McLane Nearly Sold Astros Last Year

3:39pm: MLB.com's Brian McTaggart has more from McLane.  The Astros' owner says the team is not for sale, but if a credible person or organization approached him he'd talk.

8:46am: We mentioned this briefly yesterday, but here's a link to an article from Jose de Jesus Ortiz and Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle.  In the article, Astros owner Drayton McLane admits he had a tentative deal to sell the Astros to Jim Crane after the 2008 season concluded.  Crane backed out of the deal.  McLane told the writers the Astros are not currently on the market, but he left the door open by saying, "nothing lasts forever."

In a blog post, Justice explains that McLane is "pretty much announcing the club is for sale" by confirming last year's Crane deal.  He'd like to see a spending spree follow, since it'd be "other people's money."  We saw how well that strategy played out with the Cubs, who binged in the '06-'07 offseason.  The Ricketts family probably didn't consider the $90MM owed over the next five years to Alfonso Soriano to be a positive.