KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- In baseball terminology, Brad Lidge is what is known as a "standup guy." He's accountable. Always willing to talk. Always willing to listen. Always there to take the kudos or the clobbering. That's Brad Lidge. Being a standup guy, for the most part, is a good thing. In a lot of people's eyes, it's one of the best things that a player can be. The problem with Lidge -- and, yes, he has his problems -- is that he's had to be a standup guy way too often in the past year or so. Every time you turned around last season, Lidge was earnestly explaining what went wrong. It's a great character trait, sure. But, all in all, the Astros would prefer that their good-citizen closer simply quit getting his butt kicked so often. Lidge is confounding in a couple of ways. He's not some whacked-out head case ready for the scrap pile. His arm's not ready for triple ligament replacement surgery. Lidge's stuff is still really good. He was good enough last year, in an otherwise pretty terrible season, to post the best strikeout rate, per nine innings, of anyone in baseball (see chart, above). When Lidge is on, when his slider looks like it can slice a deck post in half and that 95 mph fastball lights up hitters' eyes, he can still blow the ball past anybody. Even Albert Pujols. But, yeah, Lidge has had his bad moments. And that has prompted this good guy -- really, if you can't root for somebody like Lidge, you're just downright evil, or anti-Astros -- to listen to everybody and anybody that comes calling with an idea or a tip. That's just about the worst thing a closer can do. "It wasn't as horrible as we all made it to sound," Astros manager Phil Garner said about Lidge's 2006 blowups. "I think he'll be fine. You just gotta eliminate people. Go talk to one person. One person you trust. That's it." Lidge will admit it: He listened too much last year and he thought about his problems too much. He couldn't, or wouldn't, tell all those good-intentioned people to simply back off. He listened to people and gave up his windup, pitching almost exclusively out of the stretch. He listened to people and started throwing sinkers and cut fastballs. One bad outing led to another and, as the Astros' lackluster season died a quiet death, Lidge ended up with some of the worst numbers of his career. A 5.28 ERA. An ungodly 36 walks in 75 innings. He allowed 10 home runs, including a couple of grand slams. Lefties ate him up. He blew six saves. By mid-August, Garner pulled Lidge from the closer's role. "I hadn't really come across a lot of failure in my career, and so when I did, I thought it would be beneficial to listen to people," said Lidge, 30. "Really, what I should have done was just simplify and iron out my mechanics. I was trying out all kinds of new things and really got myself into trouble. I started walking way more guys than I normally do. And that got me into a bad rhythm. It was tough for me to bounce back from that, just because I had gotten in so many bad habits." Lidge bashers will tell you that it all began the postseason before, when Lidge served up a memorable, game-winning home run in Game 5 of the 2005 National League Championship Series to the Cardinals' Pujols. That homer was memorable in its mammothness, a moonshot of a walkoff, an ego-shatterer of the first degree. Lidge was shaky through the rest of the postseason, which ended in a World Series loss to the White Sox in four games, and that dripped into the early part of the 2006 season. Lidge isn't buying that, though. And the Astros, forever backing their standup teammate in baseball's most time-honored tradition, are making sure he doesn't buy into it -- by not letting him forget it. "Hey," first baseman Lance Berkman, interrupting another standup performance by Lidge, yelled across a hallway at the team's Kissimmee training camp, "you gotten over that Pujols home run yet?" Nobody is rooting for a bounceback season from Lidge more than his teammates. Some of them -- Berkman included -- were those whispering in Lidge's ear last season about trying this or not doing that. Many saw him in '05, when he struck out almost 12.5 hitters per nine innings (and walked only 23 in almost 71 innings of work) in saving 42 games for the NL champs. "He set such a high standard for himself," Berkman said. "Literally, there was a period of time that when he came in, the game was over. I could just throw my glove out there and walk into the dugout and sit down and watch him strike out the side. He was that good. When you've established yourself at that level, it's very hard to maintain that. You have to adjust. "The other part of that is, in baseball, sometimes it goes sideways -- it just does. Bad hops. You make a good pitch, he fouls it off. You hang one, he hits it out of the ballpark. That kind of thing." Still, Lidge wasn't about to chalk up his '06 disaster to bad luck. He started to clear his mind and go back to some pitching basics late last season, and in January he went to a special pitching camp with Nolan Ryan and some friends (including Roger Clemens). There, Lidge talked pitching, watched film, broke down his motion and decided that he was rushing his body toward the plate. That caused the left side of his body -- Lidge is a right-hander -- to fly open, away from the plate, which led to too many walks. Hitters could see the ball a split-second longer. Balls that were supposed to be low and away ended up over the plate. His slider flattened out in the strike zone and nothing good happened. This spring, he's working on all that, trying to remember his talks with Ryan and Clemens and some others. "I didn't really know how to process what I was thinking until Roger said, 'Hey, I have three checkpoints every time I make a pitch,'" Lidge said. "Then all of a sudden I started thinking about it and I said, 'I don't have any checkpoints. What is he even talking about? What's a checkpoint? "Nolan and Roger gave me some good, key points to focus on in my delivery, which I've never really done before. It's something they've always done. Things were always going so well for me, I didn't really have anything to focus on. So now, I have check points in my delivery, so that makes it a lot easier for me to get to where I need to be." Lidge isn't exactly tearing things up so far this spring. He's given up five hits and five earned runs in four innings. But it's early still, and Lidge is relearning a lot. He's playing around with a splitter, one of the pitches he shouldn't have been playing around with last year. He's back in a full delivery when he can be. And, of course, he's trying to turn a deaf ear to all those do-gooders around the Astros who want to help. Sometimes, being a nice, standup kind of guy just doesn't get the job done. "The fans in Houston have been awesome. When you're pitching, you really need that," Lidge said. "I know that last year there wasn't a whole lot to root for, but I feel very confident this year that I'll be back to where I was in the past. I think I learned a lot from last year. "If I didn't learn from last year," he added, in his typically standup way, "then I'm never going to learn."
