The Crawfish Boxes

I'll have to recheck the math on that tally later, but Ken Rosenthal reports the following this morning (or afternoon given when I woke up and read it):

Left-hander Randy Wolf's asking price is believed to be $30 million for three years. The Astros are believed to have offered him between $22 million and $24 million before pulling their proposal due to economic reasons. 

Besides the obvious gaffe of Randy Wolf not being anywhere near that value, and the shear idiocy of investing $24 million him when for four more million you could have Ben Sheets (seriously, what the HELL is our front office doing?), there is something hugely alarming to me.

Why/How could you be prepared to offer someone $22-24 million dollars and then suddenly go, "Oops, we forgot to look at our books, turns out we're going to have to pinch every penny this offseason, but we're really glad you didn't accept that offer...we would have been f***ed"?!?!?!  How could we one day have had an offseason plan that included spending that much on such a bad pitcher and then because he priced himself out of our range and into the range of Ben Sheets (worth every penny at that range) only to then suddenly abandon that plan via a realization that we're broke?

There's no way we really needed to unload Wigginton if we were going to drop that much on Wolf.  There's no way we can' truly afford Sheets if we were going to drop that much on Wolf.  There's no way we need to chose this bastardized middle ground between contending and fire sale.

Our front office, is full of shit—that's my take at least.