A sports blog with Richard Justice

If the Astros had less money then, they’d be better off now


If the Astros knew then what they know now, they might have made different decisions. They might have taken a deep breath and blown up the roster three years ago when it became clear (a) their farm system was a mess and (b) Drayton McLane wasn’t going to spring for the $200-million payroll it would take to keep the big league team competitive.

By then, it might have been too late because the Astros were already boxed in by no-trade clauses and emotions. For one thing, McLane had this dream of Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt playing their entire careers with the Astros and going into the Hall of Fame as Astros.

McLane also wanted the Astros to be competitive every single season. He believed in adding pieces instead of subtracting them because he never wanted to stand before the microphones and cameras and say, ”We’re rebuilding.”

If you’re irritated by this attitude, think how you would have felt if he’d announced he was stripping the club down and starting over. You would have accused him of not wanting to win and other high crimes.

So Drayton did what you wanted him to do. He kept spending, kept pushing forward, kept hoping for a magic formula.

Miguel Tejada. Pudge Rodriguez. Mike Hampton. Russ Ortiz. The Astros ran old guy after old guy through their clubhouse.

For years, fans accused McLane of not spending enough money to keep the Astros competitive. Isn’t it ironic that spending too much money may finally be the thing that brings the franchise to its knees?

OK, that’s not exactly true. Some of the problems with the minor league system was McLane squeezing the dollars, but by far the larger issues were scouts making poor decisions.

If Drayton had less money to spend, he surely would have made better decisions if you define better as tougher. The Twins, Rays and Rockies focus their resources on the farm system because they understand they can’t afford to play the free-agent game.

If Drayton had less money, he might not have given so many no-trade clauses, might not have hung onto his guys so long, might have been more cold-blooded.

If he had the revenues of the Yankees, he could have spent his way through the player development crisis. If he’d had the revenues of the Marlins, he wouldn’t have spent all that money in the first place.

Instead, the Astros were caught in the middle. Some of you have written to complain that the Astros aren’t a mid-market franchise because Houston is the fourth-largest city in America.

Wrong. Houston is a mid-market franchise because the Astros are 12th in terms of revenues. Those revenues have more than doubled during McLane’s time as owner, and the payroll has risen accordingly.

It’s easy to look back now and see the Astros should have started over, but there’s plenty of pain associated with that kind of approach.

Check out the Rockies. They might be baseball’s model franchise these days. But they made mistakes, too.

They tried to win through free agency, and then one day, they took a deep breath and did the right thing. GM Dan O’Dowd sat down with ownership and came up with a plan to rebuild from the ground up.

And O’Down was given the time to do it. Not money, but time. Lots of owners will invest money. Fewer will invest time. The Rockies toughed it out through six straight losing seasons, and as attendance declined and columnists demanded changes, they stayed the course.

Now they’ve got a very good major league team and an amazingly deep farm system. They’re positioned to win big now and in the future.

Drayton just didn’t want to put a bad baseball team on the field, so his general managers patched here and patched there. It’s also impossible to know when is the right time to pull the trigger on a full-blown reconstruction.

Almost all the teams that have done it in recent years have been had their hands forced by economics. Owners and general managers convince themselves that fixing a leak here and a leak there will work. They can see another 2005 run to the playoffs, and they keep working toward that.

Then one day, they look up and the current roster doesn’t resemble the 2005 roster in any way.

That’s what happened to the 1988 Orioles. Jim Palmer got old. Ken Singleton got old. Al Bumbry got old.

Yet owner Edward Bennett Williams, who was dying of cancer, was so desperate for another championship that he began bringing in old guys. One Fred Lynn won’t hurt, will it?

How about a Don Aase? And Alan Wiggins.

Instead of making it better, it just got worse. And just like with the Astros, the Orioles had allowed their farm system to go south.

Ed Wade appears to have stopped the bleeding by convincing McLane that the Astros would never be very good on a consistent basis without a productive farm system, and now help finally seems to be around the corner.

The Astros may be bad this year, and they could even be bad next season. But if the Astros made good decisions in the 2008-2009 drafts, things will get better.

The problem is that by opening day 2012, Oswalt, Berkman and Lee may all be gone, and it’s impossible to know if the void they leave can be filled by these young players.

What should happen now? That’s easy. Stay the course. Oswalt is the lone guy on the roster who might bring a couple of major league-ready players, but those kinds of trades usually don’t happen at this time of the year.

For now, keep running those five starters out there and see if things improve. If Wandy is terrible, if Carlos Lee is not productive, if this club really is as bad as it appears, it’ll be a long, fascinating summer. I guess you were already starting to know that.

Categories: Astros