Reasoning of the Astros is mind boggling

We are now a couple weeks beyond this year’s MLB trade deadline.

Some teams (the really good ones) were buyers. Others (the ones needing rebuilding) were sellers.

Then there was the Houston Astros (the team that vowed to buy but ended up making the world’s most meaningless trade. I’m still trying to understand what happened and why.) Spencer Arrighetti was raised in Houston and bought a house there. This year, he was the Astros’ third-best starting pitcher. Although, in recent weeks, he’s experienced a couple of bad outings.

Meanwhile, the team has seen a couple of its supposed starting pitchers totally bomb and moved one to relief while sending the other down to the minors. The leadership responded by declaring that in the trading weeks following the all-star game they would trade for a starting pitchers as well as a power-hitting, left-handed outfielder.

So what did they actually do?

They ended up making their starting pitching worse by trading Arrighetti to Canada for a late-inning defensive replacement center fielder who only hit seven home runs this year and sported a meager .243 batting average.

Neither his home runs nor his batting average were better than the batting by outfielders we already had. All that sports announcers could turn to were the 20 home runs he’d hit a year ago.

Since the trade he hasn’t hit any home runs, only has a couple of hits, and has struck out with the bases loaded. To say that Daulton Varsho has been a disappointment is putting it mildly.

The big question is why the Astros would make that trade. They needed the pitcher. They don’t need the mediocre outfielder. To make matters worse, Arrighetti’s contract is good for two more years. Varsho, on the other hand, is in the last year of his contract. He becomes a free agent in two months and can demand as big a raise as anyone decides to give him. We traded an established player for a rental.

The best we can hope for is that next year there’s going to be a lockout as the league contract expires and the owners demand an upper salary limit to future contracts. If that happens, baseball shuts down and both contracts become meaningless.

That lockout is looking more likely in recent weeks.Television ads have been running featuring various fans supporting a salary limit on the grounds that some teams have become far too powerful because they have the money to outbid smaller market teams.

In the interests of fair competition, therefore, these fans are calling out for a limit to salaries. There is, of course, another reason for salary sanity. Fans are unlikely to support multimillionaire players. It should also be noted that scrounging for dollars to pay those high salaries has produced too many ads and also promoted gambling ads.

How in the world can Major League Baseball ban Pete Rose for his gambling while trying to talk the fans into gambling?

It is also true that not all baseball clubs are making a profit and have more money coming in than out. We don’t really know how many are losing money and being supported by the private wealth of owners. Nor will we ever know.

The minute a team claims losses, the players’association will shout foul and claim that numbers are being twisted in order to gain an advantage over players. Players, of course, are never asked to share in a club’s losses.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if some multi-million dollar salaries were cut down a little and the money thus saved spent on providing a living wage to minor league players or perhaps to expanding the number of minor league teams?

Oops! Varsho just hit a home run. Now he has three hits in over 20 times at-bat.