[Westheim]

Final day of the winter meetings! What’s gonna happen!? Who’s gonna get swapped!? Who’s gonna get swamped!? Excitement!! Aahh!! (manically waves small Raccoons flag!)

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December 10 – In a switch of first basemen, the Raccoons acquire 1B Adam Avakian () from the Knights in exchange for 1B Travis Zitzner (). To sweeten the deal, the Knights also receive two prospects, #30 A SP Mike Lang and AA INF Vincent Zesati, and cash.
December 10 – The Bayhawks pick up Dallas’ C/1B Jorge Resendez (.267, 8 HR, 102 RBI) and a prospect in a trade that sends OF Ryan Cassell (.280, 21 HR, 143 RBI) and cash to the Stars.
December 14 – The Pacifics sign ex-OCT 2B/SS Alex Serrato (.273, 226 HR, 848 RBI) to a 2-yr, $6.56M contract.

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This team is better by leaps and bounds for Adam Avakian, who wears #95 to honor his older half-brother, born in 1995 and a promising Little Leaguer in his days until he met with a grim accident with a cornhusking machine and had two fingertips sliced off. They were re-attached, but his pitching prowess was all gone from that point on.

Our farm also met a rather brutal end; besides “over my dead body” Jesus Maldonado we have no top 100 prospects left. Everything else has been sent away in a bid to chase down the bedeviled Titans. Lang, our 2033 first-rounder, had somewhat struggled in single-A for one year and a half, but still looked like a future major leaguer. Zesati was more of an infield utility with limited batting prowess. I can say that now, but he will definitely have his 3-homer game with the visiting Knights in Portland in ’39 or so…

The Knights also received $535k in the deal to help balance their budget. Here was the major improvement from Nick Valdes, as distraught and distracting as he is, compared to his father Carlosito. At least Nick Valdes didn’t plunder our cash register entirely every chance he got to fund his … uh… narcotics company in Mexico. The Critters started the offseason with $1,006,200 in cash and made good use with it. I think the most cash we had in the Carlosito days was closer to $6.20 …

We ended up trading for Avakian rather than Bossert of the Blue Sox since I could get the Knights into a non-Maldonado trade, and the Blue Sox were very much insisting on Maldonado.

Bench coach Erik Mango (sic!) brought up some concern about team leadership and that outside of Gilberto Rendon, Nick Bates, and Philip Scheffer we had no leaders to speak of, which was of some concern given that Bates was not necessarily on the Opening Day roster and Scheffer was earmarked for disposal once we were confident Tony Morales had superstardom figured out. While there were only two genuine bad apples on the team now and one of those was “me, me, ME!!” person Darren Brown, also not exactly a lock for a spot on the Opening Day roster, that left only hardcore distraction Ignacio del Rio to deal with. Del Rio(t?) was a lazy, foul-mouthed bum trying to set his team mates’ shoes (and the team mates too) on fire, and at every turn would loudly declare that he would only pitch for a winning team that paid him according to his imagination. There were also rumors that he was behind the mystery that every Saturday night a cat would disappear in Portland, except in weeks in which the Raccoons were on the road.

Yeah, but he threw the baseball sort-of well, you know, and we kind of need those people.

Much of the team was quietly going about their work one way or another. Some played the game for the love of the game and didn’t care much about who they played for and for how much as long as that team filled the fridge and paid all the bills. Some were constantly sticking their heads together for infield alignments against certain batters in certain base/out states like Berto and Zeltser. Another team leadership figure would be nice, but would also be genuinely hard to find.