Like he has done the previous 18 years, Astros owner Drayton McLane addressed his team before their home opener. The speech, given before the Astros' 4-3 loss to the Marlins Friday night, could have been unusual because of McLane's active desire to sell the team, but he said it was business as usual.

"I don't look at anything as the last time," McLane said. "If I'm eating a piece of chocolate cake, I don't like to think that's the last piece I'm going to have out of that cake. I think about the next one I'm going to eat."

McLane acknowledged that three or four interested parties were interested in buying the team, a number that he stated earlier in the process, with Houston businessman Jim Crane among them. He announced publicly in November that he would try to sell the team, which he bought in 1992, in order to liquidate for the purpose of estate planning.

He came into the major leagues as a very green baseball man and has taken varying degrees of control as his tenure went along. Nineteen years later, his expectations are a little bit realistic as he watches a team that dropped to 1-6 with the loss to Florida and has cut payroll as McLane has headed for the exit.

"I was under the impression we might win 140 or 150 games," McLane said of his initial excitement upon taking over what really was a young and rising Astros team in the early 1990s. "I had a lot to learn."

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