The Stros (40-54) won last night for the first time in five games since the All-Star Break, which has put the club in contention for the worst record in Major League Baseball this season. That performance prompted Baseball Prospectus to provide this “what’s busted” capsule summary ($) of the Stros’ woes:

What’s Busted? Organizational decision-making. Whether it’s putting Craig Biggio’s goal ahead of the ballclub’s fortunes, or Phil Garner’s fickle relationship with Lidge, or unquestioning Brad Ausmus cultism, or spending big money on Woody Williams and being surprised by the result, it’s fair to say that the Astros have consistently made the wrong choices when they have to freedom to make them, and only have happy results from thoseólike Hunter Penceówho force choices upon them.

Add to those bad decisions a string of bad drafts from 1998-2002 and the Stros have a real mess on their hands. In those five drafts, the Stros generated only a handful of productive players — Brad Lidge and Morgan Ensberg (1998); Jason Lane and Chris Sampson (1999); Chad Qualls and Eric Bruntlett (2000); Chris Burke and Matt Albers (2001); and nothing so far out of the 2002 draft, which is shaping up to be one of the worst drafts in Stros franchise history. The foregoing is not much of a return on investment in the Stros’ minor league development program.
Despite the clarity of the foregoing mistakes, Chronicle sports columnist Richard Justice continues to manage to to get it wrong in analyzing the Stros:

Tim Purpura’s biggest blunder was swapping Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens for Woody Williams and Jason Jennings. It really begins with Pettitte. The Astros had such a dislike of his agent, Randy Hendricks, that they allowed it to influence their evaluation of the player. Bad mistake. Childish, too.
We’ll never know if they could have signed Pettitte. I suspect his heart was set on returning to New York. Close friends in the home clubhouse tell me he agonized over the decision and would have returned if the Astros had tried a little harder. Instead, they treated him like he was an optional part.
Neither he nor Roger Clemens have been great this season, but they’ve been far better than Woody Williams and Jason Jennings, who are a combined 5-16 with 14 quality starts and a 4.94 ERA. Pettitte and Clemens are 7-10 with 15 quality starts and a 4.25 ERA. To adjust the ERAs by league, Pettitte and Clemens are .18 of a run under their league average while Williams and Jennings are .65 of a run above.

Purpura’s biggest blunder? In point of fact, trading Pettitte and Clemens for Williams and Jennings hasn’t had much of an effect on the Stros’ season at all, while not signing them has had a huge positive impact on the Stros’ payroll. Had Pettitte and Clemens been pitching for the Stros this season, they would have saved the club about 27 more runs than Williams and Jennings to this point in the season. That translates to about 4-5 more wins, which would make the Stros record at best 45-49 and still far behind in the NL Central. Meanwhile, if the Stros had signed Pettitte and Clemens, then the club’s payroll would be bleeding by an additional $25 million or so over and above the aggregate $10.5 million or so that they are paying Williams and Jennings. Had that occurred, Justice would probably be criticizing the Stros for wasting a substantial chunck of the club’s payroll on a couple of high-injury risk veterans on the downside of their respective careers.
The bottom line on this season is that the Stros pitching staff has underperformed so badly that having both Pettitte and Clemens would not have improved that overall performance enough to matter. Stros General Manager Tim Purpura has made some mistakes, such as signing Williams in the first place. But electing to pass on overpaying Pettitte and Clemens was not among them.