[Westheim]

Last winter the Raccoons had shelled out dollars like there was no tomorrow. All that had netted tham had been a third place finish, and more bite marks in my desk. This winter would be different. For starters, we wouldn’t shell out dollars…

The Mexican Prick had his own way of saying that he appreciated my work. Well, he never actually said that, and he probably never would. His formal review of season goals that I received in October contained a lot of Spanish profanities for which there was no English equivalent, I guess, and overall he didn’t seem happy.

Neither was I, but what does it help?

In any case, my offseason moves were criticized, my roster composition was criticized, and there was still nobody watching our games (people like to watch a winner, maybe?). On top of that, we still had no real catcher (and hadn’t had one in 25 years), and why had Nick Brown not been signed to an extension yet? Uh, I don’t know? He’s 39 and might become hittable any minute now?

Bottom line, he wasn’t going to waste his hard-earned money on my colossal ways of mismanaging it. The budget for 2017 received a cut, down from $27.6M to just $27M. This would rank the Coons tied for 12th in the league (2016: t-9th) right at the median budget. The average budget was $26.7M. Top in the league were the Crusaders, who just kept spending like crazy, and would try to compensate the shame of their quick CLCS exit by packing another $3M onto their already insidiously huge budget, which would now be $47M, more than $10M more than the rest of the top 5, which consisted of the Miners, Stars, Warriors, and Pacifics. The league’s paupers would be the Buffaloes, Blue Sox, Loggers, Wolves, and Falcons, with the latter three’s budgets combined barely amounting to more than the Crusaders’.

In the North, the Crusaders of course reigned supreme, ahead of the Canadiens ($31.5M), Raccoons, Indians ($23.6M), Titans ($23.2M), and Loggers ($17.2M).

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Raccoons also had to cope with two personnel departures. Juan Calderón decided not to sign another contract with us after seven years of combing Latin America for us. A replacement was swiftly found, with the Mexican Prick referring one of his henchma- … human resource agents to us. Tomás Moralis had a good eye for people, he wrote, and had hardly ever missed on a target.

Also, Todd von Lindenthal had seen too much in one year with the Raccoons and decided to rejoin the military as a drill sergeant, but would also apply for deployment to a warzone as soon as possible, spitting that only a headshot could make him unsee the pile of garbage he had been subjected to last season.

Since I had also canned our hitting coach near the end of the season, we had to instantly replace our two most important coaches as well as our scouting director, which can only cause turmoil again.

There is also a mild budgetary issue for 2017. We are *COLLOSSALLY* overbudget. Jones, Santos, Abe, Young, Cookie, Thrasher – the list of players that would make more dough in 2017 compared to 2016 was a long one, didn’t even include arbitration cases yet (Toner!!), and combined with the budget cut we were hideously in the red. With that I mean that we were more than about $2M short of being ‘just’ broken – and that was without a full coaching staff.

Below would be the arbitration table. There is only one free agent, Alonso Baca, and he won’t be back, so we already have no catcher once again. The arbitration candidates include a few essentials (TONER!!) that are going to break the bank (TO-NER!!!!), but it will also be possible to skim the odd quarter million around the edges of the cake by dumping a few players like Canning and Bergquist. Medina might also be a guy that has no trade value and hardly fits the team.

None of this will heal our HUGE budget gap. We have two players making more than $1.5M that contribute ZERO to our efforts: Howard Jones and Ron Richards. I don’t consider either of them to be movable, but we need to get rid of at least one of them just to get close to a black zero.