Short Man's Rise

We were fortunate enough to catch last year's meteoric minor-league player, Starlin Castro, before he hit the big time, but this year we've missed out. Then again, we're hardly alone, as the man in question—who is one part Castro (for his youth) and one part Tim Collins (for his height)—began the year at High-A Lancaster and spent all of 35 games at Double-A Corpus Christi before making the leap.

I'm speaking, of course, of Jose Altuve, whom Kevin Goldstein called "one of the strangest prospects in the game." Altuve got the call after the Astros decided to ship their incumbent second baseman, Jeff Keppinger, to the Giants. By all accounts, all the team sacrificed was seven inches and about 45 pounds—seriously, go look at the picture on this page.

I'm not sure what my more-or-less father-in-law, who has an unexplained horror of little people, would make of this development, but I like to think that Gary Oldman might play Altuve, should there ever be a movie of his life.

Altuve is playing in his second and (I presume) third and fourth major-league games at Wrigley this weekend. I missed today's game, but Rob took the afternoon off to catch the broadcast from a cooperative bar in Brooklyn. We wish the tiniest Astro all the best.