentage in there in last place. They would be easily first place in the West. American League West. National League West, the Dodgers are 16 and 6. Oh, my God. What was that?

What was this exasperation? It's good news. Well, it's an exasperation of, let's face it, in the last 20 years. Or how about we just dumb it down to 16 years since you and I've been doing this show, okay? Mm-hmm. How many dynasties have we had? We've had a Spurs dynasty, the tail end of it. Okay.

We had a Golden State dynasty, correct? Yes. we're on the verge of the Dodgers having one in baseball. They've won three out of six, right? Three out of six or seven. Football-wise, it's been different teams, so we're at least feeling good about that. I'm calling the Dodgers a dynasty.

All right. We're counting the 20. We're saying the 20 as a Mickey Mouse doesn't count. But somebody had to win it, though. It was Mickey Mouse. Somebody had to win it, though. It was Mickey Mouse, but it goes up on the banner. The banner's hanging.

It's like the Asher. Oh, it's got an asterer. Well, look it up. Just Google. Who the champions were? 2017. It says Houston Astros right there. There's no asterisk.

No asterisk. In our mind, it does, but it's not in the technical. 2020, 2020, 24, 2025. Dynasty. Sorry. Dynasties build us against the world, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to win that. Three out of six is a dynasty.

And they're playing 700 baseball. And they keep, and they just got Kyle Tucker who was, either one or 1A when it came to the free agent market of the offseason. Remember how ever we're talking about, oh, Kyle Tucker, he wants to go play maybe back and play for a team in Florida or something or maybe go back and, you know, play in a team where he doesn't have to carry the heavy lifting. Well, he doesn't have to carry the heavy lifting in L.A., but he couldn't be any further away. The Dodgers spring train in Arizona, his home of Tampa is 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

They want cash. Hey, weather's nice. It's nice. although today it's kind of rainy here I think L.A. has actually become a little underrated because it was great and then people, everyone hated it. I think it's like somewhere in between.

What do you think? It was like a society or just... I will tell you this. I've been here. I felt like I've been here for a long time. I think we got here. When do we get here? Yeah, you have been there. You're taking up residence? I hope they don't text me on my stage. I was going to ask that, actually. Make money over there. They're texting the athletes. I can tell you that for sure.

I know. I know. I'm a contract employee, so I believe I do not have to file taxes in here. Because I thought I saw Robert Ford tweeting something about taxes, getting taxed all over the place. Yes, yes. I know the players do. The IRS knows exactly when the NBA is playing in a town. Oh, so you have to file income taxes for all 30 states or whatever you're in? For athletes, they absolutely do.

I know, they do. Yeah. I don't, Craig used to. I don't think he has to do it anymore, but I've never have in the. of 10 years. Not that I don't want to give the IRS any ideas. Yeah, I was going to say.

The thing about LA, beautiful people, largely very nice weather. It's just, how do I explain this? They're rude. They're not New York rude, but they're pretty close. Yeah, I mean, you have more experience

than I do. Yeah. I love the food scene, close to the beaches. Weather's great. Yeah, beaches, mountains. Yes. lots of I mean sightseeing things to do that's why Hollywood was there because they could film beaches they could film mountains they could film deserts all within a couple hours

it's very convenient for them to film movies yeah I went to the Universal Studios a couple days ago and did that studio tour I kind of geek out on that kind of stuff yeah yeah so let me like your Instagram post where is it it's at SportsMT thanks for asking follow SportsMT on Instagram hey Rockets win the night if you follow SportsMT I'm sick of your false promises. What do you mean? You said they were going to win on Saturday if I followed you.

They lost. You have no evidence of that. I bet I can pull the tape. Nah, you're not going to take the time. I'm not going to, but I could. Yeah, that's true. You know what I do right now? No, I don't know.

Oh, here we go. You're so funny. I'm going to do a follow back one o'clock hour. If you follow me between now and two o'clock, I will follow you back. Yes, follow SportsMT, please, folks. SportsMT, you follow me, I'll follow you back. I will too at Sports RV. I'm only 24 away from 1,500.

What? 24-00. You need have a party or something. 24 away from 1,500. Come on, people, please. All right, so if you want to follow back on your Instagram account, now I might mute you. I can't guarantee him.

Wow. What? I will not mute any of you. He's lying to you. That's not true. I don't even know how to mute people on Instagram. You can do it. At SportsMT, follow me between now and 2 o'clock, and I'll follow you back.

That's what I'm a man of the people. You know what, though, if I don't get back to Texas until tomorrow, maybe they're going to start calling Mr. California. You are Mr. California. You're certainly not Mr. Texas. I am so. No, no, you're not. All right.

713-212-5-79 if you want to chime me. It's 7-1-3-1-2-5-7-90. Is anything else going on in World of Sports? I mean, I know we're not going to get into a dive on Atlanta, New York. or Minnesota, Denver, because those were great games, but I just just got to know an audience. Is there, I mean, I'm missing? You want a full Billy Donovan breakdown?

Nah, I don't think that's going to happen either. Okay. I don't think that's going to happen either. I'm trying to see if there's anything on the trade and the NFL trade streets. I mean, the Dexter Lawrence trade. Yeah, have you shaken up your mock draft now? Not necessarily. Who is TSE zeroing in on, by the way, for this year's draft?

Oh, Thomas Sports Enterprises, I will come back and give you the TSE for the draft in 2020. Okay. Keep an eye on him. And when he becomes a star like that, Prescott does, you'll once again respect what Thomas Sports Enterprises are into the NFL streets. Can't wait. 713-212-5-790. You want to come in and join us. We'd love to have you.

7-1-3-212-5-7-90. Rossi shout-out to the 20 people that follow me on Instagram. Thanks, everybody. 20 new followers and I'm following you back. There you go. Rules implied until 2 o'clock today. Wow. That's not what I'm talking about.

Love you guys. You're so funny. What do you mean? You did not mention your Instagram account once until I started doing it. You know what it is, honestly. Can I tell you the God's honest truth? And you brought this up yourself.

It's just nicer over there. It's just, now it's not immune to criticism and hate, but it's just a little friendlier place. Yes. You know. Plus, a lot of people are just deactivating their Twitter account, so, you know. Mm-hmm.

It is what it is. All right. 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-7-90. And again, if you want to follow me until 2 o'clock, I'll follow you right back. That's what I'm here for. Again, is there anything else I'm missing in terms of headlines? I just, the draft just doesn't move the needle for me, and I think I'm in the minority in this, and I apologize.

It's okay. Again, if we were, if the Texans were in the top ten, we'd really have a deep dive into it, but I don't care what the Kansas City Chiefs do with their draft. I don't care. I mean, who the second quarterback is going to be because the Texans don't need a second quarterback. This can be Ty Simpson. That's the Alabama guy, right? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I really want the Rockets, because I want some people to call them tomorrow. We only get a 50, an hour show tomorrow. And 10 of that is with Brian Bullitt. Oh, yeah, we've got a short, short program. Make sure you tune in tomorrow. Astros versus Guardians. Astros going for the sweep?

Soft sweep? Gentleman sweep? Sure, why not? Oh, look who's here? Our buddy. Craig Ackerman? Well, I mean, we have a lot of friends. Oh, you mean on the phones? Yeah.

I thought he was like coming to your room. No, he's not here. I thought he was dropped. Oh, that's right. No, poor. You know what? Ooh, salt in the wound. That was not the thing to say. I'm sorry.

Well, I enjoy Craig. We had him on last week. It's not anybody's fault. It's the, it is. fault. Yeah, it's the league and they said cut the check NBC and Peacock and they did. Yeah. Amazon rhyme, you're going to get a bunch of games.

Yes, they are. And if you don't have Amazon rhyme, you know. I mean, I was reading somebody said like there's like 182 million subscribers to Amazon Prime. The only thing I'll bitch about is that it's not easy to go between your

streaming and your When's your birthday? I'm going to get you a nice, cheap TV, 4K TV for your birthday. You shouldn't have to do that, though, Ross. I mean, I appreciate the offer. Come on, man, it's 2026. You're a sportsman. You got to watch, hey, what are you doing when the Astros and the Rockets are on the same time anyways?

You've got to put both games on. Let's go. But I could do that. Five years ago, I go click. Good. Previous, previous, previous, previous. No, because you're still missing stuff. Gordy's got multiple TVs.

I know if the Gordy's can afford it. You can. Yeah, but he's got one of his TVs on the SEC Network at all the time. That's why he's got three. And the other one's on LSU softball reruns. Is it on the SEC network or no? No, it's just on a loop. DVDs of all that.

He just puts LSU baseball on a loop? Yeah, softball. Softball. All right. Hold on, I can get my phone ready here. Hold on one second. Oh, gosh. Don't gosh me.

Follow me on Instagram at SportsRV. I'll follow you back as well until 2 o'clock. at Sports RV. Gerard, good afternoon to you, friend. Good afternoon. How are you guys doing today? Great. All right, getting ready for game, too, man. It's going to be a late night tonight.

Hopefully, given the rant plays, I know the head coach said that it's not about the pain, it's about the mobility, so hopefully working around the clock to get the guy back on the court. I thought they really missed him the last game. You know, him not playing. you know, they get the news right before the game. I think kind of threw the teams for a loop.

They ended up starting a coachie, if I'm not mistaken. So you had a cogi and a mean Thompson, you know, basically two non-shooters out there. I think that probably contributed to the Rockies coming out kind of lack of days ago on offense. You know, I think if the rent does not play tonight, man, I think you got to start to Reed Easton. You got to start him along with Reed Sheppard, man. I don't think you can go with a Colji and Amine Thompson in his starting line up if the rent doesn't play. But if he does play, man, I think they'll get the win.

even if he doesn't play, man, I think the key guy is Jabari Smith. When you look at his numbers in game one, he didn't even have no bad numbers, but I thought he played a below average game. I think he played well at all in game one. His decision-making wasn't good, and I just thought he played a poor overall game. Hopefully he can play better. I think when he plays well, the Rockers are hard to beat. I think a lot of the shot that Sukun got in game one he missed,

but I like him being aggressive. He just got to knock down those shots, man. You know, we can't have a situation where Aiden out plays Sagoons. I told you guys before the game one that would be a key matchup in game one that matchup went to the Lakers. So Sagoons will definitely have to outplay or Aidan for the Rockets to move on and win this game tonight. So it's going to be a good game. Like I said, we just really don't know how it's going to play out because we don't know if Durant's going to be able to play. So if Durant plays, obviously, I look for the Rockets to win tonight.

If he don't play, I still see an avenue for the Rockets to win tonight. And like I said earlier, Jabar Smith is a key guy. Sagoon is key. And I think, Amin Thompson is a key guy, too, man. I think teams play all for him, but I know it's later on in the season. He was making that little mid-range jump shot right around the free throw line. I think he's got to hit that. He's shooting that with a lot of confidence.

I think he's got to go back to that. When they play off of them, just pull up, and they're going to play all the way to the basket. They try to play you for the drive. You'll pull up and shoot that little mid-range game and make those guys pay. I think that's going to be a key-key adjustment for Amin Thompson. But looking forward to the game tonight, and hopefully the Rockers can take care of business.

Play the defense that they play game one. outside of, well, I know the Lakers shot well, but they held them to 107 points. So you all the teams are 107 points, nine times out of 10, you all they'll be able to win that game. So hopefully they'll be able to hold them to that amount of points and get the field goal percentage down for the Lakers

and win, and hopefully your three guys play well if the rent don't play. I just want to hang up and listen to you guys' thoughts. Thanks, Gerard. Ross, do you want to add anything? No, I'm about to sneeze. Don't sneeze. Don't sneeze in the rockets.

I hate you. It went away. You said don't sneeze twice, and it went away. Yeah, it's like saying stop burping. I'm going to stop hiccuping. I don't know. You're yawning, the opposite of yawning. All right, now I'm upset.

My nose is tickled. This is... Would you like to guess the time? I'll give you within 10 seconds either way. Oh, how long he talked? Yeah. I don't know. Oh, by the way, we got Javier.

Yeah, Javier sent me a message. He had to go take his daughter to school today. Uh-huh. She's in college. Yes. I think he's going to be able to sing for us still. I don't know. 2.48.

236. Okay. Not bad. Let me tell you, Dari. You got carte blanche in the show. And thanks to Pat for following. He said creating a new statistical category deserves a follow. Quality Start light.

No. Is it light quality start or quality start light? I don't know. No. You came and you know what? That's why. That's ridiculous. You can't even name it properly.

What do you mean? You don't even know what's called. Quality Start, light. It's like Miller Light or Bud Light. Who's presenting our draft coverage Thursday. Hey, I got one for you. Hey, I got one for you. Light apple juice.

Still has a lot of sugar in it. Probably shouldn't drink it. It's not that bad. Apple juice, I mean, fruit's got to be good for you. Yeah, but sugar counts not good. By the way, I had zero sugar apple juice. Crap. Oh, terrible.

Yeah. I used to love apple juice when I was younger. I'm team apple juice. This is my go-to. You ready for this? I'm going to give you a hot take. Okay. Apple one, grapefruit two, orange three.

Oh, hell no. Oh, hell, yeah. Get grape through it out of there. I'm not going to call you crazy for putting it over orange. Like grapefruit's for octogenarians. It's too tart. It doesn't taste good. I'll put crayon.

I'll put crayon. How about a cranapple? How about cranberry? But I would put that, I would actually probably go orange three than the cranapple for. Yeah, but if you're having like eggs and bacon, no, this is terrible. If you're having like eggs and bacon and pancakes, though, you've got to have OJ.

It's the goat. I get that. Ryan and Javier, we'll get to you guys next. 130 on Sports Talks. I believe it or not, today is what today at 150? 20 minutes. I'm Billy Donovan. Sure, why not? All right. Back with more in a moment. Moments. I do want to announce to you, ladies and gentlemen,

1134 Pacific time. 135 Central. Thomas, Sports Enterprises Can't miss NFL prospect. What the hell is this? It's called production value.

Are you in a car chase with Batman? Tight end. Lance Mason of Wisconsin. What? Versatile Blocker. Leading receiver for his team. Frequently overlooked. Bucket.

Lance Mason. Let's go. Love, admiration from all of us at Thomas Sports Enterprises. Are you just making this up? I put my name on that. You're putting your name on Lance Mason? Lance Mason, yes. Lance Mason draft.

Right it down. Jonathan, you like the call. You like to pick. Do you not? seventh round pick? I'm feeling that. Thank you. Priority free agent?

Yep. What are you up to? Yeah, something's going on here. What do you mean? What am I out to? There's no way. First of all, you didn't know who Lance Mason was. You don't know that?

Yes, I do. I know for a 100% fact you didn't know. You don't know who he is. Priority free agent today? Star tomorrow. Who is infecting your brain with this pick? Is it Cole Thompson? Nope.

You're such a liar. Let me say what it is. All right, I'm writing this down. Do you want the priority free agent is the next big thing? It's intense. It's preparation. You know,

what do you think I'm doing here? You think I'm just going to L.A. and working on rockets only thing I'm working on the whole show. Watching Astros games. I'm chrome casting into my TV and my room. All right. I'm writing down. TSA.

I'm studying prospects. Don't worry. But I'm right. I'm coming to get my flowers. Okay. Priority free agent's going to take over the NFL. I didn't say take over. You know what?

Not everyone of Drew Rosenhaus' clients are megastars. Most of them are. Not every one of Scott Boris's baseball clients are superstars. I don't think David Mooligetta's got Jared Stidham. Lance Mason. Sneek. T-S-E. Special teams.

All-pro. No, I didn't say, you're adding stuff. You're just adding stuff. Wrong. Ryan on 790. Hello Ryan. Ross, I think Matt's going crazy. I was going to let O.K.C. over Toronto, where you would live, slide.

But now I find out he doesn't have two TVs. And he would pick grapefruit juice over OJ? Yeah, he's a strange bird. Matt, call twice if you're being hurt. Are you okay? Ryan, I ain't stuttering. grapefruit juice the second goat behind

apple to tell the truth is a farce I think this is I think it's just trolling all of us now this is this is it makes for great radio but you sound like Sarge now with these wild things Oh

blow Anyways no I don't know who you're speaking of because I don't even know that it is. Go on. Continue. Who? Who? No, you're right. I think the Rockets pull it out and Christian Walker's given mustache rides

to everybody in the first 10 rows behind home plate after he hits another nuke. So on that note, I'll talk to you boys later. Thank you. Wow. Ross, what was the last time he had a mustache ride? I have never had one.

What? 713-21, 2,000, 5, 790, believe it or not, coming up at about 10 minutes from now. What is wrong with you? I asked you a question. So let's check all the boxes here. You love grapefruit juice. Yes.

You're going with a Minnesota price. I'm sorry, Wisconsin priority free agent tied in as your breakout star of the draft. Sneaky. Not breakout. Sneaky. Okay. Hmm. It'd be low hanging of fruit if I said first round pick, would it not?

You'd be crushing me with that. I did a deep dive. If you don't appreciate Meneb Da, that's on you. You didn't shy away from picking Joe Alt and Brock Bowers last a couple years ago. And that worked out. See, the client tells. How's Will Levis looking? I've only had two misses.

And I remain bullish on Willevis once he gets healthy. John Ross didn't do much for me. A scoop some mayonnaise. John Rauston do much for me. Yeah. But, Dak Prescott's my flagship. He's my guy. I know.

Thomas Sports Enterprise is made in the most. expensive NFL quarterback in history. So you're welcome. Good job, TSE. And then, I mean, Joe Alt and Brock Bowers were like, can't miss prospects. They had a choice. They could have gone on those where they went with T.S.

I wouldn't call Brock Bowers. Can't miss. There were some concerns about his size. He's doing great, though, isn't he? He's doing okay. Javier, on 790 at 141. Javier, good afternoon. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my call. First of all, I just want to say,

happy birthday to my mom, 72 years old. Happy birthday, Mom, I love you. And we were talking about early about the movies. What's love got to do with it? Tina Turner, that's a good movie. My gut feeling is the Rockets win, 113, 110 tonight, and the Astros win 9 to 7. And that guy was super annoying.

I was listening to the call yesterday on my hammock, just chilling with my headphones. And that guy never shit up the whole game, man. Unbelievable. And what else? Yeah, unbelievable. but that guy's super annoying and uh what else what else was it um i was something else uh oh yeah you are mr texas yeah that's what i'm talking about you are mr texas thank you harvier

calling us from lorado thank you very much i never been to a loyto but you don't want me to do now i'm going to lorado i got to spread my wings havier he hasn't even been to lorado man i can't be everywhere i've done lubbick amarillo childeris corpus Victoria? What'd you do in Victoria? You're just naming cities. Name me one street in Victoria. Don't say Maine.

MLK. All right. You know I'm right. You might not be. Victoria? Oh, that's true. I mean, I don't know if city council's, I don't know if city council is improving that one. Yeah, I probably picked a one day that bit out of that happened.

down there. I stay corrected. Oh, goodness. All right. Rockets win tonight by six. You got them by what? Ten. Ten. Jonathan? I'll give them by six.

We're on the year and hour tomorrow. We have to be. We have to celebrate an hour. Oh, that's, no, that's actually not the worst time to lose. Everybody can lose because we only have to be on for an hour to suffer. Don't speak that into existence. All right, let's play, believe it or not next. No matter what I say, they need to play on the floor and do well.

That's exactly right. All right, 713, 2,1, 2, 5, 790 if you want to play, believe it or not, it's all things Billy Donovan. He left today as the coach of the Chicago Bulls. Ross, you owe the city of Victorian Apology. Go on. There is not an MLK Boulevard in Victoria. So I was right. There is an MLK Park.

in Victoria. Okay. So it's at 30808 Calus, Victoria. So there you go. Knock it out. C-A-L-L-O-U-S? It is... Or like Todd Callis. No, it's C-A...

C-A-L-L-I-S. Callis, Calis. C-A-L-L-I-S. Okay. I don't know. I apologize. I said there wasn't a street. Yeah, but you were thinking that they were not going to recognize him. down there. And they did. Good for them.

Tomorrow, Brian Boga-Sepic is going to join us at 10.50 tomorrow. I'm going to hang out with you guys until 10-9. You can rent the pavilion there for 15 an hour. That's a good deal. That's a really good deal. We have an hour show tomorrow, and then we have Astros on deck at a half an hour. If you miss Dana Brown, I'm going to assume we're going to replay

the Dana Brown during on deck tomorrow. Would that be fair to say? Actually, Dan Matthews wanted to step up and do it since he knew I was going to be working so late. He's going to do the hole on deck? Yes. Good for him. I know.

Because it's you and me for an hour tomorrow. Yes. And then we have Brian Bogusevick at 10.50. Yes. And I need to leave it at that time because I've got to catch some of flights. And I think, am I off for the day after that? I don't think I have more. You need to get some real.

You know what? Work hard tonight. Rest tomorrow. Yes. You deserve it. And then I have the game Friday and Sunday. You can beat the game on Friday night. You can definitely.

Absolutely. I will be at the Corona Lounge. hanging out. If you want to come by pregame, we'll have. You know what? We should have T-shirts. We're going to have T-shirts to give away. If you come say Matt Thomas's Peach Basket, I will give you a T-shirt at the Rockets game, pre-game. It's a seven o'clock tip, right? What? Why can't you accept your compliment? It's a compliment. Yeah. It's not a compliment.

Dr. James Naismith invented the sport of basketball, and you are so knowledgeable that we call you Peach Basket because that's what they use in the original game of basketball. It's beautiful. I'll accept it. Not really. All right. Last chance to follow me on Instagram. You got nine minutes.

Yes. And me at Sports RV. I'm with over 3,300 now. Isn't that good? Yeah, you're doing, everybody. You're doing great. Thank you. Five minutes left to go on the show.

What should we do? We should play America's fastest-growing sports radio game show. We simply call it B. Believe it or not. And here's how it works. Your call 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-2-1-2-5-7-90. Today's edition of Believe-R-Nob,

it's all things about Billy Donovan. I'll read your statement about Billy Donovan. Statements completely nuddly accurate. You'll say this. Believe it. In the statement, it's your morning. It's full of bunk. I'll say this.

Not. Two believer-or-nots in a row. We're going to win you a pair... Excuse me. You call for a quick... A pair of tickets to see Godsmack. The Rise of the Rock World Tour with Stone Temple Pilots and Dorothy

May 30th. at Woodlands Vavilion. Tickets are on sale now. LiveNation.com. I assume. No, ticketmaster. Oh, Ticketmaster.com. Sorry.

Yeah, it is where it is. Let's play. Line number two. Brian on 7. 90. Brian, you're ready to play, believe it or not? Believe it. Billy Donovan started as a walk-on bench player for Providence Friars and did not even earn a scholarship until his junior year.

Believe it or not. Believe it. No, Ross. that up. Thanks for Blanam. Greg on 7.90, Greg, your favorite part of today is 10 to 2 radio show. There was one? Billy Donovan is still third on the Providence

Fire Us all-time scoring list behind Jimmy Walker and Marvin Barnes. Believe it or not? Not. Statement number two for the win. Billy Donovan's son, Will Donovan. The third is the head coach at Benedictine College, and it's an NAAI school.

Believe it or not. Not. I'm so happy you're going. Cody on 790. Cody, you ready to play, believe it or not? Believe it. In 2007, Billy Donovan signed a contract to be the head coach of the Orlando Magic, but begged out of his contract and was released a week later.

Believe it or not? Believe it. Believe it. Statement number two for the win, Billy Donovan was Naismith College Coach the year back-to-back in 2006 and 7. Believe it or not? Not. That's right. never won any national college folks a year ago.

Let's talk to Ike on 790. Ike, you ready to play, believe it or not? Believe it. Ike, Billy Donovan's a devout Catholic and visited Pope Francis of the Vatican back in 2018. Believe it or not? Believe it. No, he didn't get to go. Wanted to. Ran into free.

Mike on 790, Mike, your favorite part of today's radio show. Everything. Billy Donovan is second in Bulls's all-time coaching wins. but well behind the leader, Phil Jackson. Believe it or not. Nair is fourth. Dick Mata in front of him.

Let's talk to Corey on 790. Corey, you ready to play, believe it or not? Let's go, Peach Basket. Billy Donovan was named to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach just last year. Believe it or not. That is absolutely true. Believe it.

There you go. Congratulations. Let's remind you about Sertr-Pro Parenthood. painter, C-E-R-T-A-P-R-O-S-R-O-Serta with a C if you want a free estimate. I promise you, it'll be well with your time. I'm telling you, gang, if you want to get professional painting done by the right folks that will come in, choose your paint, lay all the groundwork down, do the painting job, get on the ladder, do all the heavy lifting, and do the painting done right the very first

time with 100% customer satisfaction, both interior and exterior for your home, interior exterior of your place of business. It's got to be with Serta ProPainers. To get the free estimate, C-E-R-T-A-P-R-O, C-E-R-T-A-P-R-O. Rockets over on K-T-R-H starting on 740. We'll go over to 790 and have both stations on the call. Astros up here in a couple of hours. Right now, it's Wexler.

It's Clinton. It's the A team, and they're on their way. Next on Sports Talk 7-N. I'm