If there’s one stain on the city of Houston—apart from the humidity and traffic—it’s the Astros. A steel-drum band posing as a professional baseball team, the Astros are a bunch of craven frauds who have brought nothing but shame (and a championship) to what is otherwise the greatest city in Texas. Their craven constitution alone would destroy the Astrodome if cowards were still allowed to roam such hallowed grounds. (Fun fact: they didn’t put a roof on Minute Maid Park because the architects couldn’t make the structure powerful enough to withstand the internal pressure of how much the Astros suck.)
And so it is with great resignation – and honesty, and it is a level of honesty I would not expect from an organization as craven as the Astros – that I must report that Houston Astros catcher César Salazar runs a really good cafe on Instagram.
Now, to be fair to Salazar and me, the Sonora-born catcher didn’t join the team until 2023, after the team’s most despicable acts were exposed (and wrists were smacked with the stiffest feather duster MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred could find in a gadget store). So until we learn otherwise, Salazar can still be considered one of the Good Guys.
Recently called up from the Triple-A Sugar Land Space Cowboys — which is an objectively good name for a sports team, even if their logo doesn’t quite live up to the Teddy Roosevelt motif of the Double-A Frisco RoughRiders — Salazar has spent a fair amount of time on the road this season, logging every stop for coffee @Sally.Sips.
As reported Houston Chroniclehis coffee obsession is relatively recent, though, having only begun last year after his buddy (and former) space cowboy Austin Davis took him to a local specialty coffee shop, where Salazar had his moment of epiphany while drinking a drip coffee and “was surprised by the notes of orange and chocolate.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is what good coffee tastes like.’ [Davis] is like, “Yeah, you have to go to different coffee shops and try different methods. And you’ll get different notes. So I just started paying a lot of attention to… this coffee has notes of lemon, citrus and caramel, or chocolate and almond, and I sip it slowly to see if I can get that note.”
In June, he created an Instagram account that his sister in Mexico runs, and it already has an impressive list of cafes that Salazar has visited in the three months since he started the account. Note on Ghosts in Seattle, Three pines in Salt Lake City, Bluebeard in Tacoma, the recently opened Modern York export store from London Watchhouse, Spy house in Minneapolis and of course Blend in Houston, home of US Brewers Cup champion Weihong Zhang, to name a few.
Salazar tells Chronicle that his favorite spot so far was the first stop, Caffe d’Bulla in Salt Lake. “I bought a $50 shot of espresso that changed my life… I said, ‘Hey, just give me whatever, whatever you recommend.’ And he said, ‘Do you like cigars? And do you like vanilla?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He shot the espresso and handed it to me, and it literally tasted like a vanilla cigar.” (Although my eyes were about to pop out of my skull at the thought of a $50 shot of espresso as the first response to a customer’s request for a recommendation, it’s encouraging that this price for coffee isn’t treated as a punch line, but as a reasonable shorthand for something sporadic and valuable.)
And Salazar’s obsession with coffee has taken over his counter. In pursuit of the perfect cortado—his favorite drink—Salazar’s home setup has expanded by Breville coffee machine, Varia VS3 grinder, and v60 for brewing and a manual grinder for safety.
The 28-year-old is the latest, but certainly not the first, Astros player to fly the coffee-loving flag. A noted sign enthusiast and co-owner of Houston’s great board game cafe, Coral Sword Hunter, Pence chronicled his coffee travels with his wife, Lexi, on YouTube toward the end of his playing career. (Pence wasn’t with the Astros during their more furious rule-breaking years, so he’s chilly, too.)
Luckily for Salazar, and Salazar alone, the Astros have all but secured their place in the postseason, giving him more time to travel and explore recent coffee shops. Future stops could potentially include great coffee shop cities like Modern York, Boston or Kansas City. Maybe even Philadelphia or Los Angeles, if there’s no god.
I root for you, Sally. Mainly so I can play for another team, so I can root for you sincerely. But I root for you nonetheless.
