The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Astros Mid Season Report, No Labor Harmony in the MLB

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Astros Mid Season Report, No Labor Harmony in the MLB

is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. N. H-Town. Good morning and welcome to a Tuesday edition of the Matt Thomas show with Ross here on Sports Talk 790. Hope you guys are in a good mood this morning and ladies as well. Thanks everybody for listening to the program. Ross and I find ourselves today in Las Vegas. We'll be coming back to our Ferry City. I know that the weather is not good back home. storms apparently from what I saw this morning when I checked through about 2 o'clock Houston time. So, geez, be careful. Good luck to all of us trying to fly back.

Yeah, we have flights. Some people in our party have their flights delayed via the storms. Yeah. So at least the worst stuff is, I guess, through the middle of the afternoon. So we'd love for you guys to be a part of our show calling in, but we understand when the weather is not good that you need to focus on, frankly, driving safely. That's the most important thing. And I'm also seeing an excessive heat warning as well. Later of the week for sure.

Oh, well, it says 20 minutes ago. I don't know. It was expected in this area. I don't know. All right. I think it's here, though. Oh, is that here? Yeah.

Well, it says Houston, Texas. Either way. It doesn't matter. Well, let's see. Today's high here in Las Vegas, 102. Is that it? Yeah. It's nice and cool today.

Houston's high 81. I think we're 105 over the weekend. Yeah, I don't think it's excessive heat at 81. Yeah, maybe the next couple of days. Maybe excessive humidity. Yeah, maybe that's it. Probably feels like a swamp over there. I don't know if this is a hot take or not.

I prefer the dry heat of Vegas. Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. When I left Minnesota in 2009, I said I would never complain about the heat ever again. Okay. And we're now in middle of 2006. Okay. And I have not complained once. Okay.

I'm going to complain about it. I know. I know. But I'm telling you as someone that lived when the high temperature was minus six, you have a change of heart on these things. So with that being said, not only am I not complaining about the humidity of Houston in the hot weather, I ain't complaining about 112 here. It's dry. It feels like you're in an oven, but you can at least walk around.

But at least at night, it's a little breezy and the light is air. In Houston, as nowhere around would say hot and sticky nights, Matt, it's hot and sticky, and you still feel like you're in the middle of a swamp with mosquitoes sticking to your body like you're a beekeeper. It's bad. At least in here in Vegas, you can walk around and it's a little light and a little breezy. Right. Totally agree. I would say I would take 112 in Vegas over 96 in Houston.

I'm sorry. I would. Love you, Houston. Born and raised. I'm born and Fred. Hey, two of my three kids were born in Houston, Texas. I was married to Houston, Texas. I went to high school in Houston, Texas.

You know what? I'm Mr. Houston and Mr. Texas. No, you're just Mr. Houston. Okay. You can't be Mr. Texas and hate the Spurs and Cowboys. No, that I mean, who would, let me ask you this. Who loves all of them?

The governor? I'm not running for office. Missy the ultimate Spurs fan? No, she, that's true. She does love the Spurs and the Cowboys and a Ranger. Oh, God, we work with her? Yeah. Oh, gross.

See you're Mr. Houston. No, she can't be Miss Texas. All right, on the radio program today, we are going to, coming up in the next segment of the show, in fact, in about 15 minutes, we're going to start our progress. report. Now, when I was in the Katie Independent School District, we would get these midterm progress reports. And it wasn't necessarily the number of your grade. It wasn't the determination of your grade.

But it was a little bit of a forecast of what the teacher thought of your work. How you're doing? How you doing? So, Ross and I, because I think it ought to be the low-hanging fruit would be, let's give away A's through F's. Okay. We're going to do it mid-season. season progress report style. Yeah. To give a warning to some people to step up their game, to appropriately give them their kudos that they deserve said kudos.

And we're also going to put some incompletes in because there are some of them that should not be graded the same way. A guy that plays 20 games should not be graded the same way. They should be graded on 90 games. Okay. So the grades will be excellent, satisfactory, incomplete, Yes. Needs improvement.

Okay. Or unsatisfactory. Now, just to let you know, back in the day, I was on something called the Good Sportsmanship League in the Canadian Independent School District. Okay. This was when all, we only had three high schools at the time. It was Katie, Katie Taylor, and Main Creek, of course, the Harvard of West Houston. Right.

And we would go to football games, and I was the mascot. And then at halftime, we'd all meet up together and exchange gifts. be the kumbaya of that. There was only one requirement of being a part of the good sportsmanship league. Okay. You had to have good conduct grades. I am the first person in May Creek High School of history

to get kicked off the team of the good sportsmanship league because I got three straight ends of my English class, Mrs. Exley. Ouch. Okay. That's it. Oh, okay. I have a completely random kind of off-topic question, but kind of on topic because you talked about being the mascot.

Yeah. Wasn't your football team really bad? No. Or they just weren't very, they should always do with Katie. No, no, no. We've never beaten Katie in the history of Main Creek High School, which is going back to 1988. So that's 12 plus 20s. That's 38 years.

Yeah. So we were a brand-new high school in 88 was our first varsity year. We did not make the playoffs. Okay. The second varsity year, we went to play. As a 5A school, we made the playoffs. Okay. And, in fact, played a couple of games.

games inside the Astrodome, which was really cool. I mean, being mentioned being 16 years old and being a mascot on the Astrodome turf, that was fun. We played a school called West Orange Stark, and if you remember that, but West Orange Stark had a legacy of football teams. Yeah, they got a lot of, yeah. And I believe we got our ass kicked up and down the field, literally almost every plane. And then we moved down to 4A. We were the highest enrolled 4A school in the state.

Okay. And we went 8 and 2 and lost two district games that did not make the playoffs at all. Hmm. Okay, so you won some. Because I was going to ask, what's it like being a mascot if the team's really bad? Or when you're getting your ass kicked? I don't know. Two years.

One year was a playoff. The second year, our girls team, basketball team, went to the state championship, the semifinals in Austin. Wow. We played a school called Corpus Christi Cal Allen, and they also kicked our ass. So that's how they're here. Okay. These are memories of mine that I will never forget.

That's nice. And now you're in the, what do they call it, Hall of Honor? You're in the Hall of Honor. I'm in the Hall of Honor, yes. That's beautiful. Yeah, I mean, it's not bad. I'm pretty pleased. They have a picture of you, your mascot head?

You can see a picture of me at May Creek High School in my cheerleading uniform. Really? Still, it is up there at May Creek High School. That's beautiful. I don't expect you to do that. I don't go over there, but you'll see me fat with hair. I mean, that's up to you. I'm good.

Okay. Thank you, though. So the mid-season report card is coming out in about 10 minutes from now. We will visit with Willis. done he is one of the rocket's assistant coaches he is a summer league head coach you love it talk to him about what's going on and it's not necessarily hey let's go through a deep dive of every player but i do want to talk about bruce thornton obviously i want to talk about what's it like to get an opportunity to run a ship and what's it like watching some of the other

rookies and so uh we'll get a thought or two about what he's doing here in los vegas well done we'll join us coming up at 11 o'clock we have gut feelings at 1130 the news at noon and believe it or not we have an old smoky giveaway today. Let's go. At 12. At, what time did I say? I put on the tweet here. I think I said one. At SportsMT. Folks. Yes. I say we're going to give this old smoky

giveaway at the official time will be 120 this afternoon. Okay. It's going to be trivia about the show again. Yes, something about the show. Okay. And I would just say, if you are a smart man, I would take a note of how we graded our mid-season report on the Astros. Ross and congratulations, by the way, to George. Walker. He was the home run-hitting champion from the last night.

Oh, awesome. Great for him. I know they changed the rules. Yes. But the biggest complaint wasn't about the rules yesterday. What was the biggest complaint? It was on Netflix. I didn't watch. It was on Netflix?

Netflix. Really? Yes. You got a couple of episodes of House of Cars and you flipped on the home run derby. Yes. Lauren Shee-Haddy worked as the silent reporter. I was getting numerous tweets and mentions of, hey, your girl's on Netflix. You did? Yes.

That's pretty funny. What was more important, however, was our rally at the casino Yassanites. Oh, my God. We went to cross street to another casino and did much better. Thank you very much. You're welcome. So needless to say, a home run derby doesn't spike a conversation.

Oh, and this is for you, Jonathan. I have to call, this is not going to do this in the first segment. When should I do this? I have to call Matt out. Yeah. Uh-oh. I have to call Matt out about something at the blackjack table, Jonathan. And honestly, this should end all complaints and debates for good.

Okay. Now, wait a minute. I'm high for this. Hold on. I didn't do anything philosophically incorrect. I just wasn't very adventurous. I wasn't gambling. I was just playing.

I didn't make a philosophical rule wrong. Yeah, you did. We'll discuss, what are you, 1050. I don't know. I don't think we'll have to, let me. I think we're going to call him out. No, Jonathan. Okay, we didn't rule.

Well, I need somebody who knows blackjack. No. I think we're talking about two different things. No, are we? We'll talk off air. Because I know you looked at me and I was like, the one thing I did not do, I'm going to say it right now, I should double down on a play and I didn't do it. Uh-huh.

And I would have won the double-day, the double down. I just, there was a lot of money on the table and I didn't have great feeling because I hadn't been losing a lot of money. So I didn't double down, and it wound up cost to me a chance to make an additional amount of money. Yes. That was a mistake I made. also changes the deck because if you don't do that let's say you you had 11 right yes okay let's say you got a three you were against a 10 i was you got a three right you would hit again yes if you double you don't get the chance to hit again right so it changes the deck but it didn't really

change it because i but the decision changes it but i so i didn't double down i hit for one card and i got a 10 okay but it didn't so it didn't really change things but it could have it could have you're right all right uh seven one you're a fraudster and you can never call you anybody out at the blackjack table ever again hypocrite and a fraudster no no no no philosophically i should have stuck to stuck to my guns but it did not hurt anybody at the table it could have and it was not a it was not a misplay of the cards i will not i will it is a misplay of the cards no because i only you don't get one card yeah you could only get one card if you double yeah but i didn't i i only took one cards i didn't really change anything he's a fraud jonathan don't listen to him folks

The 90. 1018 on Sports Talk 790. Please be careful today. Oh, this is a jam. If you're driving around this wet stuff this morning. I love the peanuts. Okay? I mean, it felt like I was watching the same episode every year about the same time.

Were you talking about Charlie Brown Christmas? All of them? Lucy pulling the football when Charlie's trying to hit the ball. Yeah. Snoopy is sleeping on top of his house, snoring. I mean, I used to read peanuts every Sunday in the paper. The comics. peppermint Patty calling Charlie Brown

Chuck. The doctor is in. Yeah, peanut's kind of underrated. Underrated? Yeah, I think it's properly rated. Okay, properly rated. It's an all-time classic. Nobody talks about it anymore these days. No, they don't. Because, I mean, Charles Schultz has been dead for a while.

All right, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to give out our mid-season progress reports. Five different grades you can give ES, excellent, satisfactory, incomplete, and needs improvement, or are you for unsatisfactory? we have 25 players that have taken a bat for the Astros this year that's it that feels like a lot we will start and I'm going in from

I don't know how the MLB stat service went but I'm going from 20 there's a four-way tie for 21st with something I don't know if it's on OPS or batting everything but here we go okay we'll start with and we'll do this fairly quickly here because we've got to do the pitchers too we've got to the top of the hour to make this happen okay uh... Saitre Salazar

Incomplete? Incomplete? It's fine. Colin Price. I don't even know who that is. Yeah, you do. He's the catcher that got called up for like a week. Okay, incomplete. Incomplete. Daniel Johnson.

Okay, now you're making names up. No, no, this is definitely happening. That's the running back? The Texans traded from the Cardinals? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Daniel Johnson had eight at bats for the Astros this year. You're making that up. I don't think I am. That must have been when I was out of town.

Me too. I wasn't out of town. Incomplete. Okay, sure. Let's give it him incomplete. Dustin Harris. Incomplete. Again, I don't know who Dustin Harris is.

I remember that guy. I'm sure he's wonderful. Okay. Joey Loperfeito. He's also been hurt and down. Incomplete? I'm going to go needs improvement I think

Needs Improvement's the answer on that one Because he's been given The opportunity to take the spot He's one of the many left-fielers that have been given the spot Opportunity not done so So I'm going to give it You're right, okay Zach Desenzo

Ooh Unsatisfactory What's his OPS? 653 Unisatisfactory Based of what I thought he was, he needs improvement Okay.

Unsatisfactory to me, if I'm giving an unsatisfactory, it's because I've expected way more from somebody, and they've way disappointed me. Okay. Raynell de Godo. Satisfactory. You got the guy from cash. He hit a couple big hits.

OPS 713, I will say, satisfactory, based again on what is expected. Okay. Here's the trick, not the tricky one, I'm sorry. Nick Allen. Based off what you're expected. Satisfactory? Uh, you know what?

Unsatisfactory. What's, no, no. I want a little bit better from Nick Allen. 602 OPS. I want a little bit better. Unsatisfactory. I will say needs improvement. Shea Wickham, 558 OPS.

Unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory. Lamont Wade, incomplete. Ooh, I'm going to go with like, excellent. Okay, so let's put this down. Ross. He's got a 794. Any time we give some.

anybody in accident we need to write this down okay well all right fine no no i mean if you want to do it he's only got 34 plate appearances he's got a 794 ops though fine satisfactory fine i will say incomplete satisfactory okay from what i've seen taylor tremel oh it needs improvement needs approved uh brayton shoemaker is now a milwaukee brewer traded for cash so we're moving on from him All right, folks. I will go first. I'm going to assume that Ross will piggyback me off of this. With a 580 OPS, Jake Myers, unsatisfactory.

Satisfactory is fine. The Duke got shipped to AAA. He's been mashing in AAA. What does that do for us on the big league? He's building his confidence back. He'd be ready to rock, baby. Second half surge. All right.

Carlos Correa does not count anymore because he's done for the year. That's an incomplete, right? Incomplete, yep. Zach Cole, a cup of coffee with the Astros. Unsatisfactory. Sorry. Yeah, had the chance. We wanted him to win the job.

He made the opening day roster. We talked about his September. Unsatisfactory, Zach Cole. Yep. Christian Vasquez, OPS of 618. Oh. Now, remember, defense is part of their grade. you leadership.

All you Christian Vasquez truthers can be so excited about this. You want him to what you want him out there more because apparently you think the Astros win more with him? He started out so hot. What's his OPS you said? 618. How did it get that low? He was like at 900 and a thousand to start the season. Hashtag sample size.

You know what? Go ahead. For a backup catcher, satisfaction. Satisfactory. Yeah. I'm okay with that. That's still horrible numbers. Jeremy Pena.

OPS of 773. Now he has to head two stints on the injured list so far this year. I'm going to go satisfactory, though. Satisfactory as well. Janier-Diaz, OPS 688. Needs improvement. I almost want to go unsatisfactory because he's supposed to be out there to hit. Yeah, the glove work is not getting any better.

You know what? It's challenge work is good. I'm going unsatisfactory. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right. The Astros need you in this lineup. Bryce Matthews, OPS 582.

Now, defensively, he's able to play multiple positions for you. So you have been a satisfactory. Sorry. Top Hunter prospect has been horrible. Can't hit. Good in the field. But I want more from him. Okay.

I am right at the cusp of putting him at the end. Satisfactor. I'm going to keep him in the needs improvement category Because again, I'm still looking at small sample size, relatively speak. 24 years old, he ain't a baby. Jose Altubei OPS 711. Back at second base. I will say Based on what you expected,

okay, here's, here, stay with me on this. This is bias, and I'm okay with this. You think I'm going to say satisfactory. I'm going to say needs improvement. No, I don't think you're going to, you better not say satisfactory. My God. Oh, come on. He's 39. He's like 49. He's at a 0.1.2 war.

Is that good? No. He's been the... Don't make me pull up the DRS. Don't do it. Don't do it. You know what? I'm pulling up the DRS leaderboard right now.

People don't even know what DRS means. I don't care. Defensive runs saved. Okay, needs improvement. We're second baseman in baseball. Guess who it is? Nope. Jose Altuve.

Brian Sandberg. All right. For $30 million? I'm sorry. If his name was Davy Jones Of the monkeys You're paying him $30 million for point two war

What would you say? Unsatisfactory Sorry I love you Astro Godfitt Astro Twitter get him right now If you were paying a guy $30 million for point two war

Needs improvement Unsatisfactory Sorry I'm sorry All right Cam Smith OPS 669 Bring glove and right field.

Yeah, it needs improvement. Yeah, it needs improvement. It's fine. He's at least one more. Isak Peretti's. This is an interesting one. 76 OPS. Yeah, no.

Yeah, this might be, yeah, I'm going to go satisfactory. Satisfactory, yes. 766, steady glove work at third. Yeah. All right. Christian Walker, 775 OPS. Great first basement. Man, started off the season.

Excellent. I'll say, oh, man, I would say slightly above satisfactory of where we want it. I don't know. There's nothing in between satisfactory and excellent. No, there's not. We're not putting it. Pretty good. No, we're not putting pretty goods in there.

No, no, no, no. P.D.G. No, no. Almost E.A.E. no. It's either excellent or satisfactory. You know what? For my expectations of him, I'm giving him an excellent. I will give him an excellent as well.

Based off expectations. Yes. And the last one of our pitchers, Yordon Alvarez. Hitters. Hitters, excuse me. This is very easy. Yeah, excellent. Oh, my God.

What a season is. Batting second for the All-Star team today. 31 home runs. Home runs. 318 average. 1,059 OPS. Incredible. It's been intentionally walked 15 times.

All right. So we have two excellent players on the offensive side. Walker. and Alvarez. By the way, yes, sir. When's the last time the Astros only had one all-star? I don't know. There's been some injury replacement kind of things over the years, too.

But no, this was an easy one, but it was, it's, well, in the team's last year, they had three all-stars. He was under 500. Is there somebody that should be there with him in Philadelphia? Was it like when it was like Jason Castro was the only Astro? Was that the last? But I mean, if Josh Hader was healthy, in pitching to the level that he's pitching at now, he'd have been there. I'm just asking when's the last time the Astros had one all-star.

I believe Jerry Mumfrey back in 1983. That's OG Astro right there. It can have been any of the last several years. Well, look it up going to break. I'm looking it up right now. I'm already back to 2023. They had multiple all-stars. Oh, right.

This is terrible. They won the World Series. Of course, they had multiple all-stars. That's what I'm saying. This makes me sad too, man. When this program returns. Bad baseball team. Sorry.

We'll do the pitchers. And I think our gratings are not going to be very pleasant. How many pitchers do we have? 5,000? 1036 on Sports Talk 790, and I know we're running through these grades very quickly. So if you hear one, you go, oh, my God, guys, you guys are terrible. Being too harsh, or you're not being harsh enough. let us know it's 713-212-5-790

Kyle sends us this tweet thank you Kyle Yonair Diaz since coming off the injured list with an OPS of 824 Keep it steady That's good But we're grading on a hole here We're grading the whole not first half proverbial first half

First 90 whatever games Right right right All right back to the peanuts music here You ask how many pitchers 25 Oh one quick thing I did look it up. The last time the Astros had one All-Star.

Yeah. 2014. And it was? Jose Al-Tuv. Oh, by himself, huh? Yes. Okay. Very good.

No, not very good. Last 10 years, All-Stars, 6. 6. There was no game in 2020. 4-5-3-4 and now won this year. Okay. It's depressing. Well, it means we get to focus on our favor.

Okay. All right, here we go. Uh, Logan Van Wye. Incomplete. Incomplete. Christian Roa. You know what? Unsatisfactory. Is he the organization still?

I don't know. I don't think so. If he had to do a Google search on a pitcher, you don't really know the picture very well, do you? Let's see where he is now. Did he come back? Is he in Japan now? No, he just says free agent. Okay. Roder Rory Munoz out of the organization.

All right. That's enough. Stop. Rotary Moonios What is wrong with you? Three games and an area of 15.75. You know what? I'm giving him an unsatisfactory.

So, he's sucked and he's off the team. When he was released, it said, what was your favorite? Roderie Munoz was an Astro moment, and I'm like, well, for those of you don't know, he has a picture for the Astros. By the way, he is on the Astros? Yeah. My favorite moment was right now when I figured out he was on the Astros. Miguel Uliola, that is incomplete, right? Incomplete, I guess.

guess. He pitched well when he was up. Jaden Murray? Incomplete. Wait a minute. Eight games in the area of 7.43. Okay. Unsatisfactory. Fine. Why not? Alimber Santes. Alimba Santa.

Santa, excuse me, Santa. Incomplete. Ten games. He went down to AAA. All in one with an Ernie of 1.17. Okay. That's good. Colton Gordon, incomplete. Four games. The area 11.57. You know what? I'm going unsatisfactory. All right, that's fine.

Six games for Christian Javier, ERA 9.98. Unsatisfactory. I agree. Jason Alexander, four games for the Astros. That's a Chris Gordy favorite. I'm just teasing you, Gordy, if you're listening. One and one with an ERA 9.33. He's just a guy.

He's just a guy. He's just a guy. He needs improvement. Is he going to improve you know? He's still unsatisfactory. Sorry, even if you're just a guy. What does you say the ERA was? 9.33.

Okay. Give you a 6. Give me a 5-50. Okay? Unsatisfactory. Nate Pearson. Oh, God. 16 games.

Decent sample size. Yeah, yeah. You know what? 1 and 0 with a 360. Satisfactory. Satisfactory. Nate Pearson, off the scrap heap. Let's go.

Cody Bolton. Is he with the team anymore? And out with the Astros. Is he in the organization? Um Eight appearances 5.40 ERA Oh no my tweet got retweeted by

McTaggart I got fact checked it now Make sure it's really right Oh my guy you're in trouble right Now I'm going to get eyeballs on it Josh Hater 17 games 3 and 1 With an earning of 1.17

10 saves Satisfactory I mean, I would go excellent, but he's been hurt. How many games? 17. I'll still go excellent. I will, too. Forget it, whatever.

In front of the show, Ryan Weiss, Owing 3, an ERA of 7.62 and 9 games. Based up of what he thought he could do, unsatisfactory. And not with a team. Unsatisfactory. Brian King, 40 games. Okay. Two and two. Okay.

ERA 2.93. Excellent. For what it was expected of him and how he's performed, excellent. Excellent. So now we have added a third member to the excellent party, Rossi. Yes. We have Christian Walker, Jordan Alvarez, and Brian King.

Love it. Next. Aniel Duno Santos. 41 games. O. and two, Ernie of Yonnie O.N. 4.33 based off of what I expected, which would be who the hell was

Aniel de Los Santos? Satisfactory. He's got you, how many saves, too? Five or something? I think it's seven. Seven? Seven saves? Yeah. Yeah, satisfactory.

Yeah, I mean, based again off of what you thought he was supposed to do. Oh, no, excuse me. Five out of save offers. Five saves out of seven opportunities. Okay, so five saves. I was right. Okay. Brian O'Brien, you two and three, Ernie of 5.8, 1 and 34 games.

Probably the most unsatisfactory on the list. Well, among the most better. Eh, come on. I mean, I like him. The balance of the season is unsatisfactory. Yeah, obviously. Lance McCullors, 2 and 3, ERA is 6.86 in 8 appearances. Unsatisfactory.

Unsatisfactory. Especially for a guy making 20 million. Here's one. Stephen Ocert, 46 appearances, 2 and 1 with an ERA of 2.3. 3-1. Excellent. Shout out, every day,

Oakhirt. Excellent. Eaukert. Again, based up of what we expected, just being just a middle reliever, excellent. He has become your seventh inning guy.

Kai Wei Tong, 23 games, 10 starts. Okay. Four and six, Ernie of 4.36. And not on the team right now. Correct.

I'm going to go with satisfactory? That is correct. That is the right call. It might be a need to prove. Well, I think he's been put in a tough position. Arm is tired. Again, this is a mid-season report card. This is not the final grade.

I would say satisfactory, but he needs to come back and help out. 13 games, 13 starts. Tatsui Emai, 5 and 4 with an area of 6.6. 6.06. Factory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory. Damn it, man. I thought he was going to turn the corner, and he never did.

He turned the corner and he swerved back. Yeah. 18 games, 17 starts, four wins, nine losses, earned run average of 5.99, surrendering 21 home runs. I know who that was when you started the line. I know. I did too. Unsatisfactory. He has bombed. It's...

He may has been a dud. It's funny how a bombed and a dudder. They're basically equally busted. They're equally bust. Yeah. Well, one's a $20 million bust and one's a cost you a couple of pros, low-level prospects. Yeah. But they were both helped.

We were so optimistic and bullish on Burroughs. And Burroughs was carving them up in spring training. Yep. All right. Eight wins, five losses, earn run average of 3.14 and 15 starts. I speak of Peter Lambot. Excellent. Shout out Peter Lambo.

Just as well thought, Peter Lambert's carrying the rotation, 90 games into the season. Okay. Next, seven games, seven starts, one and O with an earning of 3.57. I speak of Hunter Brown. Seven games? Incomplete. To a slightly lean that needs improvement, but way more of a lean towards incomplete. Okay.

And our last one, well, Spencer Errol Gett. 15 games all starts 7 wins 5 losses Ernie of 4 1 1⁄ I hate to do this because I'm team Araggetti needs improvement He's been a different pitcher since the end of May

He just has that's a month and a half now Needs improvement is fine God, I had such a great month I root for him He's such a nice guy You know how it is we root for nice guys You are good interviews We're nice to us off and on

Yeah, you're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. He's a good dude. Yeah, he's a good dude. All right, so ladies and gentlemen, we gave out five excellent scores among 50 players that have put an Astro uniform on in 2026. They are Christian Walker, Yorna Alvarez, Brian King, Stephen Okert, and Peter Lambert. How does that make you feel? Like a team that's a few games under 500, right?

Pretty much. That's great, Bob. Okay. And here's the number one problem as we go to break here, Ross. Some of those guys aren't going to be able to get out of it. I mean, unless Kai Wei Tong comes back with an ERA2 or Tatsu E. Mike E. Mike Burles does. They're stuck where they are.

Their grades are not going to change. You see why I'm not super confident in this team. I know. That's why I'm bull. There's just three out stuff. I'm going to stay hard to buy. Hey, my shirts are selling really well, by the way. Are they?

Yes. I thought it was just five out. No, it changes just three out. Yeah, you hit a button and it changes on your shirt. Oh, I got you. How do you wash it? You don't. You directly in it.

713-1-2-790. 7-1-3-2-1-2-5-7-90. If you want to get in and tell us how you feel about five Astros among 50 that hit the excellent category. 7-1-3-2-2-5-7-90. All right. It is Matt and Ross. We're actually here in Vegas. 8.53 here, Pacific Time.

Shout out Golden Nugget. Yeah, shout out! About a loss. There should be shot me out for the money I've given them. That's true. You got some back. Yeah, at a different casino. It's all right.

It's up. Hey, we got Will Dunn, Rocket's Assistant Coach. We're going to join us in about five minutes from now to give us a summer league update on things. Real quick, I've been reading a little bit of the stories about, you know, when you have the All-Star break, you have all the national media and all the big-name players. So clearly the number one conversation piece is about what's going to happen with this labor agreement and the fact that they're expecting the owners to lock out the players December the first. It feels like to me, and look, I only, Ross Honest to say, I just probably perused maybe five or six stories, different people.

Okay. The number one consensus is the owners are going to. Absolutely 100% insist on a salary cap. And the players are going to 100% not go for it, which means the players are going to have to acquiesce in a minute to accept it, and the owners are going to have to acquiesce, and they're going to have to raise the floor. It's going to have to be a decent floor like there is in the NBA, like there is in the NFL, especially NFL. The NFL model absolutely works. Everybody gets paid.

everybody gets money based off of what is brought in from the league I know salary caps for people that are in labor they lose their mind off of this but every other organization in professional sports has one and no one is suffering for it Major League Baseball frankly and I've been thinking more and more about this has been lucky good for them they've gone as long as they have without one

the owners are just going to say it's time we got to keep our expenses out of control because there are the owners and then whether you like it or not They are the bosses. They want to keep... Bosses do get to like to keep profits. I think the biggest thing that the owners are going to have to do is going to have to make sure this floor is satisfactory.

But I think if we do not have a salary cap, we're not playing baseball in 2020. They're going to have to raise this floor. I have a stupid question. Please. Why are we rocking the boat so much? Interest is up. Social media impressions are up.

Ratings are up. The product is better to me that it has been... I mean, since I can remember, I love the pitch clock. I love the ABS system. I love the amount of star power we have right now. But the things you're saying don't have any to do with finances, though? Oh, interest in ratings and aren't finances up?

Who's struggling? Which major league baseball team is losing money right now to where they say the current system is untenable? The current system, we are hemorrhaging money. We can't make any money. We're struggling. We're losing money. Sorry, players. We have to restructure everything.

We have to blow up the current system that we have right now to put in a salary cap system. and we've never had. What team is... Is any team losing money that we know? I think they would like to see ultimately everybody make money still, but they also want to be able to see the fact that the lower third teams

start spending more money. So they just want more money. Or they just want... Is it the halves? Is that what the deal is? I think the... The Dodgers and the Yankees want the Rays and the pirates and the...

Who have Rockies or whatever to spend money. To pick up the brunt of some of this money that the players are supposed to be getting, yeah. That makes sense, but I'm just telling you that's what they're thinking. Okay. I'm just saying it. It feels like when we're locking people out, it's like, I don't know, man. And there's some players, too, obviously.

Players, they're just cutting off their nose despite their face. But isn't that with... Baseball is so good right now. But isn't that with everything when you discuss labor is that you do wind up changing things? Not everything. Sometimes, like, when the union first formed, is because there was unfair practices. was no free agency they didn't have nice hotel rooms they didn't have you know and this is what happens in unions are basically all across america this is a little unions in theory are a great deal

a great idea but then you get corruption then you get like they're they're demanding too much and then that's when things can get a little bit difficult unions this is like everything a lot of things are better in theory and necessary but then they get corrupt and then they just go too far yeah so i'm not saying that's what's happening with baseball right now i i don't even I don't think. I would not consider the baseball union to be corrupt. I'm just saying that the baseball owners are watching the other leagues thrive with a cap, and they're saying we've gone 100 plus years without one. It's time to get one.

Okay. And that's an answer you don't want to hear. Yeah, but are they, is baseball thriving, aren't revenues up? But they're saying it could be even better. They want even more. Yeah. We want more. What we're getting right now is not enough.

Well, they also, the Dodgers want to be able to say at the end of the day, I can only spend so much. And they want to keep their profits. Look, we see with this bit, we see in our industry, we see everybody's changing the rules all the time, Ross. The rules are just not the same anymore. And I wish they were, but the rules constantly have to change.

And again, I'm not privy to the finances, nor are you, nor anybody listen to this show. But the owners have been thinking about this, Rossi, we've been talking about this for three years now. We knew this was coming. This is not, this is not, it should be a surprise to anybody. And that's why I think baseball has been preparing for this and are saying, if you're going to insist that you will not play under a salary cap,

then we're not playing baseball. If we believe this website, Statista. Statista? Statista. They have a lot of statistics. Okay, really quick. Statista. Revenues for baseball have been going up every year.

$10 billion in 22, $11.6 billion in 23, $12 billion in 24. And I don't have 25 numbers in front of me. Yeah, I mean, baseball's thriving. Stadiums are full, new TV deals. That's what I'm saying? And then, you know what, guys, let's get a lockout going. Let's get a whole season missed. That's the dumbest part of it all.

Is that there cannot be a common point to say everything's going well. We don't want our union players on the beginning of money. We want our stadiums filled. We want our TV games because you can't get TV money if you don't put TV games on. One could argue in 2026. I mean, 1994, they lost a lot of interest. 2026, you got Netflix, you got Hulu, you got YouTube, you got other leagues, you got, I mean, you got options. Yep.

Yep. All right, let's get to well done. Rock as Assistant Coach. Start the second hour of the show next year on 790. This is Sarah Spain with the latest from IHeart Women Sports. Presented by Novartis. Caleb McBride scored a season high 37 points. Rookie Olivia Miles put up a career high 33, and the Minnesota Lynx topped the Phoenix Mercury 104 to 100 Monday night.

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Hi, this is Lance Dury with the Lance Doree law firm. If you have unfiled returns unpaid... This is the Matt Thomas Show with Ross. 1102 here on 790. Matt and Ross with you here from Las Vegas, where the Summer League team will be taken out of the 76 years later today on ESPN. And the man that will coach that team is a man that's been around the Rockets for a long period of time. He's assistant coach and coaching the summer league team. Well done with us here for a first time on the Matt Thomas Show at Ross.

Coach Dunn, great to have you with us. First of all, congratulations for this opportunity. Explain the audience. You've had a little bit of everything with this organization. You've worked with now four different coaches. What's that been like to be around different types of people and leadership in this organization? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a great point, no doubt.

First of all, thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, it's been quite the journey with the Rockets. This will be going into this next season. It will be my eighth year. It's been my first year was with Coach Dan Tony and that James Hardin era group. And then I was with Stephen Silas, his three years with us. And then obviously Coach Adoka comes in.

I've been with that whole stretch of the way there. It's been really for me, it's been an awesome opportunity to just kind of learn how different coaches do different things and how different schemes can get implemented. and what works, what doesn't work. Out of just a good bash course and a variety of different ways to coach a basketball team in reality. And I'm so proud of you and happy for your success. It's funny because Mike Dantonie is known as one of the greatest offensive minds,

perhaps in coaching history. And obviously, E.M.A. Doga has been able to learn and become a very good assistant coach because of his defensive tendencies. What a strange opposite is the world to learn from two different people like that. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. Just like my first year in the NBA, getting to learn how modern NBA offense works under a coach like Mike Dantonie was obviously such a blessing for me. And at the start of my career, just learning kind of how to coach offense with spacing and what type of sets to run, what type of actions work, getting your guys to buy in, getting your guys to play fast.

But also just one really big thing that he taught me early on was just how to keep it simple. like he was so good at like hey look if something's working and working well we're going to get out of their way and we're just going to let them do it rather than trying to overcomplicate things or overthinking he'd always he'd always make the joke like hey let's not let's not start coaching them and screw him up so that was a great that was a great lesson from him that I always got and then yeah with coachuduoka obviously his defensive prowess as a coach as a tactician is I think one of the best in the league if not the best in the league if not the best in the league league. Right when he came in, he came in and turned us into, obviously, with some help with some personnel changes, but he turned us right into a top five defense right away. And it has been that way since. And he's just not only the teaching, the defensive kind of problem solving, but also his ability to get guys to buy in and to hold them accountable to what we're asking

them to do is second to none. Rocket Summer League coach and assistant will done with us here on the Matt Thomas Joe Ross. And we'll also get to a couple of players here just a minute. but I want to ask you, and I know the answer, but I think it's good for the audience. You guys are treating this visit here to Las Vegas like it is an NBA training camp with games. And so let me ask you, not necessarily on an individual basis, but from a macro view of things, what is it like taking these young men, these college kids or guys that have been maybe with G-League teams of their teams

and putting them under the rocket style of how you guys practice, how you guys eat, train, play games? What has that been like watching some of these young guys, especially the ones that are fresh out of college learning the rocket system. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's been really fun. Obviously, like you said, it's kind of a truncated version of what a lot of these guys that are going to be with us will see in the fall. But it's really cool to kind of be the first guys to kind of get your hands on these young players and start molding them into the guys, into the players we want them to be for the rockets.

And then just watching them kind of learn every day, get a little, you know, the light bulb comes off. a little bit more each and every day and then the game start and they start to see it you know you get some success and then you kind of kind of build off of it from there that's been really cool to see the other part that's kind of fun for our group that's kind of unique to the summer league group is we're doing we're implementing a ton of the rockets principles and what they're going to be seeing with the houston rockets but we also get a little leeway to kind of experiment with some other things as well things that maybe might be something the big club is looking to adopt or something that we might be interested in said, hey, we could try that. That could be good for our group. Or something that me or a couple of our other kind of assistant coaches that are on my staff, just are interested in seeing for our own sake, like, hey, I've always thought this might be something that could work. Like, let's try it, whether it's just an offensive set or whether it's a defensive coverage or a certain kind of something unique like that. So it's been fun to kind of marry those two things together.

Rockets Summer League head coach, Will Dunnell with us here on Sports Talk 7.90. Ross with you as well, well, and I'm just curious to kind of just, the boots on the ground human element of this what what is the the things that you're doing like to kind of teaching all these guys to to be professionals do you feel like you're a teacher or like a like a summer camp counselor or something like that and trying to teach guys the practice habits and all that and how to get to and from the arenas and the practices and all that stuff yeah well that's that's funny like funny you mention it we always joke there's a joke that probably a lot of staffs make, but definitely on our staff, we're always joking that we're part-time coach,

part-time teacher, part-time therapist, part-time big brother, part-time uncle, whatever it is, you know? So we wear a lot of hats as coaches, obviously, and it all just kind of goes with, comes with the job description. But especially when you get these younger guys, there's definitely a lot of elements to that. I will say, we have just an awesome group. We have like a handful of guys that are vets as far as Summer League goes. We have guys that at Dacia Knicks, Isaiah Crawford, Tristan Newton, all these, these are guys that have been around the NBA now for a couple of years at least. So they kind of know how it goes. And then we have Bruce Thornton and Quadir, Copeland, who I'm sure we'll get to some of these guys, but these

guys are guys that spent, especially Bruce, spent a lot of time in college. And these guys are polished and they're smart and they're sharp and they pick everything up really quickly. So I do think we've gotten lucky as far as that goes. And then also I do think with guys more and more as guys, especially the guys that have spent two or three years in college or elsewhere before they get into the NBA, they're coming out more polished just because of all the money and the agents and the NIL and all that stuff that goes into it now. It's become way more of a business. So I do think there is an element of that where it's a little bit easier. And you mentioned Bruce Thornton. Obviously, that's kind of been the headliner of the

summer league roster for the Rockets. Just tell us about him as a young man and also kind of either basketball wise or personally. What impresses you the most about him and then some some things you guys want him to work on. Yeah, well, we'll start with him as a person. I think that's first and foremost with him. He's 10 out of 10 as a dude. He was a four-year captain at Ohio State. I think that's been going around quite a bit when we talk about him. But that's just a pretty rare thing to see. Like to be a captain your first year at a big time college basketball program is pretty rare. So that says a lot about his character right there alone.

But then when you get him in the gym, you see the way he works. You see the way he carries himself. He's got like this quiet confidence to him. But with a good dose of humility as well, he's not going to beat a lot of the guy in the gym, but you feel his presence in there for sure. And then he's just on the court. He's just really steady. Like we just trust him with the ball.

hands. We trust him as a leader. He's just really steady, even keeled, never gets too high, never gets too low. And he just plays with the toughness that you just, you can't teach. So that's him as a person, that's him as a dude. As a basketball player, what we love about him so much is, hey, the shot making in college was

incredible. He was the guy that basically wherever he shot, whether it was at the rim from two, mid-range area to the three-point line, he shot very, very well. That's obviously something that was attracted to our group. And then also he's a guy that can handle the ball in pressure with great defenders guarding him under duress. He can handle the ball for big, long periods of time without turning it over at a high rate.

He turns it over very, very few. I think he saw that a lot in our first summer league game. For those of you that watched, he had the ball, he played 35 minutes, had the ball in his hand the whole game. He had one turnover. So that's kind of another element that he brings to the group. And then defensively, he's just really solid, really strong for his size. He's a little smaller, but he's strong. stout, he's physical, and he's really smart.

So he's able to kind of get away with that stuff as well defensively with how smart he is. All right, we'll let you go on this well. What will you tell Bruce what he has to do? Now look, he's going to be in the gym shooting. He's going to be working on his game. He wants to get into that rotation.

There's obviously a lot of competition at the guard spot. Marcus Smart is in. You got Reed, you got a man, you got Fred, hopefully coming back. How does Bruce crack playing time for EMA-A-Doka if he was to work on something over the next handful weeks. Yeah, well, I think first and foremost for him, I think he's just got to

get comfortable being super aggressive hunting his shot. So he's we mentioned, I mentioned already how great of a shooter he was in college and we've seen it already in a couple of these summer league games, how good of a shooter he is. He's got to be comfortable. He's got to have no conscience as far as

if he has an open look, he's got to pull the trigger every time. And that's an adjustment a lot of guys make, especially coming from college where it might be a little bit more conservative of a coaching staff or you're just trying to make the right play or whatever it might be. But in the NBA, like, it's 24-second shot clock. It's a little bit quicker.

The defense is better. If you get a clean look, you got to take it, especially when you're a great shooter like him. So that's going to be an area where he's just got to continue to get comfortable with. And then I would say to him also, look, we're, I would say last year, we had a little bit of a shortage of two-way play. Like, we had guys that were really good offensively or really good defensively, and we didn't have, whether it was because of injuries or whatever, we didn't have a bunch of guys. that we trusted on both ends of the floor.

And I do think he's a guy that could be really excel as far as could bring a lot of juice offensively, but then with his ball pressure, with his intensity, with his physicality, on defense, he can really help us as well. Well, Will, you sound like a head coach, my man. Congratulations on getting this opportunity. And good luck today against the 76. There's a game on prime at 3 o'clock this afternoon back home. And we'll catch up with you before training camp.

Thanks for the visit. We really appreciate it. Thank you, my friend. Always a pleasure. All right, well, take care yourself. Well done. Rockets assistant coach with us here running the summer league. I saw Bruce first-hand, Rossi.

Yeah. Again, he's six-foot. He's thick with several seas. He ain't fat. Okay, good. What's what like here? That's not going to be the issue. What's the old wingspan?

Mine or his? Yours. I don't know what my, from, I don't know look at it. I put my arms out at you right now. Six-five wingspan. That's good. Six foot with a six-five wingspan. We can work with that, right? Absolutely. Standing reach eight-foot, we're good.

Yeah. Look at my wingspan. I'm stretching out right now. Look at me. I can move around. Look at this first utility I show you. Okay. All right.

1114 is the time. Relax coordination. Can't shoot. Not athletic. Small wingspan. Not real heady. You know, you've got a fighting spirit, though, Matt. I do.

important i i'm a good guy in the off the bench comes to old ladies at the blackjack table you got the fighting spirit hey i didn't find with anybody this weekend you didn't no i wanted to when that dumb bitch started to split the 20s well when you were when you were down the attitude was real down it was really you were bringing me down i was selling was i not

oh my god he was so surly i was quiet i almost got up i was like oh because every hand you're like ah ha and i'm like i just want i don't want to be around yeah we uh ross and i were doing a lot of sound effects this is bringing me down but we rallied That's, we did rally.

Now, Tell me, got my money, but that's a different casino I took theirs. It all even though. He could use it. He's doing well. Ross and I were just looking at the radar during the break. Is there any part of our audience? It's not raining right now. I believe the word is daylou, Matthew. Now, it looks worse north of I-10.

Okay. And say, Brian Brenham, Hempstead area, La Grange. That's a little bit further west. A la Grange. But look at the city, Houston. Is there anywhere in Houston's not... Well, League City's got a small pocket of not rain, but goodness. Y'all be careful today.

Conroe, Huntsville, all y'all got some yellow and red up there. Yeah, y'all can't even drive when it's dry. I know. I'm worried about y'all when it's wet. I know. All right. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's completely covered.

Blanketed. Yeah, so it's... Apparently it's through about 1 or 2 o'clock this afternoon, so is what they're saying. All right, so my flight's going to be okay. Oh, well, if you're playing gets here. Where's your plane coming from? I don't know. Singapore.

Southwest flies in Singapore? Yeah. Or dark press, excuse me. So, you're really quick on the airline thing. So, you know, I told you, I went to look for you, Tabb, and there's this woman complaining about Schmerican. Schmerican. Yeah.

Okay. I need you to help me think of a hashtag of Daily Airline, Bitch. Is that what we want to call it? But I don't want to, I don't know these people, and I don't want them to be mad at me because I'm doing this. I'm just saying that everybody every day is complaining about a, another airline. There is no airline that is complaint-free. Remember when Spirit

went around? People were messing with that. Shmided. Well, people were bringing their speakers on and throwing hands. That's correct. Hey, I flew Spirit before it went under, so... Well, on the way here, it was the third time was the charm for us to land, but the, well, the pilot was very upset. He blamed air traffic control

at McCarran, or whatever, what is this now? Harry Reid Airport. This is Harry Reid Airport? It used to be McCarran. Right. McCarran's on the names off there completely? or is it Reed McCarron? No, I think it's just Harry Reid. Okay. That guy's dead, right? Both of them, I think, are dead.

Okay. Somebody trying to come in the room? I don't know. Maybe. You put late checkout, right? I did. It's 923. You can't be coming to ask me to check out at 923.

Oh, is this a big time? I don't know what time it is. That's early. I know. I'm throwing off. Okay, so I just, I got to think of a good hashtag for daily. Is it... Hmm.

I was called an airplane complaint this time and up with the airline. Airline complaints. Airline complaint. Okay. But every airline gets... I mean, that's...

Why would you want to get in that business? Because I always hear... You seem to be printing money. No, but I always hear the profit margins are very, very thin. I think they're doing okay. Although, well, Spirit, I guess, stop, but they were also charging $30 a flight.

Yeah. But I think the gas has cost? Yeah. jet fuel prices they should be coming back down right Brian said so driving back to A from college station it's raining like a sum B there you go Be careful out there That's a Brian Cozell weather report thank you Brian for the shot on that

Don't be don't be tweeting us while you're driving Yeah maybe he stopped at the rookies That's true there is one up there in water yeah I've been to that one a few times me too All right 713212 570 we got to gut feelings coming up really quick We'll bring this up probably another time. Did you see?

I know you didn't see because I'm going to throw it as a surprise on this. There is somebody, Ross, in sports that would like to try their hand at play-by-play broadcasting. Now, for those of you, I'm assuming most of you know, there is the play-by-play man. Yes. Who does the actual call. And then there's the Mike Tariko, the Jim Nance. Right. And then there's the color analyst who describes why something happened.

Right. the Tony Ramos, if you will. Yes. And the Tom Brady's. Yes. Generally, it's almost always a former player. Correct. Well, there is a former coach who would like to do play-by-play.

It's Gary Kubiak. No, I'm going to give you some hints because I wouldn't see if you can figure it out here. What if I saw it? Oh, then this isn't going to do it's no good. Well, I'm sorry. John Gruden. on something called Joe Bucksfan.com. Joe Bucksfan.com?

Yes. Are you making up websites now? It was an Ira Kaufman podcast. Ira Kaufman is Roger Clemens and Ira Kaufman. Oh, okay. Relax, Susie Waldman. You know, and this is John Gruden speaking. You know, Frank Gefford, he transitioned in the play-by-play role.

I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys, Mike Tarrico, and I'd like to be given a shot, man. Of course he said, man at the very head. I'd like to be given a shot, man. I've been watching these guys for nine years. Now, there have been quite a few football players that have turned into play-by-play guys.

How many in the last 20 years? Dan Fouts did some, but that's got to be right at that 20-year edge. What about basketball or baseball? Baseball is more, right? Like baseball. Bob Euker. Bob Euker.

Hawk Harrelson when he was doing the White Sox games. Don Drysdale was doing it. He was really good, actually. In football, here are the ones that I can come to mind. We're going to get two gut feelings here. Frank Gifford, obviously, by the name football. Pat Summerall was a former kicker. Dan Fowles, I mentioned, did some games.

But it's not really recent vintage. It's not happening a lot. I mean, I guess I'd be interested. I'd interested to hear him try. I wouldn't be interested. I would insist on it. You'd be locked in. Put him on a UFL game.

So if I'm a network, I give him a crappy college game. Or, you know. UFL. I don't want to wait that long. Okay. Give him like. Oh, UFL's over?

Yeah. Okay. How do the gamblers do? They win it all? We're not getting any calls from, what's our phrase, some gambler gym. Gambler gym.

Yeah, he said you heard his feelings very much. He was DMing me on Instagram. Yeah, I know. It's going to happen. He said you're hurting his feelings calling him the worst caller. He wasn't the worst caller. And then he admitted he couldn't get into UT, so he went to U of H. Oh, did I out him just now? You just did.

James and Klein, if you're listening, you are more than welcome to callback. You are not the worst caller. That goes to Terry in Ohio's the worst caller, right, don't you think? I think Carrie Ohio is the best caller. Jonathan, you don't get a vote, sorry. Jonathan Terry's in the top three, right? right? Oh, for sure. Did you hear the call yesterday how bad it was?

Well, okay. He had not had his coffee, I don't think. When he has his coffee, it's a really good, you know. He didn't have his metamusel is what he didn't have. He didn't have his metamusel or his prune juice or his coffee or his tapioca pudding. So I would say this, if I'm a SPN or CBS Sports Network or one of the other ones, I put him on a San Diego State U-TEP game, right? Let him try.

Sure, why not? See how it goes. Okay, I'll tune in. You know, we always say. We never listen to a game for a broadcast while watching a game for a broadcast. If John Gruden's calling a game, I'm watching it. Okay. Now, I'm watching it for the train wreckage. Maybe it'll be good.

I mean, I imagine you get a couple of practice reps in, right? Oh, I'm sure he's at home doing it in the shower like I do. Yeah. First down in 10, man. That was a really good pass, man. You got that receiver down there. I don't know his name, but he caught the ball and it's a touchdown for Utah. that was terrible wasn't it Jonathan that actually wasn't that oh that no that was not good stop actually wasn't that I was normally Matt's impressions are like a one out of ten that was at least like a four okay I'll accept that I think that wasn't bad right Jonathan

right right right you're sure let me let me work on it from the 19 yard line you can do this in the shower okay take a take a break I'm in my hotel I'm in the john the you'll be going to shower right now I don't want you to shower right now when I leave Okay, but I, all right. Gut feelings time. You got some in your gut. What? Well, I mean, by the way, the diarrhea thing is really moving around this country. You notice that?

Are you okay? If you heard, they said, stay away from vegetables. I had a Caesar, I had a spinach salad yesterday, but I'm okay. All right. We're on the West Coast, too. Oh, we're in trouble. There was like the, I'm going to be in a flight today, too. Oh.

The California vegetables. Is the California is doing all those damage to us? Parasite outbreak. sickening hundreds across 31 states. 21 million people, correct? Cyclosuriasis. Sporiasis. Well, maybe we should rename it gut feelings for something else this week

because people just were worried about their guts in general. All right. Some kind of fecal. Okay, that's probably enough. I'm just telling you. I know. We don't need to hear any more of it, though. All right, listen to a minute, ladies and gentlemen,

if you would like to make some sports predictions, 713, frequent explosive diarrhea, cyclosporiasis. More of my case of Tuesday. Listen up, girls and boys They've been so appealing You're Russ and Matt Thomas Yo, they got a gut feeling This is their gut feeling

On the Matt Thomas show All right, here's the reality of it Ladies and gentlemen We have one caller on the line His name is Brad And it's our buddy Brad And you know the rule about Brad Is that if you call

You get to come on before Brad If you don't call Brad comes on the show So that's really on to you, folks. It's not a question of if you hear from Brad, it's how late do you hear Brad on the show? Please get in. 713-212-5-790. 7-13-212-5-790.

If you want to join us through Twitter, you may do that as well at SportsMT at SportsRV. Of course, our Instagram accounts at SportsMT at SportsRV. If you want the weather to get better tomorrow, follow me on Instagram at SportsMT. If you like continued rain and flooding, follow SportsRV. If you're a reasonable person that knows that following an Instagram account has nothing to do with what's going to happen in the weather, follow Sports RV. But you know what? Follow SportsMT as well. All right, Rossi, again, 713, 212, 790. Everybody that calls in will get in front of Brad, no matter who you are.

Now, please, how we do last week? Last week, let's see, you had the Chicago Bears to Indiana. I feel good about that. I'll see what's going on there. You had the Asher was 3 and 3 on the road trip. I believe they went 2 and 4. Yes, that's correct. You had the Killingameh is a golden boot.

That's in play. He is the favorite right now. Still tied with Lionel Messi. You do have Spain and France kicking off. It'll be 4 o'clock local time. And you had Bruce Thornton averaging 4 assists, over 4 assists in the summer league. How many assists did he have? He's scoring a lot.

What? I've got to pull up the summer leagues stats. I've never pulled up summer league stats. I don't even know where I would be able to find these several leagues steps. Oh, my God. You're making me pull up summer league box scores. What the hell? Let's see.

Did he play both games or just one? Both games. Okay. You know what you look this up? I'll look at it. I'll look at it up, I swear. Yeah, good God. All right, I'm looking it up right now.

Thank you. A rocket summer league stats. This could take a while, Ross. You continue to you on, take your time. What's your problem? You said Christian Javier will stay in the bullpen and while he started on Sunday. That's a loss.

What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Ooh, I had a good one. Argentina at the time in the 36th minute was losing 1-0 to Egypt. I said Argentina would come back to win. It got even worse. They got down 2-0.

I said Argentina would come back to win? and messy would score. That's a dub and a dub. Okay. Dub and a dub. Go ahead. You get your Bruce Thorntzance. No, keep going.

I got one game. That's what I'm saying. Keep going on. Okay. Harry Kane, Golden Boot. I stuck with that. That's not looking so hot. I also said quality start light for Tatsu.

My, nope. No. Bruce Thornton, by the way, in the Rockets, Raptors game, two nights ago, had six assist. Okay. So I'm going to look up what he did against the nuggets. That was their first opponent.

Okay. And Bruce Thornton in that game ahead, three assists for a total of nine, divided by two, is four and a half. Win, win, chicken dinner. Woo! Let's go!

Man, I'm so proud of you for nailing the Bruce Thornton. Hey, I'll take victory that I can get there. Four assists. I'll take... Whatever. Whatever. Let's see Jonathan had Egypt holding on to defeat

Argentina Jonathan what do you have to say for yourself? It's rigged. FIFA's corrupt. Oh, it's rigged and FIFA's corrupt. If I win, I'm right, I'm a genius. If I lose this corruption. That goal should never have gotten taken away.

Okay. I agree with you all that. I was team Egypt. Well, if they're corrupt and they're rooting it for rigging it for Argentina, then why'd you pick Egypt? I thought there would be some morals. Are you gut feeling that Fibbe has got no morals? Okay, that's fair.

Let's see. You had England beating Norway. That's a dub. Good for him. He also had Morocco upsetting France. That didn't happen. That was a dumb big thing, but yeah. France is like that.

I should have said that. France is the Lamborghini. They're going to race past everyone, I think. And there you go. That's our gut feelings from last week. All right, Jonathan, you were up first this week. What do you got in your gut? First

A first All right France beats Spain Argentina Bees England I'm just going to cut it Chalk Or it's not talking

All right Argentina is not favorite So it's a rematch Yes it's going to be a rematch It's going to be a rematch And I think The Astros still

Have hope To make the postseason Just put the gut feeling I don't think it's over yet No wait a minute You need to tighten up a little bit there. You're going to say it again? Sorry.

No. Astros are still in the hunt. That's all I'm going to say. Okay, so you're saying the next month they're still in the hunt? Would that be fair? Is that a good one? Yes. Okay. That's not crazy to say that. Yeah, it's not crazy to say

Bruce Storing gets four assists in the Summer League, and it's not crazy to say. Hey, you don't know that. Get them, John. You don't know how many minutes he was going to play. You still have hope. I like this. Jonathan's showing some teeth. Yeah.

Got a flossal of teeth. God, there's nothing going on in sports. I don't know what else I'm going to go. Nothing going on in sports. I got France versus England. France wins it all. I've already told you, Mbapé is going to win the golden boot.

So you got to be, are you got France wins at all? God, it seems so. We're into the semis. Yeah, I mean, I'm team France. Sure. France wins it all. Okay.

I have no foundation for that, so ever, by the way. It's as gutty. It's as gutty as a gut gets. Yeah. It's a gutty feeling. It's fine. I will go with a gut feeling. We will see gas prices under $3 a gallon

in Houston by the end of the month. It's been trending that way. So I've got some work to do. I think I've seen a 309. Then I need to go down 10 more cents. Of course, that's a cash price. Cash, I'm saying, you will see a cash price of $2.99.

before the end of the month. Okay, good. Okay. Go with that. What else, Ross? Oh, I'll take the American League to beat the National League in the All-Star game today. Okay.

You know what, National League, I'll fade that. You contrarian. No, they've got to be the favorite, right? Ails trash, but I guess they all got good players. I've got a team Yordon. Oh, okay, you want to guess how Yoron's going to do today? Yordon gets a number. gets a double in today's game.

Write that down. Double. Yordon draws a walk. And that's the only time he gets on that. Intentional or regular? Regular walk. Yeah, you can't intentionally walk in by the All-Stoke. That'd be terrible.

Okay. You said Yoron hits a double? Double. Okay. Nice. Okay. Anything else? Jonathan, what else you got?

Let's say... I'm going to stick with the National League. The Suns win the Summer League. The Suns? Not to say. The Suns? I don't like this. I love it.

I'm looking around. I think that's what I'm going to go with. The Suns. Ranto. That's the best. The Vegas Summer League. They're all 30 in the league. Okay.

Well, I didn't know. I thought some went, didn't some go to Orlando? No, no. They're all 30 here. All 30. That would that be. That'd be hysterical. Let me tell you, Jonathan, if that hits...

I'm afraid. I'm saying. It's my gut. What can I buy? I'm going to... I need to buy you a treat. Do you like Dairy Queen? Oh, give me a blizzard.

Dairy Queen. Let's go get a dip cone if the sun's won the summer. Is there a Dairy Queen? Inside the loop? No, there's one on $2.90, though. It's not too far. Dip cone large sizes. By the way, if you ever try to eat a large dip cone from Dairy Queen, it's too much.

And I love you, Daney Queen. very queen but getting a small is plenty big the sun's win the suns with the superlish dikewn in my day yeah by the way the national league is a minus 135 today that's quite a bit for a juice

national league yes oh that's my pick let's go baby all right we're going to take a time out come back to talk to dave and gary david and gary get before brad anybody else before that talks to us before brad does please guys dave one gary two brad three

or maybe you can jump in front of Brad. 713-212-5-7-90, 11-44 here on Sports Talk 7-90. All right, let's get to it. It's time for us to get some gut feelings in the other Matt Thomas show with Ross. 1150 is our time. 7-13-212-5-7-90. We'll start with Dave on 7-90. Dave, what's in your gut this week?

What? Oh, am I to Dave? What is your name? Okay, I never talked to Jonathan, so I didn't know. I'm going to the Stroes game on Saturday because it's recognition of SFA. I hope Jonathan's going. Don't know if he is or not. But the gut feeling that ties into that is that Josh Miller will not survive the weekend.

He shall be replaced. And that's all I got. Josh Miller, Astros pitching coach, gone. Right after the All-Star break. I guess so. That's going to be a loss. That's going to be a loss. That's going to be a bad loss.

Now, the rule about gut feelings is we usually don't make fun of gut feelings. Okay. Unless they're so preposterous. There are people that are upset with Josh Miller, even though he was here when they won it all in 2022. Okay. You know what? I don't think it's going to happen.

I would put it at 2%. No, I put it at 1.0. No, I put it at 0.5. But, um, no, you know what? It's not so preposterous. It's not on the level of NASCAR race on the moon. Okay. That's funny.

So I will, we will not annihilate it. We may bring it up in harsh and harshly, but it's not what, it's not what. It's not what. not one of our better ones the year. That's okay. Well, he's you know, that's Jonathan's SFA guy. Nothing about this. If you're Brad, you're listening going, you've got

that guy on before me? Well, Brad sucks, okay? He's the worst caller in the history of this show. Really? He can do whatever he wants. Over James and Klein, huh? Brad is the worst in the history. Wow. All right, let's go. Here we go. Gary and Spring on 790. Gary,

what's in your gut? Hey, good morning, guys. You too, Matt. Good morning. Hey, listen, I was listening to y'all's satisfaction and unsatisfaction and excellent report on the Astros, man. You guys were ragging the heck out of my Astros, and unfortunately, I agreed with most of the ones you that you talked about. I was going to say, wait a second. It seemed warranted. Go ahead, Gary. Except for my boy, Jose Tuvay, leave the man alone. He is raising his average. He is raising his home runs. He is raising his RBIs. He is raising his RBIs. He is raising. his OPS. So by the end of the year, you guys will be proud of him.

Here's my prediction. Within post-all-star break, the Astros, within three weeks, and the reason I go three weeks, because it's going to take either the first part of the three weeks or towards the end of the three weeks. They will go on an eight to 12 game winning streak because they're pitching and they're hitting, which has been the problem, have never peaked at the same time. will peak with the first three weeks out of the all-star break and they will be in first place that's my prediction and hopefully i'll call you back and get an add-a-boy on that all right we will we will definitely give an out-a-boy on that if that happens yeah i want the astros to win i'm just not super optimistic we got a 90 game sample

i got one not a good team let me give you this um i have said all year long it will take only 85 wins to win the America League West. So I'm trying to think if I want to put a gut feeling in, if I want to double down on that, or do I want to say that somebody is going to finally play up to expectations? Because think about this, this division race last year, Ross, was super close until the Mariners had an awesome September and blew everybody out. 49 and 47, that's at 85 and 75 and 70.

The Rangers would have to play six over 500 the rest of the way to get to 85 wins. I'm going to stick with that. I think 85 is going to be just enough. I don't think there will be an 86 game winner in the American League West this year. The Astros would have to win 38 of their remaining 64 games. So 38 and 26. That's what Gary's wanting. I think it takes 85, it doesn't take 86.

Maybe it may, I should say, it's going to take less than, it'll take 85 or less to win the division. And I'm going to, I'm not putting my name on it, but I'm like circling back to once again reaffirmed that I feel good about that. 38 and 26, can they do that to get the 85 wins? Well, if you just listen to our man, Gary, he said the answer is yes. 12-game winning streak will put them in that position. How do you feel about that, man? I'm not overly bullish on it, but I could be wrong. Okay.

Jason and Katie on 790. Jason, what is in your gut? I think the Astros come out of the break with their pitching rotation set up. People go off the I-L. We sweep the Baltimore Orioles and the Rangers get swept by the Braves. We're tied for first place, and Mickey Moniac will be an Astro this time next week. Ooh. And then he hung up.

He named Rob and then hung up. Mike dropped. He might drop that one. Mickey Moniak. That's the kind of player, it'd be good. Look, they have to do something. For me, as is, this is who they are. 47 and 51. That's what they've been. They're getting healthier. They've been a little bit better.

But they've also been in the last couple of weeks, basically treading water. You just lost the series to the Nationals and the Rangers. You said 38 and 26? Right? 64. That's 64 games. Yeah, it's played 98. You're doing the math, right?

You did, you did. Okay. Last but not least, that's their buddy Brad on 790. Brad, what's in your gut this week? I'm not the worst caller. Y'all, you two are delusional. You know that?

Very delusional. You're delusional. If you think you're not the worst caller in a history of sports... No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Absolute dead last.

I don't think you are. Not at all. Not at all. Anyway, I think England is going to win Wednesday. They are going to be the surprise team. England with Jude Bellingham. They're going to blow everybody away. And then this draft pick, Bruce Thornton, I think he's going to surprise some people,

and he's going to take Summer Reed Shepard's points and time away, and he's going to make his way into the Rockets lineup sooner or less. later. All right. Is it sooner or is it later? Which one are you going with? Probably by mid-season. When they're unhappy with Reed Shepard.

And I think Van Fleet is going to teach him everything and more, and he's going to eventually pass Van Fleet after the All-Star break. Okay. He's going to...

The Rocksman draft him number one in the second round. He didn't say starting. He's saying he's going to get some valuable minutes. You know right over there? I got watered down my windpipe. I'm like, what the hell is this guy talking about? All right. And then the Brennan McCurry, I believe he's got his six-night of the year. Stop. Stop. What? Don't, don't. Everybody makes mistakes. Bradd makes a lot of mistakes. Let's go to his last few gut feelings. Spurs win the NBA finals. L. Spurs win the finals, L. Tatsu E. My, best pitcher on the staff. Wins 15 plus games.

L. Oh, oh. Let's go back even further. Let's see what I got on these archives. Asheros trade an infielder. I guess Nick Allen counts. What about Brown? What about Brown?

Astros make the playoffs. L. Texans don't make the playoffs. You said that last year. L. Oof. Texans finished third in the AFCA South. L.

Boy, Brian, he's got you. He's got you a little bit of a pickle here. Didn't I say that running back that's now in Baltimore It would get 250 yards. He got 250 yards. He didn't get that. No, who? Derek Henry?

Derek Schmeckle. Derek Schmeckle. Thanks, Brad. Appreciate you. Derek Schmeckle. Derek Schmeckle got $250. It was against the bucks. Okay. By the way, if you were asking me for more John Gruden,

play by the play, I can't do it. I've only got a limited about it. It was pretty good. Spider-2-Y banana. Spider-2-Wanana. a first to 10 for hey man the buccaneers man let's go man spider two wild banana man

all right I will work on this for sure 713 212 570 that was got phillings a week you guys did a great job 7122 212790 this is the matt thomas show with ross

level 5 in h town what's happening it is our number three of four the matt thomas show with ross if you'd like to join us. You may do so. 713, 212.5.790. 713, 212, 5, 790.

We are coming to you today from Las Vegas. Ross and I will be back in our palatial Houston Studios tomorrow for 10 to 2 edition of the show. This specific time zone thing, I mean, it was cool the show ended yesterday, Rossi, at noon, but I was like, at 1.15, I was crashing so hard. I needed a major nap. Uh-huh. There's no, uh-huh. I just was just a matter of fact.

Oh, I thought you were had anything. No, I'm nothing in a noon. Okay. I am crashing right now. But you know what? The show must go on. Excellence must continue. Sorry, I was playing Blackjack all night.

And that includes the news at noon, so let's get to it. Oh. Oh, great. Well, I'm glad you asked Matthew for the news at noon. As, well, let's start with World Cup action. Later on today, you have a clash of Titans, France versus Spain. It'll be 2 p.m. where we are in Pacific time, but of course, 4 p.m. Central time.

France holding as slight favorites in this one. Total is at 2.5 in Arlington, Texas at Dallas Stadium. Then tomorrow, also at 4 p.m. Central. It'll be England versus Argentina. That'll be at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. You will have the final. Wherever final you get, it's going to be a pretty darn good one on Sunday. And Matt, did you know that the World Cup has also a third place game?

I did not. So a third place game will be on Saturday between the losers. And I think there is prize money involved in that. So there is a bit of an incentive there. But yes, whatever happens, you got all the four big brands, France, Spain, England, Argentina, left in the World Cup. They will be in action later today. Also, Matt, what is your favorite thing about Jordan, Walker.

St. Louis Cardinal legend. Did he hit six consecutive home runs yesterday? Yes, he did. He had to hit six home runs on

demand in order to defeat hometown hero Kyle Schwaber of the Philadelphia Phillies. And this is also interesting. Jordan Walker

making a salary of $79,400 this year, so about 800K as the St. Louis Cardinal. Take 38% out of that.

Yes. So he's when he's comfortable. Well, he gets a million for winning this home run derby. So he doubles his salary by entering and winning the home run derby. So congratulations to him. Jordan Walker, also speaking, said he hopes he inspires more black kids to follow in his footsteps. I want to be a role model for black kids, he said, you know, I want more black kids in baseball.

Hopefully this raises some awareness. Great story. I mean, good kid. did it in, you know, it's one of the top prospects in baseball. Now he's winning, honestly, and I've not heard of him until yesterday. I don't follow it on the Cardinal baseball.

Oh, you're a Cardinal guy? You do, let me ask you this. Should we to be better baseball fans? I think the answer to this is no, but should we be in a fantasy baseball league? Yes. Absolutely. Okay.

You know what? Next year, well, I'll put it this way. The next time there's a full baseball season, which could be 20-28. Let's do a fantasy baseball league. Okay. We need to let the computer roll the heavy lifting, right? Just like in football.

Yeah. Yeah, first couple of years, Jordan Walker is one of the top prospects in baseball, and he scuffled a little bit his first couple of years, as the kids do. And now as a 24-year-old, he is OPSing 887. Okay. And he's got 22 home runs on the year. Would you be hoping is, although Cam Smith wasn't that level of prospect, Jordan Walker is like top five prospect

in baseball. Okay. And then age 24, he's figuring it out. That's kind of what you were hoping that kind of blueprint would happen for Cam Smith. Be a good prospect. Scuffle maybe a little bit for a couple years. Then start to unlock some things and figure it out. And get to get.

Last year, OPS in 111 games for the Cardinals, 584. Now, will we get an Astros to trade for this guy a call before the end of the show today? I don't think so. I don't think so either. but Jordan Walker having a spectacular season for the St. Louis Cardinals. Matthew. Elsewhere in the sports headlines, Tyler Hero wants to move on from the BAM at a bio altercation.

Now, do you know there's somebody water carrying for Tyler Hero? Who is it? Ramona Schober. Oh, really? Said that Ramona reported ESPN's Ramona Showboard that Tadour Hero had to be restrained to go from going after Bam Out of Bio. Oh, he said, they hold me back. Correct.

Yeah, because Tyler Hero, man, he's, Bam and Obio will break him in half. Come on. You know who should be holding Tyre Hero back from Bam Outabio? Tyler Hero. I don't like that. I mean, I know you like to throw hands. We saw that a couple of years ago against a man Thompson. Well, he gets to get slammed down by him in Thompson.

That's right. Eh, me. Ma. All right. He said, quote, honestly, I'm just trying to move past all of it. he told the SPN. I'm focused on Milwaukee and building something special.

They obviously just traded the greatest player in their history, so we want to come in and help continue what they've been doing. Ooh. Janice and Tentacouple, greater than Karim Abdul-Jabbar

slash L. Sender? Greatest buck in history? Says who? Tyler Hero just said they traded, they just traded away their greatest player. Um, I don't have the context of that. How many years was,

was Karin? Yeah, I mean, when I think of the greatest of Kareem, I think of him as a Laker for longevity and the championships. He did win a championship with the Bucks, though. Yes, he did. Okay, I'm trying to pull it up. He was there for only six years. And then over a decade in Los Angeles. 14 years in L.A., six years in Milwaukee.

You could be the greatest of a franchise of being in the only six years. I can buy that argument. Yeah, LeBron's the greatest Cleveland Clavillier ever. Was there like 8, 10 years? Drinus Zagoskis is the second-grade. Hey, come on now. By the way, before we get to the top, our break here, here, are you intrigued by this daily LeBron?

Is interested here? No. Isn't it true at all? No. Not really to me either. It's manufactured. It's manufactured story by NBA. I don't know.

You've got 20 different websites saying, it's ridiculous. He's leaning towards Golden State. He's leaning towards Miami. He's 41 years old, guys. Well, but I mean, in context, wherever he goes is going to be a major story. I'm not. I don't need daily updates about it. I don't.

But there's people lying. There's people trying to get engagements and clicks, and I'm not buying any of it. Although I have a friend of mine that insist, that insist, okay, that LeBron is going to Cleveland. Okay. Well, they're the odds on favorites at the moment. But it, you know what, and it's crazy, though,

if you are betting on LeBron's destination, that's where you probably have a habit. You have a problem. Because it's an opinion. There's nothing factual. Yep, you can trade on anything. I know you can trade anything. And I want you to go to Kowshi.

I'm about to put a few bucks on LeBron to the calves. Let me tell you about Kalshi. And Kalshi, you can respect this. You can trade on anything. I would not trade on a human person, a human being's personal decision. Okay. Is that's just a stay away from me I got you

I'm just saying There's way more other things on cash I'd be trading other than that All right I'm going to put a few bucks on Cleveland All right 43% Cleveland Golden State's going up a lot 36% Golden State

9% Miami So things are going in the Cleveland slash Golden State direction Right now All right and then lastly As I told you I was going to do on Twitter, which I did today. It's time for the daily edition of the

Daily Airline Complain, is what I'm going with. Okay. And today, American Airlines, your first step. Ryan Cruz, where Ryan lives. Flew American out last week. Constant issues, delays, cancellations, changes, transfer, weather, loss of $500 reservation due to A.A. cancelling flight.

Email and called and got exact same letter from Mary Beth Jenkins. Sorry, thanks for letting us know. We will show your concerns. And that's today's edition of a aforementioned daily airline complaint. Thank you, Matt. I will rotate airlines to make sure everybody gets equal distribution of complaints.

Okay. But you're going to rhyme them all. I just said American. Oh, okay. Yeah, if it's complaints, I think you should. Yeah, yeah. Let's hold these airlines accountable. Yes.

Like, will either one of us today have a complaint when we land in Houston? Well, my flight's already delayed. Well, that's weather. That's not dark breast fault. It doesn't say that. It's got to be weather. Jonathan, how's the weather back home? Terrible, correct?

Horrible. It'd be cleared up in a couple hours, though, right? Yeah, but they're not going to fly. They're not going to risk people on a dangerous aircraft flying. I mean, it's fine. To get you here on time. They do, like, 20 more minutes so I can make sure I catch the entire World Cup game. Okay, you're going to be good.

I would not tell anybody that. Why? Because you do not, you're not asking for weather delays and delays of flights in order to catch World Cup. What if Spain, France is like 1-1 in the 90th minute, and they're asking me to board? You have a phone. It works. Oh, this is BS. Yeah, I got to keep my boarding pass out.

Jonathan. Trying to watch the game. That's why I can't travel with this man. 1215. We did an Astros mid-season progress report, Ross. We're not going to run through all of them, but we're going to tell you who we thought. Not a lot of good grades.

The grades were not good. 1215 on Sports Talk 790. Ross and I are arguing why you can't have a lie check at the airport. And the number one thing is they're saying it would just take immense amount of staffing. From pit bosses to security to dealers to space. Let me tell you, if you have a blackjack devil, Ross, you can't have Annie Ann's down next to it.

Sorry. Why not? Because there's going to be no room for any ends. I want a pretzel with some hot mustard, and I want to be doubling down. What's the big deal? Yeah. I like to split these eights. Yeah.

And I like some cream cheese out of fries. frosting on my pretzel please yeah give me a cinnamon pretzel and split nates what's the big deal I would love blackjack at the airport I don't want to step right at the I mean the the slot machines

I don't like slot machines here's another issue if you win a certain amount of money that this would happen a lot but if you are a whale and you win say 10 15 20 25000 dollars you have to go through the IRS and you're going to fill out

of thing and then you're like I got catch my flight man what if i hit ten thousand dollars on a slot well that's not happening although somebody did win three million dollars oh really uh what's in the last week here in vegas here in Vegas yeah nice now if you win three million dollars you'll catch a later flight yes or you'll or you'll actually go down the street to the private airport and you take your own private jet back exactly that's funny all right uh 10 20 i make it 1223 sports talk 7 i need is mad it's ross we are with you here and we'll be with you till 2 o'clock today uh 713 2 1 212 5 6 6 7000000 790, 7.9, 3212, 5, 790.

Ross and I did go through the Astros progress report. We have five excellent grades, and we'll tell you more about that, but I'm going to get in Jeremy before we get to those. Jeremy, thanks for holding a good afternoon to you. Good afternoon to you as well. What's on your mind? Well, I wanted to let you know that in certain parts of Houston, you can't, you actually hit your gut feeling.

there are gas prices at $2.99 in cash if you go to like Pinemont and Antoine. Oh, nice. On Antoine. I got you. That's good. So that's already a gut feeling hit. I'm not even claiming that because I was not even in town. So I definitely came up with that.

Jeremy, thank you for that update. I appreciate that very much. There's $2.99, Rossi. $2.99. Are you out of your mind? Again, there are lots of things about Kingbone I like, some things I don't. I think we get some of the cheapest gas in Houston Yeah

I think it's some of the cheapest in the country And the reality is I may be paying 15 cents less than those of you What do I say? Go ahead and say it The reality is this You told me you Oh damn I didn't say that okay

I'm trying to get rid of Quartz phrases I told Ross to put the head The warning sign of Here's the truth About that one Is that better? I'm maybe paying 309 in Kingwood

But I'm still traveling more than you guys are I mean, you're paying $3.509 in the city, and you take three minutes to work. I go 37 miles. I fill up maybe once a month. God, I hate you. I just hate you. But that's not for a reasons. All right, so, ladies and gentlemen, the Astros, we gave a progress.

I spent more on Uber's than you do. That's fair. Uber everywhere. Yeah. And your groceries are probably more expensive than mine. Maybe. Eating out is probably more expensive. Yeah, but I just, I'm one person, though, so your groceries are more expensive than mine.

Yeah. Okay. I'm going to get my decisions. I decided to have sex I decided to procreate I get the lemon pepper grilled chicken breast and some broccoli I'm out of there for eight bucks

I am getting the 20-piece meal at Ruruky Rydrickin The what? Rurkeye Rikki Rikovine is having a stroke No, not having it They want to spend money They'll get the sponsor plug Rucky ride Rikken

Ruckie Rikin Rookie Rikin, yeah original recipe and Extra Krispy Oh, extra crispy. No, no, original. You're right. You're right.

You're right. You can't beat the 13 herbs and spices, Matt. Can you name those 13 herbs? Hell no. I mean, I could probably guess them. Salt, pepper, rosemary. Can we move on? Garlic powder?

I want to get the asterisk. You asked about the spices. Don't look. No, no, no, no. Don't put your head in your head. Is there a tinge? Like, it was my fault. You asked about the spices.

Garlic. You can't bring it up and be like, oh, come on, Ross. Like, it's my fault. It is my fault. but I'm placing my blame on you go ahead all right so we did the progress report we did this is at 1030 this morning we did excellent

satisfactory incomplete needs improvement or unsatisfactory we had a team littered with unsatisfacatories a fair amount of needs improvements a handful of incompletes and a very very small

number of satisfactory. Yes. We had five players that we deemed as the excellent players for the Astros, and this is no surprise. Okay? Yordon? Of course. We put Christian Walker in. A little debate on that,

but we should put Christian Walker. Because he's better than satisfactory. On the pitching side, we went with Peter Lambert. Let's go Lambo. Brian King, I know did not do well in Arlington. Right. But big picture on this. Uh-huh.

And Stephen Okert. Everyday Okert. Do love Everyday Oker. Dude's been a baller. No, you know we didn't grade? Dana and Joe. Ooh. And we'll do that coming back on the break.

Oh, I like this. Now, some of you that are a spot of haters, no matter what, you don't get a vote because you suck. because you change your mind six days a week. Unsatisfactory. Should be fired. The progress is what was our expectations at the beginning of the season, Rossi? And where are we now?

Well, we named how many excellent players? Five. Out of a 40 man or 26 man? There are 50 players that played this year for the Astros. 50, and five got excellence. One of them was borderline. Okay. Yep.

1234 p.m. here on Sports Talk 790. The Matt Thomas show with Ross, as we'll have, believe it or not, later on, the category is, oh, it's that guy that died. Yeah. Sam Neal. Sam Neal. We're going to go with that? What's his second most famous role?

I can't give you an answer. I thought I don't want to. I just can't give you one at this point. I mean, he was that guy. peeky blinders that was pretty good you ever watch peeky blinders matt no a lot of violence i'm not gonna yeah no also kind of dense and i give you an unpopular uh oh here we go i didn't watch Jurassic Park i know i know i know jonathan shame me please let's do it get out of the way i don't shame you ever you think you think less of me though no never

I just think you made me that i've never seen Jurassic Park I've never seen it either I don't like I think it's, I wouldn't. Okay, Jonathan, but that came out like 10 years before you were born. You're getting a pass. Yeah, I feel like it was a, yeah. This came out. Matt, how old were you in 93? You're in your 20s, right? You're in your 20s.

This, Jonathan, this is a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, that's true. This would be like saying I've not seen any of the Avengers movies, which I don't think Matt's seen any of those. You haven't seen the Avenger movies? Mm-mm. Marble. See, Jonathan? Wait on.

Now, now we're on the same page. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Matt. Yes, sir. The Avenger movies, Marvel. You've never seen a single one of those. Nope. Iron Man one, two, three, four.

No. Nope. Captain America. Oh, wow. First Spider-Man. That's not even. You're talking about Toby and McGuire? First, I mean, the first two or three of Batman stops.

All right. We have to have an intervention. Jurassic Park was a cultural phenomenon, Jonathan. Everyone referenced it. It was always, it was. talked about the cg i there was groundbreaking cg i know you're you're you're you're you're you're you're young and you take cg i for granted it was the first movie where the cg i actually looked like realistic it was a modern technological marvel and it was just a huge

huge part of pop culture and and really his film history yes that's true that is very wait yeah so what about transformers wilburne gerassad park look at that cgai now is 19199 And you never saw it? Why not? Okay, so let's grade out the manager and the general manager. Just wait until Friday. We'll have an intervention. We'll bring this like out.

Wait a minute. Why don't you know? If you're going to intervention to me, do it tomorrow. We ain't anything to talk about. We ain't bringing down the All-Star game. Okay, let's see. Sam Neal and the piano? I'm looking for other big roles.

Peaky blinders, yeah. The hunt for Red October? Oh, he was a... We can do a very easy Google Bowl. you know, I'll give you, I'm going to give you, this is we're on the road. I'm going to give you an easier, believe it or not. Was he in it or not? No, no, no, no, no.

You'll see him in his proper respects. Okay, that's what I'll make sure. All right. So again, if you miss our 1030 judging, shame on you. We're judging based of what we thought would be and how the actual performance. Relative to expectation. So if you are, if you're a Dana Brown lover or a Joe's spotted lover or vice versa or a hater and both, you're never going to give them decent grades.

Okay. So I would say, based off of what Joe was given, you can't be excellent if you're under 500. No. That's not going to happen. Now, it's either going to be needs improvement or satisfactory. It's not unsatisfactory. What I need to know is I need you guys to help me run this. Has there been any managerial malpractice this year for Joe?

And if it's been minimal, he's been a manager for this team for now. 98 games. I never like Jordan in the three hole, which has happened a lot, especially when they were healthier, and it was Jeremy Pena and Carl's Correa, but that's a minor quibble for me.

Okay. I would say occasionally, I mean, it's never been like, I don't know what the heck he's doing out there, because a lot of times the bullpen's been taxed. He's been trying to ask some extra outs from Ocurt or Enio Delos Santos, who's not a leverage guy,

but you have to use him in leverage. And a lot of it's because other guys, guys are taking the can't aren't available you know they're like why didn't you go to this guy well because if brian king or ochard or a hater are down for the down meaning unavailable yeah that limits his so i would say you have a lot of idiots who are like why didn't he pull the starter well because he needs to get outs the guys who go out there need to get outs spencer ergetti or tatu you yeah you mind is making 20 million dollars mike burrows has been over here like those guys need to go out there and get outs and they haven't been performing so

Overall, go ahead. Can't be excellent. No. Needs improvement means there's something he's not doing properly. I would say my quibbles are minor. So I would say satisfactory. I think satisfactory is fine. But it's not a full satisfactory.

Okay. It's a, you're under 500. Yeah. And by the, but you are what your record is. So no one's satisfied with under 500 in where they are, but being dealt with, what he's, you know, I'm going to stay with Satisfactor. Everybody was injured.

I mean, nobody's been good. It's not his fault that Burroughs was terrible. Imi, terrible, Erigeti, underperforming the last couple of months. Even Hunter Brown hasn't been up to the level that you would have hoped since he's come back. And Lance McCullors, Jr. was a disaster.

So, I mean, like, it's a satisfactory. It's a satisfactory. Yeah. I'm sorry. Now, let's go over the candidacy for Dana Brown. Kai Wei Tong Tatsu Emi I'm not going to crush him for the Nick Allen trade

Because I think he was told to get under the payroll That's not his fault So let's knock him off the list He did grab Lambert So that's a kudos to him Yes He did He chose not to keep Hesu Sanchez

And with the outfit the way that it is I think that was also payroll shaving orders from Mr. Crane Did he have too much face? and the variety of people that were playing left field for this team and not go after somebody sooner. Hey, Lamont Wade Jr.'s been decent while he's been around. I know it's been 10 games. Yeah, I know, I know, no.

Korea got hurt. A lot of injuries. So can we do this? Can we give him a needs improvement with a chance to upgrade his grade to a satisfactory? I'm going to need to improve. If he does him at the trade deadline, right? I'm going needs improvement, and let's see what the deadline is. Yeah.

Might even be unsatisfactory. Well, put it this way. If there was no trade deadline, Think about this, Ross, if there was no trade down, and it would be an unsatisfactory. But he's got a chance to upgrade his grade. He's got a chance. You know what, Ross?

He's got a big test coming up. Remember when your teachers would say, you're a little Rossi, you've got a C minus in this class, and if you want to play sixth grade football, seventh grade football and be the backup center, you need to get an A on this test. But Ross, I think you can do it. Dana Brown has got a shot to upgrade his grade

by what he can pull off at the deadline and provided that he's allowed to do that. And I believe Jim Crane would allow him to go get a couple of extra dollars for some players on a short-term deal. I'm bordering on an unsatisfactory here. I'm going to need to prove it. Talk me off the unsatisfactory fence because Ryan Weiss, DFA, Tatsu-I-My, disaster. Oh, God.

Mike Burroughs, disaster. Oh, man. I'm going to get out. I'm giving me to you. Needs improvement, but with an opportunity. Now, if he doesn't do anything at the trade deadline or the trade deadline acquisition comes in and doesn't help, then it's an unsatisfactory. And then Dana's looking for it. Highway tongue, hurt and not good.

Ocurt is a, that's a Dana Brown acquisition. Brian King is a Dana Brown acquisition. Yeah, right? Or is Brian King? Yeah, yeah. Brian King is in, okay. All right, I'm bordering. It's not much.

It's not a strong argument. But again, the trade. deadline can fix him, or fix this team more importantly. These are their Astros pitching war leaders. Do you need to do this? Oh, my God. Are we down the home stretch of the show today?

Peter Lambert, 2.4, Ocert 1.4, King 1. Hater 0.8. Haters pitch 17 games. He's been your fourth best pitcher all year long. This is nasty. This is ugly. You know who's got the best?

Here's the unsatisfactory part. Tong, Burroughs, who else? Tong, Burroughs, and Tang. No, Tong, Burroughs, Weiss, and Tang. And Emai. And Emai. But how much that was driven by Jim Crane? How much that was driven by Reichen?

That's the name of the park, Matt. Are you just going to call it Houston Stadium? Houston baseball. You know what, if Reichen wants to spend some money in air conditioning on 7-90? There you go. Houston Stadium. By the way, two Astros have appeared in games and have an ERA of zero. Can you name them?

Jake Myers? Yes. How did I know? And the other one is another position. Miguel Uiola. Miguel Uriola. Now, are you okay? Now, think about this.

Whose idea was it to put him into the bullpen? Does Dana get credit for that? I don't know. It was probably a pitching coach. It might have been a space cowboy coach. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, It wasn't good as a starter down there. No, he walks everyone.

He was good in his little taste that he got, so maybe he can be a reliable leave in the next couple of years. 713-212-5-79 if you want to join us. 7-13-212-5-7-90. Needs improvement for Dana, and that is going to... Look, if nothing happens by the trade deadline, then it's an unsatisfactor, right? Okay.

John, they get the tip char out, please. Do you have it out? I'm putting a five spot in there. I'm looking at my four-you-tap. If you are complaining about the lack of number of Texans in the top 100 NFL list, you're a loser. Who the hell cares what the NFL top 100 list is? When are we from fans to stupid-ass water-carrying media going to stop trying to figure out who makes the list? have I ever bitched about Jose Altuve not making an all-star team or a silver slugger

or that a man Thompson wasn't named on a defensive team? Give me a freaking break. Listen here, you losers. Nobody gives two craps about the top 100. You know what we care about in Houston, Texas, Ross, and Battle Red? We care about them winning playoff games and going to an AMC championship and going to a Super Bowl. You're a loser if you are spending time breaking down why the Texas don't have enough players on the NFL top hundred list. Loser!

Loser! Ridiculous. You know what? This damn radio show has been on for 16 years because we're doing it right. We don't do lame-ass topics. I'm sorry, Ross. $5 a good jar. No.

No. That wasn't bad. I thought you were going to say something about cussing and discussing or something. We go. There we do. We, we, we, Nicko Collins and Eagle being the number one receiver in the NFL. Who cares? Nobody.

I feel like we've definitely debated guys being worthy of All-Star games or, or if certainly, James Hardin, MVP's. That's a big award. This is NFL Top 100 is when athletes go on their Hawaiian vacation, they still fell out a list of your favorite player. Yeah? That's not, that's completely different than voting for MVP. Okay. He we mean $10. I put it in there.

What's wrong with you? A lot of things. Cortland Sutton ahead of Lamar Jackson in the top 100, man. Your thoughts. Oh, my God. Damn. More Jackson is getting no love. Go work in Abilene.

I don't want to hear that from you. Dolphins linebacker Jordan Brooks ahead of Lamar Jackson. Jordan Love? Yeah. All right. Jonathan Ross is putting $5 in a jar, too. Why? I'm just going through the list.

absurd. I thought this is a very valid right. What do you? 85th. Good for him. Would you say, Jonathan? I feel like this is a very valid rent. I don't think we need to put that much money in there. Maybe just $2. That's all I got to put in is two. Two bucks. I was willing to put 15 in.

No, that's all right. Thank you. This isn't outlandish. It's just Oh, God. If I was a programmer, I'd be firing people left and right. You've got to have good radio. You've got to be entertaining. You cannot run through, oh, one list is hurting my feelings today. Are we

Slated? Stop. Isn't it player vote? Yes, that's the worst part of it. So how's the media sliding them? No,

these players are not respect to the use of attention. I don't know what you're, yeah. Okay. How about, you know what,

Ross? What, Matt? I want to be Deep Steel White, Matt. No. Liberty White, Matt. Yeah,

you're Liberty White, Matthew. I need a football. You know what? I thought about this. What are you thinking about? I need a football. team. Aziz Alshar is number 92.

That's good. Okay, great. I'm happy for him. Me too. Do you think he's walking around town going on the 92nd best player in the NFL, says my teammate? I'm sure he's happy to get voted by his peers. Nobody cares.

He cares. He cares about his best players. I'm sure he cares about his cash. We talk about this list through every year. Have we talked about it yet? Nope. No. We ain't going to talk about it.

When I'm on vacation, whenever I go next, you're going to do it. We're going to go a deep dive on it. We'll take calls on it, too. All right, let's see if we can get this. Is Alziz's. I'll show your property right in at 92. 713-212-5-790. Absurd.

Brian and Pearland. Brian, what do you got today, friend? Just in regards to the grade for Dana and Joe, Joe, I agree with you guys on the satisfactory. I mean, you can quarrel with some of the Sunday, off-day lineups that he's thrown out there that have produced zero runs. But again, what players do you have available and things like that? You know, there's only so much he can do.

But, yeah, he's probably underachieved a little bit, but you can't deal with all these injuries. Now, Dana, basically, if you're putting it in a letter grade, I give them a D. Simply because you put in a letter grade, though. We are not letter grade people. Yeah, so unsatisfactory. There you go.

Simply because you also have as nice as a little pickup that Brayden Shoemaker was as a fill-in. You also have Christian Roa, who was a bust, and Roderie Munoz, who you used a Rule 5 draft pick for, that you then had to, like, give back to the Cardinals and, like, give them money to take him back. That was a bust. There were just way too many. Now, Kyle Heng was good when he was in the pen,

started off really well, but then once he went to a starter. But, yeah, so you can give him a slightly above average there. But overall, I think Daniel's got to get an unsatited. Now, he came with a decent, like, like you said with a decent trade deadline i think he can work his way back up to a satisfactory possibly if some guys come in and healthy and uh help contribute to this team whoever you pick up but largely all these well a lot of these pitching guys have just been failures that he's brought over here so far i mean i guess maybe your bright spot is partially with tang and then

uh lambert has been your saving grace but everybody else has not performed it in large and you know your key acquisition that you made a trade for you already had to put in triple a until you could say oh no no no he's hurt so he's really on the injured list but you know that that doesn't help so day and i give an unsatisfactory this year um and then like i think the munoz and the road you know those were overlooked as a you know including Weiss in that as well. But Joe, you can't bash as much because that's what he has to work with.

So Rosser Construction would be the biggest keep putting Christian Walker in the three hole. You just can't keep doing that after a while. You've got to look at it and go, wow, he's done well on the five, but not the three. Let's move back. But part of that's all going. Thank you for the phone call. Thanks, Brian. Yeah, you know, it's funny.

And I don't think I'm by myself on this. I think you're with me too. Line-up construction is a little overrated in terms of deep conversation. Yeah, it's overrated. I have my quibbles, like I was saying, like, you know, Yoron. But Yoron's been in the two-hole for the majority of the season. But when he's in a three, I'm like, what are we doing? I like to get him up there more times.

But, and it's also not ideal to have Jose Al-Tuve, who's hitting 235 or whatever to be leading off. But it is what, there's no great candidates. The last three Sundays, are they, what, two and one on the last three Sundays? and they scored five runs on Sunday against the Rangers, so it wasn't like it was three hit, 14 strikeout Sunday. Sundays Typically,

you're going to get some leaner lineups. You just argue you have a lot of night games, followed by game games. I'm not trying to justify it, but everywhere I've worked Ross, whether it was the Astros with manager AJ Hinch, whether it was manager Dusty Baker,

whether it was Minnesota Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire, everybody bitches about the Sunday lineup. And it's just kind of a easier way to get veterans off their feet or maybe a veteran D.H. Day. Yeah.

But when you, and here's the aggravating part, when you have a less than spectacular Sunday lineup and that lineup puts up one run on three hits with nine strike cuts, it gives those people that are bitching about Sunday lineups more fuel. And I understand that. I like what was

Sunday was Pena, Alvarez, Perez, Paradis, Walker, El-Tube. That's the way I like it. That's good. Yeah. All right, we are coming up to the final hour of the Matt Thomas show with Ross. We're here in Las Vegas.

Coming up in the next hour, we're going to, in 20 minutes, give away the old smoky giveaway. Oh, yes. I hope you were listening today to the show. I hope so. This is the Matt Thomas show with Ross. We're going to be giving away an old smoky grill.

About 50 minutes here, charcoal grill. And as my 26-year-old son learned, be careful on to put. too much lighter fluid on the charcoal. There'll be towering inferno going over there. All right, Ross and Matt with you for the final hour here. 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-2-1-2-7-190 if you'd like to be with us.

We've got some interesting audio coming from Summer Lake in about 15 minutes. We'll have Will Dunn's conversation if you missed that earlier day, the Rocket's assistant coach with us, and he'll have it for you coming up at 130. We believe it or not today at 150. We have the Astros and the rest of Major League Baseball. with the off day. And the All-Star game is tonight. We've got World Cup coming up at,

is it 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock our Houston time? World Club will be 4 o'clock Houston time. Okay. 2 o'clock our time here where we are in Las Vegas. So 4 o'clock. Okay. Very good. And France, slight favorites over Spain in that one.

Do we have a rooting favorite on that, by the way? I just like watching France play because they're the most complete team. They're insane. Spain is pretty good, too. By the way, it's saying two o'clock central time Oh, what? France and Spain

Why am I looking at... Okay, I'm... Why was I thinking it was four? You're sorry. I'm sorry. My bad, thank you for correcting me. I got you. Oh.

Okay. Wait, is this going to start right at noon? Our time? You got your phone, you'll be fine. Oh, I was been wrong this whole time. This is throwing... off everything. Thank you for correcting me.

Oh, okay. All right. I guess my ESPN is set to central time. Yeah, my computer's always set to central time. It helps settle. I don't like if only made one time gap during our time here. Well, I've been making it, I've been saying this for three days. Oops.

I didn't catch it either, my bad. That's fine. Oh, man, it's right at noon. We'll be fine. I'm going to leave early. What time we leave it? Right now. Okay, I'll see you later.

We'll see you later. All right, 713. If Ross is leaving me, come on, join the program. 7132-1-2-5-7-90. Again, we've got the old smoke giveaway coming up in about 15 minutes from now. Hey, I mentioned this a little bit ago early in the show. When you get all the all-stars together in Philadelphia, which they were last night, and obviously tonight,

the conversation's about the labor situation and the lockout. and they're very happy that attendance is going to be up, I think, over a percent. New television deals, television ratings are good. The MLB did it right. I mean, moving NBC was helpful. They have a little bit of games of the SPN, but NBC is freshen things up a little bit. They renewed the Apple TV deal, which pisses people off, but that's how they're hearing or there. And what else is new this year?

Fox is still doing its thing. It's mainly been NBC. I mean, say which will what NBC. see, they have amped up everything. The NBA coverage was really good. Their NFL Sunday night football is awesome. They've added a new layer to baseball. So attendance is good.

Television revenues are good. Employee salaries are good. The Dodgers, meanwhile, are looking to buy up every human player available. And whether, no matter what side you're on on this, the reality is both sides are doing very, very well. And the reality is we've got to figure out a way for both sides. come together and ultimately have the players accept there's going to be a salary cap. And the players are going to have to accept that.

If we don't get that, we ain't seeing baseball. They're going to want a higher floor, and they're going to want teams to not be under control for six years. That's going to change, too, I think. So where else, I mean, because we keep talking about NFL and all that stuff. And if you're a first-round pick, you get up to a fifth-year option on a deal. That's five years of what you would call. call control. But that's also at a higher

salary. The first few years when players are getting called up, but baseball is also different. You have the minor leagues, you have all these systems, you have guys who get called up and sent down, who are really not worthy of being major league baseball players. It's just a different animal.

It's a different labor formula. Every league has that. You have a firm cap in the NFL. You have a loose cap in basketball. You have the NFL, you have your practice squad. But you also have a hard cap. Baseball, you have a basketball, I should say.

You have a few guys you can call up and down from like the RGV. But you have aprons, which football does not have. Baseball has a luxury tax right now. Which is kind of a soft cap. Yes, for some for a lot of teams. It's a soft cap for Jim Crane. Yeah. But come on down, Nick Allen.

We're trying to get under the tax. Mm-hmm. so that's why and and pardon my ignorance on this if we're already under a soft cap as it is and look labor negotiations ross whether you want it minute or not i'm talking about you in general there's give and take and it just feels like they the baseball owners want a truer definition of it they want to cap the salaries at a certain percentage now if you You do it like they do in the NFL. The floor is determined by proceeds of the league.

When the NFL finds out we've made this much money, there's automatically an allocation of that. Is it 49% I think? Yeah. It goes directly to player salaries. It's around 50-50 in both leagues. That's the thing, too. The owners don't open up their books in baseball.

The other leagues do. Yeah. They say, we want this percentage of our... revenues. Yeah. And so the owners are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They don't want to open their books. That happened in the COVID negotiations.

They're like, we're losing money, we're losing money, we're losing money. The player said, open the books. They said, no, we're good. Well, it feels like the books are a little bit more up now because we know how much these television deals are. Yeah. We know that attendance numbers are going up. Now, we don't know if that necessarily means that revenues are going up.

Because if you put 40,000 people in a stadium, but you're only charging 75% of what you charge five years ago, then you are, in theory, making less money. Now we do know this. The national television deals are going really well. The local television deals are going away and the NBA is feeling the brunt of that right now. They are normally accustomed to 7, 8, 9, 10% bumps in their salary cap. They are not going to see that for the future because

the local television rights are gone because these regional TV networks are going away. So while you're maybe making more money on the national side of it, you are losing local revenue because the old Fox Sportses of the world, the old

you know, HSEs and Prime Sports and Fox Sports and Valley, whatever, that used to pay these teams $20 and $25 million a year are now paying them zero. For those that don't know, AT&T owned AT&T,

T&T SportsNet, right? Yeah. And they told the Rockets and they told the Astros, I'm going to try to gloss this in a very generic way, we're not going to pay you anymore. Here's the network, here's our equipment, here's our distribution,

it's yours. So the Rockets and the Astros took a financial hit off that now. They have a place to put their games and they have clearance on direct TV and all the cable systems and whatnot, but they're not getting a check from the company

that used to own these regional TV networks. That's lost money, and the NBA is suffering because of that. Yeah. That's that balance. That's why the television national television deal game was such a big deal, because they needed that money back that they lost on the local side of things. So when you all bitch and complain about not having Craig and Ryan do Rockets' Playoff games, it's because the NBA television partner said,

if we're cutting you billion dollars a check a check a year to cover these games, we want every one of the games. We don't want to compete, which I get. I do too. I totally understand. network yeah so uh but yeah on the baseball side though i i just don't get this feeling that everybody's hemorrhaging money and this is just some an untenable situation for the owners no i really firmly believe they just want more money yes as owners typically do and whether it's a restaurant whether it's a fortune

five hundred company whether it's stock a law firm they want more money yeah and i mean parent companies they want more money everybody's looking for a greater profit because you guess what you get so i'm not crying for the owners is what I'm saying. I'm not crying for the owners, but the owners have the leverage on this. I'm more and more convinced about this. I don't know that they do. I mean, I guess we will see.

My ultimate... The floor is going to have to raise, and it's going to have to be percentage of revenues. Yes, yes. I do agree with that. But I think if you were to be a betting man, I think we're getting a... The word salary cap will be implemented in baseball for the first time ever when baseball resumes.

May not like it. but I don't care. I don't want games missed. I know. And that's what the number one thing should be. All right, we'll come back and talk to Joe in the Heights. I want to get the salary cap conversation in. We have the smoky giveaway to give to,

and we've got some interesting audio from Summer League that I want to get a ruling on from Jonathan and from Ross. 115 on Sports Talk 790. 713-212-5-79. Who's ready to charcoal barbecue? I got an old Smoky girl I want to give away today. Right this second. Jonathan, I gave you the answer, by the way, so hopefully you'll check your text.

Here is the question. Two different times on the show today. We told you that three astro pitchers, Ross and I, on our mid-season report card progress report, gave excellent grade two. This is going to be tough. Well, it's for an old smoky. Love it. You got to name all three. All three.

All right. If you know the three pictures we chose that got excellence, call right now, 713, 212, 5, 7.9. He told Jonathan what they are, and you're going to win an old smoky charcoal grill. All right. And you misspelled when you told Jonathan, but we're all good. Did it really? Yeah.

Or it might have get corrected to the last name of somebody we worked well used to work with. Oh, geez, it did correct it. Oops. Thanks for getting my back on that one. I'm here to help. All right. Let's go to the couple phone because I've got people that want to say hello to us. Joe on the Heights on 7.

Hi, Joe, what's going on? Hey, Matt. I just wanted to let you know. I read this really great article about this whole strike and what the owners are proposing. And I thought it's kind of interesting. Right now, the players, based on what they're saying, the players are getting 47% of the revenues.

The new deal would give them 50% of the revenues. So it would be a 3% increase in money. The second part was that the bottom, the lowest tier would double. So whatever the lowest tier for a player is, they double that. The third part that I thought was the most interesting is they say because you would, the Minnesota, the Clevelands, the Kansas cities would now have more of a chance and would be more at to add fans to the stadium. people more people would be watching because they got a shot instead of you know having to watch

LA win every year so they feel that attendance will go up and therefore revenues will go up so the bottom line is revenues would go up the owners make more money the players would get more money because you had 3% plus whatever else grows and so it and it gives you parity and I think if you look at the players that are most upset about this it's going to be the sodos and all those guys because they won't make $700 million anymore. They're going to make $350 million, $300 million, whatever the number is. But the bottom tier place. The mega contract, I think, goes away.

The mega super long-term contract goes away. That's my estimated guess. I mean, I guess somewhat educated. Continue. I mean, it works so well in football. You would not have a Green Bay Packers. You would not have the Kansas City Chiefs being competitive if it wasn't for the hard cap. So, hey, I don't think the thing that, thank you for the phone call, it's good stuff.

The Packers were competitive in the 60s and 70s with a hard cap, but I mean, well, the reality is this. The reason why the players association does not use the NFL Satter is because the NFL, those teams have always spent to that level. There is apprehension among the baseball players association that even if you raise the floor, that the Marlins, the Reds, the Twins will be right at that floor, and they really won't be nearly as competitive as, say, Kansas City and Green Bay and Charlotte, who literally spend every team, Ross, spends to the full max. They save some money for, like, midseason acquisitions,

but there's nobody sitting around going, let's save ourselves some money here. The overriding thought for the Players Association is, yeah, we're going to make, we're going to force the Reds, spend some more money, but if there is a floor, they're going to be right at that floor number. They're scared about that. That's why they need to close a gap. Because the proposed floor was 70%.

Every other league, it's 90%. So they want to close that gap to 90%. And they want to let guys off the... I don't even know. What would you do? Like, team control for four years instead of six. Maybe four years with like a franchise type of option for like that, I don't know, the Bobby Wits or whoever. Young up-and-comers that you want to keep if you are

that have not, and you just don't want everybody to go to the Dodge. But also if you have the salary cap, that should create more parity long term as well. But these players, I mean, these owners are going to have to pony up. You're going to have to get 10 to 11 teams to spend at levels I've never spent it before. And also they were proposing this ridiculous five or six year maximum of contract. Maybe I bet that'll get, this is my little gut feeling. They'll be a max, but it'll be like eight or nine years or something like that. Yeah.

But you are going to, I don't think you see Soto contracts anymore. No. I think Tark Scoble probably isn't a huge fan of this labor negotiation either. And then how do you grandfather in? I mean, does everybody have to get under the cap within five years, ten years? I mean, good question. Because the Dodgers are going to be over the cap. If you look at their future payroll, they're going to be over whatever cap there is, probably the next five years. The Dodgers will have a salary cap in 2007 with no active players. Exactly. Before we get to our Will Dunn conversation, let's talk to Scott River Oaks. Hi, Scott. What's going on, guys?

conversation on the salary cap. And a couple points before you all went to break and then what the previous I was saying. In regards to the previous caller, correct me if I'm where I might be mistaken, he said that the players are currently receiving 47%

of revenues right now, but that to me, that doesn't make sense because there's no revenue, I mean, there's nothing based off revenue. You can make your team salary, whatever you want. You could go broke. spending money on players if you want or you could just have a whole bunch of

minimal players there's no proportion of money based on for revenue that have to go to players is that do I understand that correctly? Yeah as far as I know there's no accurate way to find that for for baseball right yeah the other part that I wanted to bring up you know I'm not calling him a liar but he said he started we started reading an article yeah I mean there there are people that are doing some things stories of this so this isn't they're starting to do some investment

reporting about how much what exactly the dollar is because the NFL is transparent whether so is the NBA the majorly baseball folks or not maybe that's what it transfers it turns out to be that out of all the revenue the MLB creates the players are actively getting 47% of it but it's not a hard rule that they have to get that exact amount or more or less but anyway the other part you know we're talking about the owners what their true want on this you I believe you guys mentioned that you know obviously they want more money and I'm not going to ever say, of course that's, you know, everyone always wants more money. But, I mean, I think their true intentions on this are to fix the competitive issue.

And I'll tell you why. I mean, you know, if you are one of the small market teams that you guys have made reference to the A's, the Pirates, the Reyes, the Royals, whoever, and you only care about money. Let's just say that. You only care about money. To my understanding of how this works, you actually wouldn't want a salary cap because the luxury tax that the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the Mets pay, you get money that funds your payroll from that.

So that goes away for them also if it's no longer a luxury tax that those people have to pay. So I really do think an element of this that is more about the competitive balance issue rather than being greedy. I mean, like y'all said, if there's a cap and a floor, a lot of teams are actually going to end up spending more money after this than they currently are today. It's just not all going to be coming from four teams. It could end up being the same amount of money. I mean, you know, in the competitive issue, you guys don't need me to tell you this.

But, like, Cobbler got paid $60 million to be the seventh best player on the Dodgers. I mean, it's getting to a point we're going to save them from themselves at some point, although if they don't see it, they're probably going to agree. Yep. Yeah, thanks, Scott, for the phone. I've got to get to break. There's also some saving from themselves. There is because the Dodgers are going to be able to go to a particular player and say,

we love you. We just don't enough money for you. And if you want to play for us, we're balancing a budget here. We've only got so much to give you. You've got to do away with this deferred payment stuff too. And that's got to be gone too. All right. Real quick, congratulations. Jonathan, who was our winner's name, please?

Jason, Katie. Jason and Katie. It's got an old smoky girl coming his way, Ross. Hell yeah. We predicted we had three. Wait a minute. What? Wasn't Jason? It was Jason and Katie the guy that telling Matt to smoke a brisket?

No, no, no. Was that a different Jason? So there are people, there's more than one, Jason and Katie Rossi. Come on now. I guess there is. Hey, we gave three excellent grades of three astro pitchers, Peter Lambert, Brian King, and Stephen Okra.

I bet people were guessing Josh Hayter, which he's great. I thought we did do. I thought I did say excellent for Hayter. Well, you only had three consensus between the two of us. Okay, you put consensus. Yeah. All right.

A couple minutes here with Will Dunn, Rockets' assistant coach, with us earlier today. If you missed a visit, here it comes, talking about the Summer League, Bruce Thornton, like one player that we're obviously interested in. But first things first, for a coach like Will to be able to have two different styles to learn from previously worked with Mike Dantonia and now under E. Meadoka. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

Just like my first year in the NBA getting to learn how modern NBA offense works under a coach like Mike Dantone was obviously such a blessing for me at the start of my career, just learning kind of how to coach offense with spacing and what type of sets to run, what type of actions work, getting your guys to buy in, getting your guys to play fast. But also just one really big thing that he taught me early on was just how to keep it simple.

Like, he was so good at like, hey, look, if something's working and working well, we're going to get out of their way and we're just going to let them do it rather than trying to overcomplicate things or overthinking. He'd always make the joke like, hey, let's not start coaching them and screw them up. So that was a great lesson from him that I always got.

And then, yeah, with Coach Udoka, obviously, his defensive prowess as a coach as a tactician is, I think, one of the best in the league, if not the best in the league. Right when he came in, he came in and turned us into, obviously, with some help with some personnel changes, but he turned us right into a top five defense right away. And it has been that way since. And he's just not only the teaching, the defensive kind of problem, solving but also his ability to get guys to buy in and to hold them accountable to what we're asking them to do is second to none. Rocket Summer League coach and assistant will done with us here at the Matt Thomas Show, Ross,

and we'll also get to a couple of players here to submit, but I want to ask you, and I know the answers, but I think it's good for the audience. You guys are treating this visit here to Las Vegas like it is an NBA training camp with games, and so let me ask you, not necessarily on an individual basis, but from a macro view of things, what is it like to do? taking these young men, these college kids, or guys that have been maybe with G-League teams, other teams, and putting them under the rocket style of how you guys practice, how you guys eat, train, play games. What has that been like watching some of these young guys,

especially the ones that are fresh out of college, learning the rocket system? Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's been really fun. Obviously, like you said, it's kind of a truncated version of what a lot of these guys that are going to be with us will see in the fall. But it's really cool to kind of be the first guys to, to, to, to, to, kind of get your hands on these young players and start molding them into the guys into the players we want them to be for the Rockets and then just watching them

kind of learn every day get a little, you know, the light bulb comes on a little bit more each and every day and then the game start and they start to see it, you know, you get some success and then you kind of kind of build off of it from there. That's been really cool to see. The other part that's kind of fun for our group that's kind of unique to the

Summer League group is we're doing, we're implementing a ton of the Rockets principles and what they're going to be seen with the Houston Rockets, but we also get a little leeway to kind of experiment with some other things as well, things that maybe might be something the big club is looking to adopt or something that we might be interested, hey, we could try that. That could be good for our group or something that me or a couple of our other kind of assistant coaches that are on my staff just are interested in seeing for our own sake, like, hey, I've always thought this might

be something that could work, like let's try it, whether it's just an offensive set or whether it's a defensive coverage or a certain kind of something unique like that. So it's been fun to kind of marry those two things together. Rockets Summer League head coach Will Dunnell is here on Sports Talk 790. Ross with you as well, Will. And I'm just curious that kind of just the boots on the ground human element of this. What is the things that you're doing like kind of teaching all these guys to be professionals? Do you feel like you're a teacher or like a summer camp?

counselor or something like that and trying to teach guys the practice habits and all that and how to get to and from the arenas and the practices and all that stuff. Yeah, well, that's a funny, like funny you mentioned it. We always joke. There's a joke that probably a lot of staffs make, but definitely on our staff, we're always joking that we're part-time coach, part-time teacher, part-time therapist, part-time big brother, part-time uncle, whatever it is, you know. So we wear a lot of hats as coaches, obviously, and it all just kind of goes with, comes with the job description. But especially when you get these younger guys, there's definitely a lot of elements to that. I will say we have just an awesome group. We have like a handful of guys that are vets as far as Summer League goes. We have guys that Dacia Knicks, Isaiah Crawford, Tristan Newton, all these. These are guys that have been around the NBA now for a couple of years at least. So they kind of know how it goes.

And then we have Bruce Thornton and Quadir, Copeland, who I'm sure we'll get to some of these guys. but these guys are guys that spent, especially Bruce, spent a lot of time in college. And these guys are polished and they're smart and they're sharp and they take everything up really quickly. So I do think we've gotten lucky as far as that goes. And then also I do think when guys more and more as guys, especially the guys that have spent two or three years in college or elsewhere before they get into the NBA, they're coming out more polished just because of all the money and the agents and the NIL and all that stuff that goes into it now. it's become way more of a business. So I do think there is an element of that where it's a little bit easier. You mentioned Bruce Thornton.

Obviously, that's kind of been the headliner of the Summer League roster for the Rockets. Just tell us about him as a young man and also kind of either basketball-wise or personally. What impresses you the most about him and then some things you guys want him to work on. Yeah, well, we'll start with him as a person. I think that's first and foremost with him. He's 10 out of 10 as a dude. he's he was a four-year captain at Ohio State I think that's been going around quite a bit when we talk about him but that's just a pretty rare thing to see like to be a captain your first year at a big time college basketball program is pretty rare so that says a lot about his his character right there alone but then when you get him in the gym you see the way he works you see the way he carries himself he's got like this quiet confidence to him like but with a good dose of humility as well he's not he's not He's not going to be the loudest guy in the gym, but you feel his presence in there for sure.

And then he's just on the court. He's just really steady. Like we just trust him with the ball in his hands. We trust him as a leader. He's just really steady and keeled. Never gets too high, never gets too low. And he just plays with the toughness that you just, you can't teach. So that's him as a person.

That's him as a dude. As a basketball player, what we love about him so much is, hey, the shot making in college was incredible. He was the guy that basically wherever he shot, whether it was, at the rim from mid-range area to the three-point line he shot very, very well. That's obviously something that was attracted to our group. And then also he's the guy that can handle the ball

in pressure with great defenders guarding him under duress. He can handle the ball for big, long periods of time without turning it over at a high rate. He turns it over very, very few. I think he saw that a lot in our first summer league game for those of you that watched. He had the ball, he played 35 minutes, had the ball in his hand the whole game.

one turnover. So that's kind of another element that he brings to the group. And then defensively, he's just really solid, really strong for his size. He's a little smaller, but he's strong, he's stout, he's physical, and he's really smart. So he's able to kind of get away with that stuff as well defensively with how smart he is. All right, there it is. Well done, coaching the Rockets against the 76ers coming up in just a couple of hours. We'll play, believe it or not next. Ross, what is the category? Sam Neal. I have to say that, Ross. That's not AI, is it?

No, I remember that. All right. I was calling you the sizzler for your sizzling. We have some audio from the Summer League of interviewer, interviewee. We're going to save it for tomorrow. We're running out of time. Tomorrow, we're going to. We go.

Thank you. I held it and show you. I held it to try you. We got to touch your bum mess up tomorrow. Take a dollar back out. You can have it back. So I only know $14 to the kiddie. Five minutes left to go on the show.

What should we do? I don't know. We should play America's fastest-growing sports radio game show. We simply called it, believe it or not, and here's how it works. You call 7-1-3-21-7-90. 7-1-3-21-2-5-7-90. Today's edition of Believe or not is all things about Sam Neal. I'll read you a question about Sam Neal's statement completely and utterly accurate.

You'll say this. Believe it. Statement erroneous full of Uncumachimede. You will say this. Not. Two believer or nots in a row when you are. prize today we are playing for a pair of tickets to the big three basketball happening july 26 of the toto center featuring h town's own houston rig hands coached by rockets legend

calvin murphy they'll take on the dallas power also the dm v trilogy meets the miami three o five two games just one ticket more information or to buy your tickets now head to big three dot com and as a kid say a yay yay seven one three two one two five seven ninety jonathan Jonathan, you're ready to play, believe it or not? Believe it. Sam Neal was a classically trained actor who studied at the prestigious Royal Dramatic Arts Academy in London, England. Believe it or not? Believe it.

Not. Yeah, it's a not. 713-212-5-790. 7-1-3-212-5-7-90. John, Southwest Signed on 7-90. John, you're ready to play, believe it or not? believe it in 1977 sam neal was considering quitting acting and had an emotional audition

that landed him his breakthrough role in the film sleeping dogs believe it or not believe it not no good work by you thank you matthew you know you don't trust yourself enough sometimes ross 713 i like that one two one two five seven on seven on nine ryan on seven ony ryan what was your fair part of today's 10 to 2 radio show. All of it, Matt. In the 1980s, Sam Neal was considered to be the next James Bond

and even did a screen test with a role, but it was not chosen. Believe it or not. Believe it. Believe it. Statement number two for the win. In 2003, Sam Neal published his memoir titled, Did I ever tell you this? Believe it or not? Nah. Believe it.

Got Madison, copy. You did. Leon! Leon likes his money. Leon, you're ready to play, believe it or not? Yeah, let me go. I'm ready. Sam Neal suffered from a stutterer as a young child,

and as an adult became an advocate for overcoming the disorder. Believe it or not. Believe it. Believe it. Statement number two for the win. Sam Neal was a massive Beach Boys fan, and often talked about the band in Interested. interviews, believe it or not.

That's it, Leon. You like your big great tickets. Beach Boys fan from New Zealand. Who doesn't like them? Taylor. They're okay. It's further fine. Overrated.

They're properly rated. They're properly rated. Taylor on 790. You ready to play, believe it or not? Ready. Sam Neal was an avid wine enthusiast and even had his own winery in his home country of New Zealand. Believe it or not. Believe it.

Believe it. Statement number two for the win. Sam Neal was never nominated for an Oscar for any role. Never. Believe it or not. Believe it. Believe it. You know what I believe in, Rossi?

What do you believe in, Matthew? Fine diamond jewelry. You're going to get an only one place at Sethi's Fine Jewelry. S-E-T-H-I-S is the name of the place. Set These Fine Jewelry online at set these fine jewelry.com. Located also on Voss Road between San Francisco. Felipe and Westheimer open Tuesday through Saturday 10 o'clock until 6 they've been there for 25 plus years friends take care of the amazing folks for me over at set these fine jewelry walk in ask for natiz and say hey my buddy matt said you're going to give me the best deals and the best quality the best customer service when it comes to diamond earrings and pendants and necklaces and watches and bracelets and engagement rings that's what set these fine jewelry does for you s e t h i s voce rose roe between san philippe Ben Westheimer, online.

Sethesfinejury.com. That's sethiesfine jewelry.com for the best place to go for fine diamond jewelry and emerald jewelry, too. That is Sethi's fine jewelry. All right, folks. Tomorrow we're back in studio from 10 o'clock until two. Up next, a man who's taking like four consecutive weeks off in vacation. His name is Adam Clayton.

He's back? Yeah. Good for him. Is he clothed? God, I hope. Can you tell him to stop posting news? That was a disgusting, gross. That is a disgusting.

disgusting act by Adam Clinton. Terrible. Up next, Clinton and the good one, Wexler. The A team. Talk to you folks tomorrow at 10 right here on these airwaves that we call

Sports Talk 790.