Minnesota, the Chicago White Sox and — surprisingly — the Boston Red Sox are listed as the Mets’ primary competition for Roy Oswalt, the veteran Houston Astro right-hander.
He needs to be traded this year, to really help his current employer, but it is a wonky situation for sure. The Astros are in dire straits as far as their farm system goes, and they lack impact talent at the major-league level capable of netting minor-league depth in a fire sale. In other words, they don’t even have what it takes to start the rebuilding phase they needed to start four years ago. In Oswalt they have an asset that could conceivably extract a good amount of talent from an acquiring team in return, but a huge roadblock apparently exists in the mind of owner Drayton McLane, who still values the righty as if this was the 2005 season.