[Westheim]

Also worth talking about was first base. The Raccoons had suffered through another season of garbage there, and longed back to the days where a Kevin Harenberg was physically present, awake, and occasionally alert at least two or three days a week, and maybe, to be honest, even back to Tetsu Osanai’s peak in the late ****ing 80s.

To our great dismay though, the free agent class at first base was rather dire. Kevin Harenberg actually topped that, but he was 37 years old and had been hampered by this pinch and that itch all season long; he was no longer an improvement over much of anything (although Travis Zitzner didn’t make it that hard for people to step onto and over him…). It looked like unless we wanted to shed prospects on a stud, we were stuck with Bad Luck Travis for at least another year. Which was *fine*…. I guess… because he had one more year of team control. An effort was made to get him to sign an extension before going to arbitration. No effort was made to get him to stay beyond ’35.

Zitzner’s .711 OPS had been the source of pretty much all my rage, but Jimmy Wallace actually also had only hit for a .726 OPS, and then there was the issue of him being an absolute millstone around your neck, six feet below the waterline, when parked on his deck chair in leftfield. This was the first full season in which he failed to slug .400, and while he set a personal best for RBI (and led the team) with 89, he wasn’t ever going to his 25 homers. He was a singles-slapping (38 XBH) defensive liability, and the Raccoons had to accept that and find another solution.

The outfield could indeed use a do-over. We’d make no attempt to retain either Adrian Reichardt (who wasn’t *that* bad whenever we could make him stand on his own two legs) or Billy Jennings. Manny Fernandez by default was the everyday centerfielder. Hugo Salgado was a candidate to keep around, if only as to keep the Agitator guessing as to our intentions. By and large, that was all the outfield we had left; Bobby Houston wasn’t seriously considered Opening Day material.

It was worth looking at Salgado a bit, who had batted .316 in limited action this year, appearing in 97 games (48 starts). He had batted for reverse splits, .338/.382/.426 against right-handers and .306/.327/.394 against left-handers. This was a developing trend for him, and he was probably for real in that regard, and we should stop treating him like a platoon piece against the wrong hurlers, and instead consider him a free switch-hitter. …a free switch-hitter with an 88 OPS+ for his career. With Sacramento in ’32 he had played in 154 games, hitting .272 and stealing 46 bases. He wound up with an 82 OPS+ and -1.5 WAR – but that had resulted from the Scorpions’ insistence that he was their new third baseman. It took them a year to learn, and Salgado piled up a screaming -3.2 WAR from being crushed at the hot corner alone. Not sure whether any between Cristiano Carmona, Slappy, and Chad (in the full costume) would be worse over the course of a full season.

Maud is not included in the equation – Maud would absolutely rock third base!

Despite the odd setback or two with the personnel we had much of our pitching staff figured out. Okrasinski would leave (he could have been worse, really), and since Darren Brown was too much of a tire fire to put in the rotation (17 BB in 33.2 IP?) we had to get out and find another starter again, but at least our pen was well staffed and nobody was eligible to leave, either.

The only issue was that all of the three young starting pitchers were arbitration eligible. All three were first-time arbitration-eligible at once, and all three were slated for free agency after the 2036 season. To be honest, Bernie Chavez was the only one looking like a pillar for the future right now, but it couldn’t hurt to carve out a year or two of free agency for all three of them, if at all possible.