[Westheim]

There it was! Nick Valdes’ axe. This time he didn’t even bring me roses. He just took his axe to the budget and called the Raccoons his worst investment since the failure of the puppy juice factory! That one almost hurt my feelings, but not so much as the slashed budget did.

Last season the Raccoons ranked ninth and had $36.5M to blow through. Well, that was over. The Raccoons were tossed all the way into a tie for 15th place with a budget of only $31M! Well… Valdes said that I made the team champs with less than that in 2026. So there was a challenge for me.

Yeah, but the 2026 team didn’t pay a solid 26% of its budget to three over-the-hill starting pitchers it would love to see from behind…

The top 5 in budget were the Pacifics ($55M), Titans ($49M), Condors ($44M), Miners ($41.5M), and Buffaloes ($40M). The bottom 5 contained the Aces ($27.8M), Blue Sox ($27.4M), Loggers ($26.2M), Rebels ($22.8M), and Falcons ($20.8M).

The missing CL North teams are the Crusaders in 9th place with $36M, the Canadiens in 12th place with $33.5M, and the Indians, who we tie along with the Stars for 15th and $31M.

The median budget for 2032 was $33.25M, which was actually down $2M from last year. The average budget was $34.14M, up almost $400k from last season.

There was also one other news item that made immediate waves in the neighborhood. I had left it up to Matt Nunley to decide whether he wanted to come back for another season. He didn’t. He was full of aches and pains, and there was nothing to win anymore with this team, he explained (and he had won pretty much everything at least once, except a Player of the Year award), and besides, he had this excellent offer to become the spokesperson for this company that made barbecue grills. The old spokesperson had died during the baseball playoffs. – Of what did he die, Matt? – No, I don’t find congestive heart disease surprising…

That removed the (also unsurprising) longest-ago Raccoon still on the roster from the mix. The new record holder was … well, we had three Raccoons on the roster that had been promoted from the Alley Cats to the Critters during the 2022 season. They were Tim Stalker, Rico Gutierrez, and Elias Tovias. The latter had an expiring contract we’d (spoiler) not renew, and the other two had huge contracts they didn’t merit and that nobody would be dumb enough to take on. Yes, unfortunately I have to take the wind out of any fan hopes right away. Getting rid of Rico Gutierrez is impossible. Two more years we’ll have to somehow employ him, maybe as one of those guys that checks tickets…

Other personnel news included Matt Jamieson and Joe Vanatti executing their player options for 2032. Those were worth over $2.4M combined, and that was money we could really put to use somewhere else…

As far as those three highly-paid starting pitchers are concerned, they (Shumway, Roberts, Gutierrez) make about $8M combined this year, and while Roberts will be a free agent, there’s still $5.4M left for next year (2033). That includes a $3.3M player option for Shumway, so you can probably guess how that will go. Shumway’s deal is up after ’33, and Gutierrez has two team options that state $2.09M but are actually worth precisely $550k each – the buyout. So we’ll rather pay Rico $1.1M in ’34 to NOT pitch for us. Now THAT sounds like a sound deal!

It is probably the best deal you will hear this winter, except should the chance present itself to dump one of the expensive contracts. Ramos made $2.5M annually at this point, but wasn’t up for discussion. Tim Stalker made $2.8M this season and next, and had a $2.6M player option for ’34. Who gave out THAT stupid deal?? Add Jamieson and you have six seven-figure contracts, and at least four of them are bad, depending on your mileage on a soon-to-be-37-year-old outfielder with a .777 OPS and eroding defense. Good spot to be in!

And we won’t get into a better spot, either. The Raccoons already started the offseason overbudget, and by more than one million! Valdes would allow us to sign a few coaches but nothing else. Any sort of wiggle room at all had to come by trading a big commitment, and we only had those lined out above. After that it was whatever the clown arbitrator would concede to Josh Boles (the estimate was $1.15M), and the final-year commitments to Vanatti for $940k, Hague for $800k, and then lots of weeds and **** like $500k a year for Toby Ross who packed 21 points on his Miners average and hit all of .227 for Portland. That contract is by the way the second-longest commitment. Who picked that guy off waivers?? And he is the ONLY major league ready catcher in the system not named Daniel Rocha, who is a career .171 batter. Oh by the way, with Rich Hereford definitely going out, we have no third baseman, like, at all, except for Chris Baldwin (career .239/.297/.314 batter) and Wilson Rodriguez, who was a third baseman as much as Ricardo Martinez had been – the flash in the pan that drove Nick Brown nuts in the late 2000s. – What do you mean? There has to be a third baseman in the minors? No. Well. Depends on your opinion of German Sanchez, who has 38 major league appearances, and will turn 30 in July, and batted for a .611 OPS with the Alley Cats this year.

Yeah, we were at a point where we had to trade Roberts et al not for prospects, but for dear life. And by the way there’s the arbitration table. We are also at the point where we have to ask ourselves sincerely whether we can afford the luxury of a super utility for $300k… Note: Sean Rigg has no estimate because he was already waived and designated for assignment during the season. This is the opening setup for the table without any changes by me.