Some baseball Facebook group showed me some post about Mike Cuellar, a great pitcher who tortured me when I was a kid, consistently beating my Yankees.
I looked Cuellar up on baseball-reference, and recalled his being on the Astros but I didn't realize he was an Astro right up to 1969 when the Orioles AL dynasty began and he pitched game 1 of the World Series against Tom Seaver. So, I thought, who the hell did the Astros get for Mike Cuellar? Why would they trade him?
Ugh - Curt Blefary. The same guy the Yankees later got trading Joe Pepitone for him, leaving them without a reliable first baseman for 5 years till they got Chris Chambliss.
Now, I had to look up the Astros in 1968, wondering - did the Astros so badly need a first baseman that they were willing to trade a future perennial Cy Young candidate for Curt Blefary?
In 1968 the Astros had...Rusty Staub and Bob Watson. Both multiple levels of quality above Blefary.
Which means that they also let Staub be available to the Expos for the expansion draft. We know that they also later traded Joe Morgan in a disastrous trade to Cincinnati.
So...the 1969-70 Astros COULD have had the following team:
C - John Edwards
1B - Bob Watson
2B - Joe Morgan
SS - Denis Menke
3B - Doug Rader
OF - Jim Wynn
OF- Rusty Staub
OF - Jesus Alou
OF - Cesar Geronimo
SP - Mike Cuellar
SP - Larry Dierker
SP - Dennis Lemaster
SP - Jack Billingham
SP - Don Wilson
This is a pennant contender if I ever saw one. What a waste, what a tragedy the Astros were as an organization. One wrong move after another.
The other team worth thinking about in this period, in this case through 1974-5 is the Cleveland Indians, who also made disastrous trade after disastrous trade, a few quite shady as Gabe Paul made them and then moved to the Yankees where he had moved Chambliss, Nettles, Tidrow. But that is another story for another day.