This. Every national baseball reporter said the same thing: Baltimore and Houston had a deal for Britton, and Angelos said no.
That narrative has changed a bit.
***Warning Jon Heyman Ahead***
----------------------
Their lack of movement caused them to make a lot of post-deadline “loser” lists, including here (which they surely don’t care about), and triggered an outcry in their clubhouse, where Keuchel said “disappointment would be an understatement” (which they may not care all that much about, either). People around the team say they will get someone in the waiver trading period, though almost surely not someone of the stature of a Zach Britton, the Orioles star they thought they had acquired before the deadline.
The Orioles canceled that trade, and while Astros owner Jim Crane suggested in a Houston radio interview that the order came from his Orioles counterpart (though Crane didn’t mention the team or owner, we know they had an agreement for a Britton trade), other sources suggest that at least one Astros player going to Baltimore didn’t pass Baltimore’s notoriously rigorous medical standard. Angelos has only sold once in his reign (2000, when the Orioles traded Will Clark and several others) and even Orioles people can’t swear he would have gone through a trade for Britton even if the Astros players all had passed the medical inspection (they admit Angelos wasn’t exactly anxious to trade Britton; one Orioles person said the day before the deadline he figured there was a 25 percent chance they’d hold onto Britton, and ultimately they did).
The Astros tried to rework the deal, and the Orioles rebuffed the new attempts, leading to Crane’s conclusion. The Indians also were “in deep” on Britton, and the Dodgers were in the mix as well, but neither of those teams got to the finish line, either. While GM Dan Duquette has a history of deal-making (Pedro Martinez twice, and the famed Jason Varitek-Derek Lowe deal; this year Tim Beckham came late in a deal to Baltimore), the reality is that between the Orioles doctor and the owner, it probably isn’t easy to make a major deadline deal with them, especially when they’re in that middle ground between buyer and seller. “If you’re dealing with the Orioles, you better have a backup plan,” one rival GM said.
----------------------------
https://www.fanragsports.com/mlb/astros/inside-baseball-astros-cautious-ways-will-hurt-october-chances/Also of note from the same article.
-----------------------------------
The Astros also tried for Justin Wilson, though apparently not very hard. None of their very top prospects were offered in that deal, either, and word is that the package from the Cubs including third baseman Jeimer Candelario was “by far” the best deal on the table.
Another rival GM said the Astros kept trying to make A.J. Reed, who’s DHing some in Triple-A, or Colin Moran, a third baseman who’s solid but lacks power, as the centerpiece of trades for impact pieces. That just wasn’t going to happen.
The Astros, who long suspected the Rangers would be less than anxious to send Yu Darvish in-state and in-division, it turns out didn’t try very hard at all for Darvish, either, causing the Rangers, who determined a couple days before the deadline they needed to deal Darvish, to send him to the Dodgers, and turning them from a strong World Series favorite into a prohibitive one. The Dodgers’ offer, once again, was said be “easily” the best one to be had. Yet, one rival exec wonders why Houston didn’t grab Darvish.
“They could have beaten what the Dodgers offer easily without touching their top four guys,” one rival exec said. “He should be an Astro.”
The Astros never seemed to be in on Sonny Gray (they weren’t about to trade three of their best prospects!), and didn’t land Tony Watson (they may have been preoccupied with Britton at that point), either, and in the end were left with only Liriano, a talented lefty who’s been misfiring a lot this year. Kind of like the Astros did at the deadline.
------------------------------------------
