I'd heard bits of this before, but never in this much detail... As unthinkable as it seems,
this article leaves me wondering: Did Bud Selig actually save baseball in Houston??
Had things turned in one direction, Collins today could be the owner of the Astros, having reached what he said was an agreement to buy the team from Drayton McLane in 1995. ...
Collins said he and his partners worked with McLane for six months on a proposed sale of the Astros. The team would have played at RFK Stadium for two years while the Virginia stadium was being built. “Drayton went through RFK Stadium with us and met with my partners and we looked at the various stadium sites, and he was impressed with them,” Collins said. “But he said the key was to get approval from Major League Baseball.
"That’s when we started dealing with (commissioner) Bud Selig, and what an ordeal that was.” Collins said his group had a “signed, sealed agreement” with McLane that would have compensated him for what McLane said were three years of financial losses for the Astros. The deal for the franchise itself was reported to be for about $150 million. MLB, however, insisted that the Astros make one more run at getting a stadium built in Houston, and voters in November 1996 approved by a 51 to 49 percent margin, with about 16,000 votes separating the ayes from the nays, to approve $265 million for the downtown ballpark. “Drayton called me and said, ‘Bill, you’re not going to believe this, but it passed, and we’ve got a new stadium, so our deal is null and void.’”
