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luckymann · 02-08-2021, 03:04 AM

New month. New staff. New outlook. New lease on life.

There’s little that can be done for what’s left of this season other than to properly use it to plan for the next.

Obviously, the recent draftees are all auto-renew. OF Joe Douglass and Earl Stewart, along with SP Joe Alexander, are all arb eligible next year. There’s a few on MiLB contracts. No action required for any of these guys just yet. Same goes with the imminent retirees Ryan Ringo and Ray Archer.

We have team control over Malone thru 1952, with nominal arb estimates of $19k and $26k for the next two seasons (he’s on $11k this year). But I reckon the risk of those is to the upside, so I wouldn’t mind locking him in and capping that risk. Somewhat surprisingly, he’s only after $18k for a 1-year deal, so I snap that up before he changes his mind. Franchise cornerstone secured for at least one more year.

Jonathan Moulton, who is the other position player I definitely want to keep, is a different kettle of fish. He’s our third-highest-paid player this year with $28k and I’m hoping his terms will be somewhere in the vicinity of 2-year / $60-70k. I got the figure right, just not the term—he wants $60k, but for one year. I’ll come back to him on that once I’ve tested the waters elsewhere and have a better idea of how our finances are placed.

As far as pitchers go, only Bryan Phillips is a definite yes. He is on $12k this season and arbs out at $14k for next, then is a FA. I offer him a 1-year $15k contract just to get him on the books. He accepts.

I’d like to hold onto Alex Ocaguera as well. He’s arb eligible at an estimated $12k for each of the next two seasons, so I test the water with him and offer him $12.5k for a year’s service. He contras with $13.5k. Long story short, we settle at $13k.
I flip things about and look at it as a process of elimination from this point. Here’s a breakdown of how that goes:

HARD PASSES

OF Justin Parks – too much $$ / poor attitude.
3B Chris Barnes – too old and expensive, plus we’ve now got plenty of beef at the position.
CF Josh Valdez – has been problematic in the clubhouse due to the extremely high opinion he has of himself. Were it in any way justified I might be willing to tolerate it. However, it is not. So I can’t.
SS Tyler Allen – 40 and his legs are just about ready to give out from under him.
RP Mike State – unlikely to see action this season, and not of much use to us.
SP Jon Bachman – even without the torn labrum I doubt he’d have figured in our plans for next season. After it, not a chance in hell.
1B Chris Gagliardi – 35. One position. Bad work ethic. Strike three, you’re out.
OF Jason Taylor – at 38, another member of our heavily-populated assisted-living group. No thanks.
P Nick Gekas – needs someone close to him to tell him it’s time to hang them up. Our not re-signing him could be that all-important first step. You’re welcome, Nick.

MEDIUM PASSES

2B David Boyd – not Charlie Hustle by any stretch but too talented to simply write off.
CL Mike Christensen – a solid pitcher, but at 35 is walking into the twilight.
1B Corey Wierenga – still got some moxie, no doubt, but 34 / low contact hitter / only plays 1B are solid hits to his appeal.
C Jaime Simko – has already shown his unwillingness to fit within the team structure. Again, were he a better player I might be more forgiving. The only reason he’s not among the hard passes is because of his position. But I doubt he’ll be with the club in ’51.
OF Mark Gentry – a great club man and, if it was 6 years ago he’d be a keeper. But in the present day he’s 36 and, if I’m being generous, only an average ballplayer.
RP Adam Hendrickson – on talent alone he’d stay, but his attitude is less than conducive to team sports. He should switch to tennis or golf.
RP Nate Kurtz – only in an extreme pinch.
RP Bryce McCray – there are worse pitchers out there and his ability to be used as an emergency starter may just keep him in a Seahawks uniform for another season. Countering that are his age, proneness to injury, and generally lackadaisical attitude toward the game.
OF Keith Pike – his problems are equally split between talent and attitude, but he may figure in our plans if things don’t go as planned.
C Greg Sellers – see my comments on Simko.

SOFT PASSES

OF Nick Terrance – a solid player. But he is our top salary earner this year at $35k and will undoubtedly want somewhere around what Moulton is after. He’s 31 and still on the IL, so that sort of money just seems an unwise risk in my mind. More likely trade bait than anything.
SP Bobby Gloeckler – no place in the rotation, but with LHP thin in the squad he may get a spot on that basis alone.
OF Keith Pike – it will all depend on how the cards play out as to whether we want to keep Keith. Then, if he’s still in the game, it will depend on how much he expects us to ante up to do so.

Roy Archer – he of the Transcontinental to transcontinental plans – surprises me by coming to my office requesting a trade because he feels he is being underutilised here. Aren’t you just about to drive off into the sunset, Roy? I feel like asking. Instead I hold my tongue and shop him around without any real hope of baiting a fish. To my great surprise and pleasure, however, White Plains offers Cory Hanes, a decent enough RHB who plays 1B / 3B well, the other IF spots OK and isn’t too bad a backup outfielder either. Cary offers up a better player in Jesse Wright, but he’s an FA come season end earning $27k this year and I just don’t know that we’d be able to afford him, whereas Hanes still has almost his full complement of team control attached. Bit of a no-brainer really. But I play it cool and see if they’ll sweeten the pot. They offer a decent young reliever Rafael Agront. Sold to the man soon to be in the unemployment line. Just remember, there’s no crying in baseball.

Flushed with the success of this trade I give the names of two of the hard passes each to Assistant GM Rickey Tassone, Scouting Director Matt Dunigan, Bench Coach Pedro Salazar, along with a list of player types we need and absolute dealbreakers, and tell them to get shopping.

I keep Parks and Barnes for myself and do the same, but quickly discover how one-hit wonders feel as I flame out miserably with both.

Rickey has better luck, offloading Valdez for a really good IF named Adam Fallis. (What a time he must have had at school; even worse for his sister Ophelia.) It’s a straight swap salary-wise, but Adam has the full team control stint to get through.
Cory Hanes goes 5-for-5 on debut as we win a thriller 9-8 at Kapaa, with both Parks and Moulton going yard.

Pedro strikes pay dirt that evening, trading Allen and a young 2B I’d never given much thought to for a couple of excellent utility IF / OFs in Ben Penley and Greg Collette. Within the hour, Matt joins the party. He’s raided White Plains again, trading Corey Wierenga for JJ Davis, who will slot into the rotation straight away, with Gloeckler giving us another southpaw option in relief.

It goes on like this for the next couple weeks. Games by day, winning some and losing others. Trades by night, saying farewell to some and hello to others.

In one 24-hour period, the other three strike gold. Rickey manages to offload Taylor and Simko in one deal, getting solid backstop David Schuld and handy IF / OF utility Jonathan Paulsen. Mike does another twofer, swapping Gagliardi for a pair of utilities, infielder Rick Clayton and outfielder Shane McBride. Obviously not wanting to feel left out, Pedro finds us Art Zachry, a like-for-younger-like replacement for Mike Christensen, and gets decent prospect Nathan Fadely into the bargain.

I trawl the Reserve Roster and see what I can dredge up. Reliever Mike State nabs us Bobby Henry--a cheaper, better version of himself. Jon Bachman gets us a really good lefty setup man in Gabe Bernal and Jeff Peoples, a young backup catcher. Adam Bruner, now expendable, is traded to Grand Rapids for solid reliever Ryan Vann.

Nick Gekas is the big surprise, generating a flurry of interest—so much, in fact, that I have to go back and see if I’ve missed something. Confident I have not, I ship him off to Cary for Kelly Hackett, who by himself should bump our BA above the Mendoza line. But we’ll have to wait a few weeks for that as he’s out of action with a bone marrow edema.

In the end the only two hard passes left are the two I flunked on, Parks and Barnes. There are a few other odds and sods we’ll revisit later, but we’ve almost completely revamped our squad and reduced our payroll by $50k in the process, meaning we have $194 to splash out on Free Agents. That’s some pretty fancy horse-trading there podner, e’en if I do say so meself. Most importantly, it leaves us with a really good chance of being able to afford a couple of absolute superstars when FAs declare.

JJ Davis wins his first start for us, allowing just 2 runs on 4 hits over 6, with Zachry giving us a 3-inning save.

Then, out of the blue Roanoke gets in touch and canvasses our interest in a gun SP and team leader by the name of John Leon, exactly the sort of player we have been building up our war-chest for. They submit a list of players they are interested in. I mull things over. John is on $34k for the next 3 years before becoming arb eligible, which is big bucks in this league. But their player demands are doable and, like I said, he’s a dream recruit in so many respects. What the hey, you only live once. I take him in exchange for Nick Terrance (retaining 5%), Mike Boardway, SS Jonas Allen and recent recruit Rafael Agront.

Now we’re talking. That means we can offload Chavez. Unsurprisingly, he’s as popular as the prettiest belle at the ball. But his high salary means those offered for him are equally well-compensated, many of whom are impending free agents. One player in particular catches my eye: 1B / 3B Marcus Strickland. Huge, huge bat. But, from all reports, an ego to match. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t touch him with a 45-foot Ukrainian. But with John Leon now there to keep the clubhouse in order and with Marcus being on auto-renew for another year before arb starts, I decide to take another punt.

We get another trade proposal that seems like a gift from the gods, when Laramie offers excellent catcher Chris Blair up for Justin Parks. At 30, Chris is a bit older than I’d like and on a sturdy $34k, but he is a quality player on both offence and defence and seeing as we got no love shopping Justin around and now have plenty of quality outfielders at our disposal, I jump at the chance to move him on. That then frees up Greg Sellers, and I flip him to Riverside for a strong lefty reliever in Ralph Grosso and a semi-decent starting pitcher prospect, Alphonse Cowley.

A great week for the club culminates in Brian Malone winning PoTW honors for his .407 / 3 HR / 11 RBI performance. He celebrates with 5 ribsters the next day in an 8-5 win over Lanai City that also sees Marcus make his debut with a 3-5 / 2 RBI showing. 2 more dingers the following game give him a league-leading 21. The lad’s on fire.

I mention the highlights, but there are plenty of lowlights as well, which is to be expected seeing as we’ve basically just thrown a bunch of relative strangers together kind of like the baseball equivalent of Noah’s big boat and told them to perform as a cohesive unit. The middle section of the month – after the initial euphoria of all the flux has waned – is especially torrid, as we lose a bunch on the trot. A Bryan Phillips one-hit gem then turns things around as we string together 4 wins in a row, but the month finishes on a sour note as we fall into a rut once again and then, on the final day of the month, John Leon is hurt.

There’s no doubt we’ve made huge strides in the right direction, but there are still a number of holes to be plugged before this club will contend. As we enter the final month of the season, we sit at 34-48, still last and 14½ games out of first, having gone 12-15 for June. One pleasing fact amid the darkness is that our BA has continued to rise slowly but steadily to its current .241.

02-08-2021, 03:04 AM	#8
luckymann Hall Of Famer Join Date: Nov 2019 Posts: 14,191	1950 season – June New month. New staff. New outlook. New lease on life. There’s little that can be done for what’s left of this season other than to properly use it to plan for the next. Obviously, the recent draftees are all auto-renew. OF Joe Douglass and Earl Stewart, along with SP Joe Alexander, are all arb eligible next year. There’s a few on MiLB contracts. No action required for any of these guys just yet. Same goes with the imminent retirees Ryan Ringo and Ray Archer. We have team control over Malone thru 1952, with nominal arb estimates of $19k and $26k for the next two seasons (he’s on $11k this year). But I reckon the risk of those is to the upside, so I wouldn’t mind locking him in and capping that risk. Somewhat surprisingly, he’s only after $18k for a 1-year deal, so I snap that up before he changes his mind. Franchise cornerstone secured for at least one more year. Jonathan Moulton, who is the other position player I definitely want to keep, is a different kettle of fish. He’s our third-highest-paid player this year with $28k and I’m hoping his terms will be somewhere in the vicinity of 2-year / $60-70k. I got the figure right, just not the term—he wants $60k, but for one year. I’ll come back to him on that once I’ve tested the waters elsewhere and have a better idea of how our finances are placed. As far as pitchers go, only Bryan Phillips is a definite yes. He is on $12k this season and arbs out at $14k for next, then is a FA. I offer him a 1-year $15k contract just to get him on the books. He accepts. I’d like to hold onto Alex Ocaguera as well. He’s arb eligible at an estimated $12k for each of the next two seasons, so I test the water with him and offer him $12.5k for a year’s service. He contras with $13.5k. Long story short, we settle at $13k. I flip things about and look at it as a process of elimination from this point. Here’s a breakdown of how that goes: HARD PASSES OF Justin Parks – too much $$ / poor attitude. 3B Chris Barnes – too old and expensive, plus we’ve now got plenty of beef at the position. CF Josh Valdez – has been problematic in the clubhouse due to the extremely high opinion he has of himself. Were it in any way justified I might be willing to tolerate it. However, it is not. So I can’t. SS Tyler Allen – 40 and his legs are just about ready to give out from under him. RP Mike State – unlikely to see action this season, and not of much use to us. SP Jon Bachman – even without the torn labrum I doubt he’d have figured in our plans for next season. After it, not a chance in hell. 1B Chris Gagliardi – 35. One position. Bad work ethic. Strike three, you’re out. OF Jason Taylor – at 38, another member of our heavily-populated assisted-living group. No thanks. P Nick Gekas – needs someone close to him to tell him it’s time to hang them up. Our not re-signing him could be that all-important first step. You’re welcome, Nick. MEDIUM PASSES 2B David Boyd – not Charlie Hustle by any stretch but too talented to simply write off. CL Mike Christensen – a solid pitcher, but at 35 is walking into the twilight. 1B Corey Wierenga – still got some moxie, no doubt, but 34 / low contact hitter / only plays 1B are solid hits to his appeal. C Jaime Simko – has already shown his unwillingness to fit within the team structure. Again, were he a better player I might be more forgiving. The only reason he’s not among the hard passes is because of his position. But I doubt he’ll be with the club in ’51. OF Mark Gentry – a great club man and, if it was 6 years ago he’d be a keeper. But in the present day he’s 36 and, if I’m being generous, only an average ballplayer. RP Adam Hendrickson – on talent alone he’d stay, but his attitude is less than conducive to team sports. He should switch to tennis or golf. RP Nate Kurtz – only in an extreme pinch. RP Bryce McCray – there are worse pitchers out there and his ability to be used as an emergency starter may just keep him in a Seahawks uniform for another season. Countering that are his age, proneness to injury, and generally lackadaisical attitude toward the game. OF Keith Pike – his problems are equally split between talent and attitude, but he may figure in our plans if things don’t go as planned. C Greg Sellers – see my comments on Simko. SOFT PASSES OF Nick Terrance – a solid player. But he is our top salary earner this year at $35k and will undoubtedly want somewhere around what Moulton is after. He’s 31 and still on the IL, so that sort of money just seems an unwise risk in my mind. More likely trade bait than anything. SP Bobby Gloeckler – no place in the rotation, but with LHP thin in the squad he may get a spot on that basis alone. OF Keith Pike – it will all depend on how the cards play out as to whether we want to keep Keith. Then, if he’s still in the game, it will depend on how much he expects us to ante up to do so. Roy Archer – he of the Transcontinental to transcontinental plans – surprises me by coming to my office requesting a trade because he feels he is being underutilised here. Aren’t you just about to drive off into the sunset, Roy? I feel like asking. Instead I hold my tongue and shop him around without any real hope of baiting a fish. To my great surprise and pleasure, however, White Plains offers Cory Hanes, a decent enough RHB who plays 1B / 3B well, the other IF spots OK and isn’t too bad a backup outfielder either. Cary offers up a better player in Jesse Wright, but he’s an FA come season end earning $27k this year and I just don’t know that we’d be able to afford him, whereas Hanes still has almost his full complement of team control attached. Bit of a no-brainer really. But I play it cool and see if they’ll sweeten the pot. They offer a decent young reliever Rafael Agront. Sold to the man soon to be in the unemployment line. Just remember, there’s no crying in baseball. Flushed with the success of this trade I give the names of two of the hard passes each to Assistant GM Rickey Tassone, Scouting Director Matt Dunigan, Bench Coach Pedro Salazar, along with a list of player types we need and absolute dealbreakers, and tell them to get shopping. I keep Parks and Barnes for myself and do the same, but quickly discover how one-hit wonders feel as I flame out miserably with both. Rickey has better luck, offloading Valdez for a really good IF named Adam Fallis. (What a time he must have had at school; even worse for his sister Ophelia.) It’s a straight swap salary-wise, but Adam has the full team control stint to get through. Cory Hanes goes 5-for-5 on debut as we win a thriller 9-8 at Kapaa, with both Parks and Moulton going yard. Pedro strikes pay dirt that evening, trading Allen and a young 2B I’d never given much thought to for a couple of excellent utility IF / OFs in Ben Penley and Greg Collette. Within the hour, Matt joins the party. He’s raided White Plains again, trading Corey Wierenga for JJ Davis, who will slot into the rotation straight away, with Gloeckler giving us another southpaw option in relief. It goes on like this for the next couple weeks. Games by day, winning some and losing others. Trades by night, saying farewell to some and hello to others. In one 24-hour period, the other three strike gold. Rickey manages to offload Taylor and Simko in one deal, getting solid backstop David Schuld and handy IF / OF utility Jonathan Paulsen. Mike does another twofer, swapping Gagliardi for a pair of utilities, infielder Rick Clayton and outfielder Shane McBride. Obviously not wanting to feel left out, Pedro finds us Art Zachry, a like-for-younger-like replacement for Mike Christensen, and gets decent prospect Nathan Fadely into the bargain. I trawl the Reserve Roster and see what I can dredge up. Reliever Mike State nabs us Bobby Henry--a cheaper, better version of himself. Jon Bachman gets us a really good lefty setup man in Gabe Bernal and Jeff Peoples, a young backup catcher. Adam Bruner, now expendable, is traded to Grand Rapids for solid reliever Ryan Vann. Nick Gekas is the big surprise, generating a flurry of interest—so much, in fact, that I have to go back and see if I’ve missed something. Confident I have not, I ship him off to Cary for Kelly Hackett, who by himself should bump our BA above the Mendoza line. But we’ll have to wait a few weeks for that as he’s out of action with a bone marrow edema. In the end the only two hard passes left are the two I flunked on, Parks and Barnes. There are a few other odds and sods we’ll revisit later, but we’ve almost completely revamped our squad and reduced our payroll by $50k in the process, meaning we have $194 to splash out on Free Agents. That’s some pretty fancy horse-trading there podner, e’en if I do say so meself. Most importantly, it leaves us with a really good chance of being able to afford a couple of absolute superstars when FAs declare. JJ Davis wins his first start for us, allowing just 2 runs on 4 hits over 6, with Zachry giving us a 3-inning save. Then, out of the blue Roanoke gets in touch and canvasses our interest in a gun SP and team leader by the name of John Leon, exactly the sort of player we have been building up our war-chest for. They submit a list of players they are interested in. I mull things over. John is on $34k for the next 3 years before becoming arb eligible, which is big bucks in this league. But their player demands are doable and, like I said, he’s a dream recruit in so many respects. What the hey, you only live once. I take him in exchange for Nick Terrance (retaining 5%), Mike Boardway, SS Jonas Allen and recent recruit Rafael Agront. Now we’re talking. That means we can offload Chavez. Unsurprisingly, he’s as popular as the prettiest belle at the ball. But his high salary means those offered for him are equally well-compensated, many of whom are impending free agents. One player in particular catches my eye: 1B / 3B Marcus Strickland. Huge, huge bat. But, from all reports, an ego to match. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t touch him with a 45-foot Ukrainian. But with John Leon now there to keep the clubhouse in order and with Marcus being on auto-renew for another year before arb starts, I decide to take another punt. We get another trade proposal that seems like a gift from the gods, when Laramie offers excellent catcher Chris Blair up for Justin Parks. At 30, Chris is a bit older than I’d like and on a sturdy $34k, but he is a quality player on both offence and defence and seeing as we got no love shopping Justin around and now have plenty of quality outfielders at our disposal, I jump at the chance to move him on. That then frees up Greg Sellers, and I flip him to Riverside for a strong lefty reliever in Ralph Grosso and a semi-decent starting pitcher prospect, Alphonse Cowley. A great week for the club culminates in Brian Malone winning PoTW honors for his .407 / 3 HR / 11 RBI performance. He celebrates with 5 ribsters the next day in an 8-5 win over Lanai City that also sees Marcus make his debut with a 3-5 / 2 RBI showing. 2 more dingers the following game give him a league-leading 21. The lad’s on fire. I mention the highlights, but there are plenty of lowlights as well, which is to be expected seeing as we’ve basically just thrown a bunch of relative strangers together kind of like the baseball equivalent of Noah’s big boat and told them to perform as a cohesive unit. The middle section of the month – after the initial euphoria of all the flux has waned – is especially torrid, as we lose a bunch on the trot. A Bryan Phillips one-hit gem then turns things around as we string together 4 wins in a row, but the month finishes on a sour note as we fall into a rut once again and then, on the final day of the month, John Leon is hurt. There’s no doubt we’ve made huge strides in the right direction, but there are still a number of holes to be plugged before this club will contend. As we enter the final month of the season, we sit at 34-48, still last and 14½ games out of first, having gone 12-15 for June. One pleasing fact amid the darkness is that our BA has continued to rise slowly but steadily to its current .241. Attached Images __________________ HISTORICAL DO-OVERS A'S RED SOX DODGERS PIRATES MARINERS CUSTOM SAVES LGB NEXUS