Okay, I'm going to address this point, because, believe it or not, how talent acquisition and financial structuring work in Major League Baseball is not remotely similar to how those things work in the NHL.
What the Houston Astros are doing under current management (their current GM has only been the GM since December of 2011, shortly after the team's new owner bought them) is they are trading higher salaried players, none of whom are exactly superstars, to acquire younger, cost-controlled players.
Talking about the MLB draft like its in any way relevant to the NHL draft is absoluely asinine, though. In the MLB draft, players have a lot more leverage since a lot of them can opt not to sign, and then they go on to college and re-enter the draft. Also, under the current MLB CBA, a team's draft budget is closely tied to a team's draft position. So, in the Astros' case, the appeal of having the top pick is less having the top pick itself and more about having more money to spend on the draft. That's why in 2012, the Astros used the first overall pick on Carlos Correa, because he left them more money to use *elsewhere* in the draft to sign other players to deals at higher than their recommended slot value. Better prospects like Byron Buxton and Mark Appel (who the Astros ended up drafting first overall in 2013) were skipped over for that reason.
Furthermore, baseball does not have a worldwide draft (only players from the US, including Puerto Rico, and Canada are eligible). In fact, in baseball, there is another unrelated budget put into place under the current CBA related to international free agents, which is also tied to a team's record.
It must also be remembered that in Major League Baseball there is no salary cap, or salary floor, so there is more reason to be cheap if you know your team is going to be awful so that you can save money to make a big financial splash when your team is building up to be good again (obviously, similar strategies are available to NHL teams, but not to the same extreme due to the salary cap and salary floor. And also, those strategies still aren't about "tanking" for the top pick)
In short, Major League Baseball has a fundamentally different economic landscape than the NHL does, along with avenues of talent acquisition which fundamentally speaking do not work the same, or even that similar to, how they work in the NHL.