MURRELL COLUMN: An example of the Astros’ local impact
Published 5:28 pm Saturday, November 4, 2017
Part of Twyman Ash’s garage is converted into his own man cave with photos from his days as an Abilene High School wide receiver and his fishing adventures lining up the walls.
No one would know upon meeting the 81-year-old Nederland resident that he scouted future players for the Houston Colt .45s. That is, unless one looked inside one of Ash’s scrapbooks.
A 1963 letter from the Colt .45s, or Colts for short, rests in the memory album. The letter, a cover sheet for Ash’s contract, is slightly rusted from paper white but also has some old tape marks and Ash’s scout card attached to it.
Ash’s supervisor Lynwood Stallings wrote a post-script under the farm director’s signature in impeccable blue cursive: “Glad to have you with us again. Hope you are doing well. Lynwood.”
This, young people, is a remnant of the history of what we now know as the Houston Astros, and Ash played a part in it for three seasons.
Houston has come a long way in the decades since then.
“The city of Houston has come up behind the Astros,” Ash said. “We needed it after all we went through.”
In Ash’s day, college football was still king and professional sports were still burgeoning in the city. The Colt .45s began play in a temporary stadium that folded as the Astrodome opened in 1965.
“At the time, they were making a big deal of getting a hockey team,” Ash said. “But they just didn’t have the same support as the other teams.”
Ash never stepped foot on a major-league field like future Port Neches-Groves coach Butch Troy and Thomas Jefferson graduate Xavier Hernandez did. An ankle injury following Ash’s second year at Rice forced him to give up baseball, as he had a football scholarship to maintain. (He was not awarded a baseball scholarship.)
He played with Stallings on Rice’s baseball team as a first baseman for two seasons, hence their association. Shortly after Ash graduated from Rice in 1959, he coached football at Jessie H. Jones High in Houston for one year and at Abilene High for five more. He played semi-professional baseball while in Abilene and would scout for future Colt .45s during the spring and summer in the area.
He was asked about some of the big names he discovered that the Astros might have signed.
“I can’t remember,” he said. “There were so many I scouted. I just got a name and looked at the player and turned it in to the ballclub.”
Well, Houston wasn’t a household name in pro football outside of Texas in the 1960s. The Colts didn’t change their name to the Astros until 1965, and they didn’t win their first division championship until 1980, when Nolan Ryan has just joined the team.
Ash left scouting in 1965 and spent a year training in San Antonio to be a Luby’s manager. The next year, he came to Port Arthur and managed Luby’s restaurants in the area for the following three decades.
Pretty good for a receiver best known in Abilene as the hero of the Eagles’ 1954 state football championship season, the first of three straight. He caught the game-winning pass with 56 secnods left in the title game against Houston Austin as a senior.
Much of the memorabilia in his man cave are newspaper clippings about that great play. The Dallas Morning News even gave Ash a ring in celebration of Texas’ 100 years of high school football in 1999.
His first love, though, was basketball.
“I knew I couldn’t play in college,” said Ash, the Eagles’ basketball captain as a senior. “I wasn’t that good.”
Things worked out very well for Ash. He’s enjoying life with his wife of nearly 49 years Toby, living in the same house they built 27 years ago.
And the Astros are finally world champions, too.
“I’m going to get me a bottle of Scotch and reminisce on all the games,” Twyman said, asked how he would celebrate the Astros’ championship.
If he had scouted just a few years back, names like Altuve, Correa and Springer might have stuck with Ash.
“They’re jacked up,” Ash said. “They’re awful good hitters.”
Nonetheless, the Astros made Ash’s whisky bottle priceless.
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I.C. Murrell can be reach at 549-8541 or at ic.murrell@panews.com. On Twitter: @ICMurrellPANews