First off, I'm not even sure how close that deal really was for, according to rumors, either Angelos or McLane to screw it up in the end. And the rumors extended beyond to somehow the Red Sox winding up with Oswalt according to some 'unnamed sources.' What got me was there was never enough of a consensus among the rumor mongers of what exactly Houston was going to wind up with at that time (besides Tejada's name).
The good news right now in Houston is that maybe, just maybe, the real baseball decisions are not being made by Drayton and his marketing team. The bad news is that Ed Wade and Tal Smith, weighted in one degree or the other, are making them and I feel they've paid too much for what they've received overall this winter. But then, I always think I could do things better as that team's GM, going into the 47th season with me playing GM for them