Is shooting from the hip a Houston Chronicle requirement for covering the Stros?
As noted in earlier posts here, here, here, here, here and here, the Chronicle’s Stros beat writer — Jose de Jesus Ortiz — incongruously struggles with analyzing baseball. But on the heels of watching Stros sore-armed starting pitcher Jason Jennings get torched for 11 runs in 2/3rd’s of an inning on Sunday, Ortiz displays his utter ignorance of the history of the club he covers on a daily basis:

Seeing Jason Jennings give up 11 runs while only securing two outs on Sunday afternoon, opposing scouts surely had to tell their bosses not to give up top prospects for the veteran righthander.
Because the Astros made the Jennings trade out of desperation after pushing Andy Pettitte out of town and then failing to acquire Jon Garland, the Jennings trade seemed to be the best the Astros could do at the time.
As it turns out, they could hardly have done worse, especially considering that a little digging in Colorado would have uncovered that Jennings hadn’t thrown bullpen sessions between starts in the second half of the season because of a tender right elbow.
As Tim Purpura heads into Tuesday’s non-waiver trade deadline, let’s look back and see where this trade fits among the worst in franchise history?
What are the worst three trades in franchise history?
Here are my list in order of the worst:
ï Getting rid of Joe Morgan.
ï Getting rid of Billy Wagner for three prospects who didn’t produce.
ï Getting rid of Willy Taveras, Jason Hirsh and Taylor Buchholz for Jennings.

Had Ortiz merely bothered to run a Google Blog Search before publishing the foregoing, he would have discovered that two of the three trades that he lists are not even in the top seven of all-time bad Stros trades.
Then, on one hand, Ortiz contends that the Stros traded Billy Wagner for “three prospects who didn’t produce,” which is not really correct, either. The Phillies sent an established Major League pitcher who was not very good — Brandon Duckworth — along with pitching prospects Taylor Buchholz and Ezequiel Astacio to the Stros for Wagner.
However, undaunted, Ortiz then in the following sentence lists Buchholz — one of the prospects “who didn’t produce” from the Wagner trade — as one of the reasons why the Jennings trade is supposedly the third worst in Stros history.
Is this really the best that the Chronicle can do in covering the Stros?