[Westheim]

The way out of sad 92-win seasons was more coin. I wrote that about seventeen times to Nick Valdes during the postseason, but never got much of a reply. The Coons had been dealing with the sixth-smallest budget in ’34, just $29.4M, and that had sure hampered them, starting with the loss of Mario Rosas, who went 13-9 with a 2.93 ERA for the Condors. Imagine that rather than Okrasinski…

At least all the carefully minced words about Valdes having to open his pockets before they burst for all the stinkin’ money inside them worked out in the end. The Raccoons got a neat boost to a $34.5M budget for 2035! Say, Nick, how about 35 for 35? – No? – Not another nudge? – Fine. $34.5M will do. It tied us for 15th in the league with the Buffaloes, but at least we were now catching up again…

The top 5 in the league would be the Pacifics ($60M), Titans ($51M), Condors ($47.5M), Warriors ($47.5M), and Cyclones ($41.5M), while at the bottom the five teams with the least coins were the damn Elks ($29.6M), Aces ($26.4M), Loggers ($26.2M), Rebels ($23.8M), and Falcons ($23.8M).

The missing CL North teams were the Indians in 11th place with $37.5M and the Crusaders in 13th with $36M.

The average budget was $36.9M, about $1M more than a year ago. The median budget amounted to $36.5M, down $250k from last season.

+++

A couple of things worked together now to make the Raccoons serious players on the free agent market in the 2034-35 offseason. The first was another $5M in dosh handed over by the owner, and the other was Adrian Reichardt’s misfortune of hitting the DL in August and thus failing to reach 135 games played to trigger a vesting option worth some $2M and small change. Oh, Adrian, I am so sorry…! No, over there, over there, that’s the door.

I would claim fiscal prudency on my part, but we all know that ship has sailed.

There were of course also some big question marks that needed answering, and some of it had to do with one of the largest bunches of arbitration-eligible and free agency-bound players we had ever had. There were five free agents and no fewer than 13 players headed for arbitration unless dumped or being made to sign a new deal. The latter group included, for starters, the entire crop of “young starters” in Bernie, del Rio, and Sabre; most of our core relievers; two catchers nobody was too happy with; Bad Luck Travis; and two puzzling outfield cases with Wallace and Salgado.

In the free agency bucket, besides Adrian Reichardt, we had Tom Hawkins, Billy Jennings, Pat Okrasinski – perhaps all players that could be upgraded with a stash of banknotes of the right height – and grizzled old veteran Tim Stalker, who had been around for so long to not only having survived our massacre of 90+ losses two years ago, but also the last one before that, on a team where he was buds with Coons legends Jonny Toner and Cookie Carmona, another Travis train wreck (Garrett), and the animated skeletons of Gil Rockwell and Manobu Sugano – in 2022. The latter two had been in their age 37 season, and Stalker would turn 37 next July.

Stalker’s defense had been worth about 1.2 wins in ’34, and he batted for almost three more. Normally, a 36-year-old second baseman on his team’s richest contract was a reason for fishermen finding the GM’s cold, moist body hanging from a bridge near the docks in the fog at 4am, but Tim Stalker had grinded away at the season just as he always did, hitting for a .727 OPS, too, which was roughly his career average.

There were some pretty sound arguments for trying to get Stalker to extend his 13-year run with the team, and a few of those were that Rich Vickers and Ross Sibley didn’t look like the right replacement. Sibley in particular; a solid contributor with the Aces, he had been acquired right up at the deadline on July 31, along with Kurt Wall (who was arbitration eligible while Sibley was a year away unless banished to Florida). Neither of them couldn’t have been more useless. Both dropped around 60 points of batting average compared to their previous teams, and neither played a major role in our 2035 plans.

Tim Stalker however was worth talking about…!