I thank my father for not being raised in Houston

Because if he had been, I'd probably be holding Drayton McLane at gunpoint right now:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bb/6458985.html

There's some positive talk in there, particularly, "We have to make a stronger investment and smarter picks in the draft. You've got to invest in young talent." But then he slits his own wrists with this:

"He emphasized he would like both Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt to finish their careers with the Astros. If either asks to be traded, he’ll attempt to talk them out of it."

FACEPALM.

The Astros are currently 23-29 and in last place in the NL Central. Their farm system is more barren than the Sahara Desert. Their future is ugly and bleak, as they play in one of baseball's best divisions and their talent level (both major and minor league) doesn't even begin to approach the rest of their divisionmates, and it's not like they can just outspend everyone either. As Tampa Bay showed us last year, the only real way to succeed in a division where you have much less money, resources, and talent than your competitors is to collect young talent that can provide you with cheap production and allow you to spend your money on good free agents that can actually help your team win instead of crappy "role players" who are really just there to fill out the lineup (Geoff Blum, Exhibit A). One of the sad but necessary steps to take to begin this process is to trade away your good, high-priced talent at its peak value in order to get the best possible return on it, even if said talent represents your most popular players. And let's be honest; Roy Oswalt is a good pitcher, but he's also 31 years old and has been slowly but steadily declining since 2005 (not coincidentally, a year in which he threw a combined 269 innings in the regular season and playoffs). He'll never be more valuable then he is right now. Same with Lance Berkman; yeah, he's still plugging along, but he's 33, and he's played over 1,400 games in his career. He's going to start wearing down soon. The intelligent thing to do if you're Drayton McLane is to concede 2009 and sell these guys off in July while you can still get a shitload of top prospects for them.

So that's what DrayMac is doing, right? FUCK NO. He's going to let these guys stay Astros until the day they retire, presumably when they're both 40 years old, clogging up the payroll, and playing like shells of their former selves. In Drayton McLane's mind, "letting two pretty good players who have been with the team for a while retire as Astros" >>>>>>>>>>>>> "winning fucking baseball games."

I'm sorry, Astros fans. At least you can look forward to five Roy Oswalt bobblehead days a month in the year 2019.

(P.S. 100th post!!!!!!!!!!!!!)