The Sad & Unfortunate Tale Of The Houston Astros
So... at the beginning of this baseball season, myself and Nox agreed that we would wholeheartedly root for the worst team in baseball in a new tradition that we were starting. While I'm sad to say that I remember this idea and I was the proponent and creator behind the idea, for a while there wasn't much to report. George Springer looked great, Carlos Correa was showing why he was a top pick and Jose Altuve was continuing to play like a Rich Man With Health Insurance version of Jose Reyes.
They were boring, they were inept, they had SOME pieces, but ultimately you'd watch about 5 innings and finally get bored of watch crap baseball and end up watching Kitchen Nightmares or something. Admittedly, being an "Astros fan" was hard-work, harder than I thought it would be. I don't know how some people did it. They didn't lead the league in anything.
Lost amidst the god-awful baseball and the flashes of brilliance from their farm system, the Houston Astros have astonishingly CORNERED THE MARKET on hilariously ridiculous and inopportune management stories that cause face palms and chuckles. Seriously. The Astros have become the league leaders in the amount of stories that make you say, "just how the fuck is that possible?"
It started with the fact that in a day and age where you can create personalized networks and intranets, the Houston Astros and their management were posting trade secrets and trade talks on what was nothing more than a glorified message board forum. It was incredibly easy to hack and ...as luck would have it? All of their trade discussions from the past year ended up on the internet, including a would-have-been deal for Giancarlo "Don't Call Me Mike" Stanton that was damn near close to being done had someone in IT beefed up their network securities.
I can forgive leaks and I can forgive certain things getting out, but your GM basically going on say ... RealGM with a screename like... "AstroBoy65"...and saying "Stanton for Correa and Altuve, what u guys think bout that tho?" ... That's fucking ...that's not even bush league. Hell, Jake Taylor and Willie Mays Hayes would laugh at that. Pedro Cerrano would ask Jobu to find a way to get him a ticket out of Minute Maid Park!
I thought that was bad, I thought that was going to be the worst of it.
Then Brady Aiken happened.
If you don't know, Brady Aiken is a stud prospect, a phenomenal one that has committed to UCLA if this whole Houston Astros didn't work out. As luck would have it, the Astros, having done their "due diligence", drafted this kid with their 1st round draft pick and basically sold him on everything short of a house in a nice area of Houston. It seemed great, everyone was excited, until AFTER they draft the kid... they ask for his medical records.
At this point, anybody reading this with even fleeting knowledge of the Astros organization knows what happened:
The reports revealed Aiken has trouble with an elbow ligament, his Lateral Ulnar Collateral Ligament to be precise, The LUCL connects bone to bone and stabilizes the elbow, allowing a pitcher to...well pitch. This is something that you would think a trained medical staff of a professional baseball team would have noticed, found or asked about before the draft. Not the Astros though! Nope! They wait till after the draft to find out they've got a lemon.
It's like the guy who goes to a Used Car Lot and gets sold a Buick with 125,000 miles on it because it has A/C, a leather interior and it 's a nice color. That guy will drive it off the lot without test driving it first, have the tranny fall out within a month and then look like Johnny Carson on the cover of Time Magazine doing the face from Eddie Murphy's Raw.
That's the Astros right now.
So, knowing they have this lemon and that MLB allots the amount you can/have to spend on a pick , and with Aiken knowing that he knows EXACTLY how much MLB allotted to the Astros to spend on the FIRST OVERALL PICK in the draft, Houston decided it would be in their best interest to go to Brady Aiken and say, "well MLB gave us this much to pay you because you're the first pick in the draft this year, but... because we found out about your elbow AFTER THE FACT WE DRAFTED YOU... we're going to pay you half that."
Look, I get that line of thinking. I come from a business background. If a florist comes to an agreement with a supplier for..lets say...6.5 million dollars for flowers and then gets word that those flowers might die before he can sell them, then the florist has every right to tell the supplier he'll give him 3 million guaranteed. That's not being an asshole, that's smart business.
If say Wegmans or Stop & Shop makes a deal to buy hundreds and thousands of pounds of USDA Prime meat, but finds out mid-way through the deal that the beef might be tainted with E.Coli or Mad Cow Disease, nobody calls the supermarket/grocer an asshole for protecting his assets when he says he wants half his money back.
Thing is? That's not what happened here. The Astros didn't do their due-dilligence and then after MLB had already allotted them 6.5 million to spend on Aiken, and a total of 13,362,000 dollars to spend on ALL THEIR DRAFT PICKS, the Astros sent their team doctors in to find an "abnormality" in Aiken's elbow so that they could feasibly lop off half that fat contract that Aiken would get. The beauty of that is, EVERY PITCHER has elbow abnormality nowadays, it's just how DEEP of an abnormality it is.
In finding an "abnormality", they can justify spending less than they have to, skirting money and "pocketing it" basically, while getting someone on their roster. Having already agreed to a deal for 1.5 million dollars with Jacob Nix, who is also represented by the same agent as Aiken, it would bring the Astros over their allotted limit. That said, the Astros have the agent of both players, Casey Close, that if Aiken doesn't sign, then the contract of 5th round pick Jacob Nix, will be rescinded.
The Astros are doing this because by offering Aiken a deal of at least 40% of the allotted pick worth, the Astros are GUARANTEED at WORST...the second pick in the 2015 draft next year if Aiken doesn't sign. If he does? They got a stud pitcher on the cheap in the sleaziest way possible. If he doesn't? It doesn't matter because they fucked the system and got, again AT WORST, the second pick in the draft next year.
What makes this so shitty though, is that both Aiken & Nix are now put in no-mans land. Since they got signed by a Major League team, both young men cannot play NCAA baseball and forfeit their eligibility. It's not like these kids can become a free agent. Either Nix & Aiken go and play JUCO ball or Independent league ball for a year and re-enter the draft next year, losing a year of their professional prime... or they sign with the Astros for less money than they're worth with the organization pocketing what they should have made.
That's really the long and the short of it. That's the rub.
The Astros are a sleazy organization that are trying to protect their assets and make gains while dicking over their draft picks. You can make the argument that it's smart business, but it's no way to treat these kids. Moreover, the team itself is just so ineptly run from the top down, fostering bad karma all over the place. Letting trades leak and killing the confidence and mental security of your players while also showing the length you'll go to earn a buck doesn't breed loyalty or a fan base.
It makes them shake their head and wonder why we even signed up for this shit.
