For when you need a manager with intelligence.

Finally, I will be able to say, "I am the Astros manager."

That's right. I'm coaching a Little League team in Austin, and they let us choose the team name.

It wasn't like this in college, when I coached a team of 8-12 year olds three years in a row, with all of my boys at UVa. That league had this retarded policy whereby the name of the sponsor was the name of your team. So there were no little kids at Central Little League who thought it was so cool to be playing for a team like the Tigers, or the Yankees, or the A's. Instead you're suiting up in t-shirts with that especially cheesy, 80's style cursive that say things like "Dixie Pawn," or the "Window and Door Pro's."

Our last year doing it, after having established ourselves around Charlottesville following four years of college, we were able to convince the old, slightly perverted Greek man who owned a go-to, late night burger spot called The White Spot to sponsor us. Sure we were still named after our sponsor, but with a twist: with that UVa orange and blue, the word "Gusburgers." Dmitri even gave the team about 15 free ones for picture day, which froze a moment in time when I was 22, with a hemp necklace and a big smile on my face, as all of us chowed down on semi-cold, half eaten cheeseburgers with a definitely cold fried egg spilling out the top.

Austin, though, is a even cooler than a bag full hour-old Gusburgers when it comes to team names. They give you the freedom to decide. It's so Austin of them, don't you think?

Since it's not just me that's coaching this coach pitch team, but also three of my boys from Houston (high school good times rather than college good times, this time), the answer for us was obvious.

"What would y'all like to be called?"

That's like a Hooters waitress asking Wilt Chamberlain if he wants to bang, or Fidel Castro if he likes control.

"The Astros," I said, within about three milliseconds. "The South Austin Astros."

"The South Austin Astros," my pitching coach said. "Nice."

Which is why he just bought me 250 of these business cards:

That's right. Because I'm an intelligence analyst too, get it?

But mainly because he forgot my birthday two weeks ago and he felt bad. They were "free," if you don't include the $14 it costs to ship them here within seven business days. But that is a $14 joke which is kind of like a television series called "The Best Conversation Starter Ever," and Nick is going to be able to hear me recount a different episode probably every week until the season ends in May. Any girl with any knowledge of baseball and a even a smidgeon of maternal instinct will let out an, "Awwwww!" so heartfelt upon hearing that this guy is the baseball coach for a troupe of six year olds it will sound like a free puppy giveaway.

Our players are young, like I said. Really young. Ranging from six to eight years young, with more weight on the left end of that see saw. Which means that at our first practice, I had to hold in a laugh when one of our kids was putting a right handed glove on his right hand, and when I realized another really is David after Dentist:

I swear.

And how cool are we going to look in front of the cool Austin parents when we bring in my friend and neighbor, and local Austin celebrity, Kat Edmonson to sing the national anthem before one of our games? This girl is one of the biggest names in Austin music (despite being so petite that she's only slightly larger than our first baseman), and when I asked her if she would be interested in singing it, she said, "I've been asked to do that so many times, like before UT basketball games, but I've never done it, mainly because I don't know the song." And then, "But I would definitely do it for your Little League."

Emphasis on "definitely." The South Austin Astros is easily going to be the most badass team this league has ever seen, even if we go winless.

What can I say, we're just lucky, I guess.

I can bike to practice, and to games, and it's about a baseball's throw from my favorite place in Austin, Barton Springs, to which I can also bike, meaning that I'm gonna be an intelligence analyzin', Barton Springs chillin', Little League coachin' hippie Lance Armstrong this spring, without the killer bod, and the money, but including the fact that I'm okay with that. It sounds kind of trite, but it is a fact that back when I had a summer internship in Austin, when I was 21 and still a year away from coaching the Gusburgers, I used to look at this field next to Barton Springs and daydream about one day in my mid-20's having a cool job in Austin, living near the Springs, and coaching a Little League team, like I was doing every year in those days, but not next to this inner city Garden of Eden.

Now that's what I'm doing. (And I'm wishing I was back in the days when I was wishing I could do it, but it's a nice consolation prize for having to live in the present moment.)

That doesn't mean that I can't live in the past just a little bit. Since we were assigned the gold jerseys -- it was either that or maroon -- the South Austin Astros are gonna be modeled after the late 90's Astros. I have a huge head (like, vertically; it goes up really high), meaning I can only really wear those deep salad bowls known as Major League fitted caps. So go figure that Lids is making a throwback, fitted version of the ugliest, and therefore coolest, Astros hats of all time.

It's so rare that I couldn't even find it again after just looking for 30 minutes. Not even on the Lids site, not on Google. Not much love for Bill Spiers on the ole' Google Images. But I bought one already, so I'm chilling. And trust me, it is bling. Nick, the one who bought me those business cards, is pissed, because he's trying to get one, too. It's the navy blue one with the gold star, and the gold brim. The original "Sunday alternate" Astros hat, straight out of the days of Y2K.

Mr. Romance Languages

And the story of le jeu le plus brillant de tous les temps

I'm sitting at a booth at an outdoor Austin coffee shop, finishing up a week of work on my laptop, and there is a couple sitting in the booth next to me.

The girl is your typical, sexy, tatted up Austin girl, with tribal looking wooden earrings that somewhat resemble a coil of hand carved razor wire looping through both lobes, and just enough eye liner to look damn hot without going overboard into trashy town. The guy is your typical douche.

They're speaking French. Actually it's more like a tutor-and-pupil session than speaking, and the girl is very much so the tutor. His French sucks.

The first thing I hear her say is "Zjuh, zjuh," really slowly. (It is impossible to phonetically write out the sound of the French word Je, which means I, a fact about le francais that this dude probably did not know about until three or four days ago.)

"Juh," he says. "Juh."

"No, you've gotta say it like this: zzjjjjjuuuh."

Not like jjuuudge.

"Maybe she's trying to teach him Serbian," I thought for a brief moment: like zzzzelja mi je pusta da ti svrsim u usta.

"Or Swahili." Nipe kikunde kimojjjjjja ili nitasizi na Muindaji.

And then came the flashcard session on how to conjugate the verb aller.

Mon dieu, does he sound le retarded.

They're in their late 20's, meaning it's not for some college class or something that they're sitting at a coffee shop at 3 on a Friday going over French verbs like "to be" and "to have" in the present tense. The girl clearly speaks French, and the guy, he just "wants to learn it." A hobby. 

Something to do besides work all the time, perhaps -- like what my neighbors Tony and Nicholas just did, splitting the Rosetta Stone Spanish between themselves.

But this guy is so bad; sure, it's never too late to learn a language, but that doesn't apply to 

everyone. It's too late for him.

But "Hahahaha, oui!" -- I'm hearing a lot of that coming from her. Because the guy is so damn charming. So clever. He's macking on this tutor girl, and clearly not really interested in learning French. But the girl has no idea. She does not realize at all that he is using this suddenly discovered desire to learn a foreign language (subtext: "I am so worldly and curious") as a pretext for running game on her.

It's a brilliant strategy, I must concede. I hate on the guy, because he really was a douche, but at least he had my full respect, like Greivis Vasquez from Maryland.

The Latin Stereotype

Then she goes to the bathroom, and the first thing he does is pull out his cell phone. He's dialing now.

"Bueno," I hear him say, in a Spanish accent so bad it is only rivaled by his French, "que tal?" (phonetically: kay tall?)

He's smiling that sort of fox-like, mischievous grin as he listens to the response coming from the other end.

Then something cheesy like, "Well then I guess we won't be able to hang out later and socialize with one another."

No question he's talking to a girl. You would never say that to a dude. Unless you have a crush on that dude. And this guy, he has a crush on Frenchie. But he's displaying the exact same persona while talking to what has to be a girl, but he's using bad Spanish in his game-spitting session this time!

Could it be...?

The test is now, because here comes Frenchie, sauntering back to the table. We make eye contact, but there is no smile proffered, because the other guy, he's the charming one. And he's sooo eager to learn French, remember? I'm just the one who previously tried to ask if I could share her booth -- because it really was the only place with an outlet where you didn't have to hunch over to type -- but she had smiled and said, "I would totally let you normally, but I have a friend meeting up with me."

And now that friend of yours is using the exact same tactic to try and get with another chick who is probably just as unsuspecting as you are that you're being lured into a trap by Mr. Romance Languages.

But I'm not sure yet; maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there was an intelligence failure at some point during the analytical process. We'll know based on what Mr. Iberia says about the phone call that he's wrapping up as she sits down.

"That was a friend of mine." (The exact description she'd given to me of who it was that was stealing my seat in the booth across the table from her.) "He --"

Stop it right there. He. Not two sentences in and I've already caught him in a lie. Who is this guy?

I want to yell out, "That was definitely a girl he was talking to, go Elen on his right to cell phone privacy!" But I don't.

"He has game nights at his house, and we'll go over there and chill."

"Oh, cool."

"Yeah, and we'll speak like bad French together, too, as a joke."

What, the, fuck.

"Oh come on!" I really want to yell this time, before gathering up my crappy laptop and the docking station that serves a required accessory if I desire to actually turn it on for more than 45 seconds, and marching back over to the booth to reclaim my right place at the outlet.

I speak better French and Spanish than this guy, anyway.

She buys it though, just eats it up, like a gourmet snail, and their flirtatious tutorial continues. I can see the verbs she is teaching him in my head, written in its six forms, in two rows of three: je, tu, il/elle/on; nous, vous, ils/elles/sont. For someone who only took French for one year in college, I'm not bad. This dude, though, actually says vooze once, as a stand alone word.

He isn't even really that good looking, and he's got a pretty annoying voice and a general cheesy presence. But they're paying the bill now and leaving together, and I'm still stuck in my little end table, hunched over and thinking about the story I'm going to write about the hot, tatted up Austin chick and the d-bag who was able to convince her he was the man just because he took the time to prepare some French vocab flashcards.

This dude, he may be running this same scam with all the romance language chicks. He's got French and Spanish on lock down; what's to say it's not the same story with Italian, Portuguese and oft-forgotten Romanian?

May be a douche, but I have to hand it to him: Mr. Romance Languages is a brilliant man.

But he still couldn't touch me if the girl in the booth had been Serbian, though.

And if she had been from East Africa, and saw my Swahili notebooks I have back at my place, she would be like a popsicle on July afternoon in Dar es Salaam.