PORT ARTHUR — Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on Nov. 3, 2004.

In his insightful gradebook on the 2004 Houston Astros season in last Sunday’s Port Arthur News, Tom Halliburton generously bestowed an A upon team owner Drayton McLane. But he concluded remarks on McLane by noting “his new grading period starts right now.”

One day into that new period, McLane tumbled all the way to an F. By making the working environment unbearable for Gerry Hunsicker — one of baseball’s brightest and shrewdest general managers — good-old- boy Drayton failed his fan base, his ball club and the taxpayers who helped pay for a stadium that dramatically elevated his personal fortune.

In the process of sending Hunsicker in search of a sabbatical, McLane proved once again that egotistical owners never learn the historical lessons of messing with success.

 Texas exhibit A to those lessons, Bud Adams, lives in Houston, but must go to Tennessee to watch his team play. Although Bum Phillips breathed life into Adams’ moribund Houston Oilers franchise a quarter century ago, Bud’s ego couldn’t stand the credit media and fans lavished on Bum.

So, while the Luv Ya Blue craze was in full bloom, Adams fired Phillips after a three-year period in which the Oilers twice played for the AFC championship and once got eliminated in the wild card game. Famine, pestlience and doom quickly descended upon the Oilers, in the aftermath of what came to be known as the New Year’s Eve massacre of 1980.

They staggered through six consecutive losing seasons, during which time their record was 23-66. The Oilers followed up a 1-8 mark in the strike-shortened season of 1982 with 2-14 and 3-13 years. Along the way, the franchise became known for misfits like Jerry Glanville and Ladd Herzeg.

 Disdain for Adams became so great that by the mid 1990s Houstonians made it clear they would have no part of building “Bottom Line Bud” a new stadium.  It was that fan hostility and apathy which shoved him into Nashville’s waiting arms.

Texas exhibit B operates out of the Dallas/Irving area, but is trying to move to Arlington. That, of course, would be Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones,  whose meddling sent Jimmy Johnson packing after back-to-back Super Bowl victories. Johnson, in the span of five years, had taken the Cowboys from the NFL’s outhouse to the penthouse and had a dynasty in the making.

Jones, however, rebuffed by Jimmy on several fronts, including a request to pretend like he was being consulted on draft choices for ESPN’s benefit, lost sight of just how valuable the right coach can be. Well, actually, he never really respected coaches and thought he could be one himself.

After dismissing Johnson with the comment that 500 coaches could have accomplished what he did, Jones proceded to sabotage his own franchise with one bad hiring after another. Although Barry Switzer did win one more Super Bowl with Johnson’s players, the Cowboys soon went into a downward spiral resulting in three consecutive 5-11 seasons.

Along the lines of Adams and Jones, McLane’s ego will not allow him to grasp what Gerry Hunsicker has accomplished under the difficult circumstances of Drayton’s restrictive budgets and micromanaging. Like so many owners, McLane has just enough knowledge of his sport to be dangerous to those trying to build him a winner.

In the baseball business, fans look to the players first and the manager second when dishing out praise  or firing out criticism. In reality, the general manager is arguably the most important man in the operation. It’s his decisions which determine the direction a franchise is taking at any point in time. He makes the critical calls and moves on personnel, from the minors to the majors, from trades to free agents.

Most baseball people would testify that Hunsicker’s nine-year run as Houston’s GM would rank him at the very top of his profession. Five of those years the Astros were in the playoffs. Two or three of those teams, including the last one, had a realistic shot at reaching the World Series.

Despite all that, Hunsicker was on the verge of being fired last year. McLane, after the 2003 season, granted him permission to interview for the New York Mets GM position and no doubt hoped he would take it. If he had, of course, there’s no way you would have seen Carlos Beltran in an Astros uniform.

That move was Hunsicker’s best. But there were many others, including scooping up guys like Lance Berkman (1st round), Wade Miller (20th round) and Roy Oswalt (23 round) in the draft. Hunsicker stunned the baseball world in 1998 by bringing in Randy Johnson, a move that didn’t work only because Houston’s big guns choked in the playoffs.

McLane, meanwhile, was a constant thorn in Hunsicker’s side, whether it be getting too chummy with Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, or cutting budgets and grinding down his baseball people, expecting them to do more with less.

Along those lines, Houston Chronicle columnist Richard Justice did a terrific job knocking the white hat off a hypocrite’s head in his Tuesday column.

The backlash is going to be very, very interesting on this one, especially the long-term backlash. There will be more pressure than ever to put a contender on the field next year, more pressure to sign Beltran, more pressure for McLane to try and prove he really didn’t need Gerry Hunsicker.

The guess here is that Tom Halliburton won’t be inclined to give McLane anything close to an A in 2005. But Adams and Jones will gladly admit him into the nitwit owner fraternity.

Port Arthur News sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net.