[Westheim]

2047 CONTINENTAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES
Portland Raccoons (104-58) vs. Oklahoma City Thunder (108-54)

Caution! Step with care – the struggle bus with all the injured players is moving through…!

The Raccoons had won 104 games, taken the CL North for the fourth straight year, and had generally been awesome all through the season, despite some significant injury burdens more or less since May. Third in runs scored, best in runs allowed, with a +158 run differential. Best defense, best rotation, best bullpen. Third in homers, second in stolen bases – we could do almost anything! …except keeping our paws mended and in one piece.

Thus we arrived in Oklahoma City for the CLCS without budding ace Bubba Wolinsky (rotator cuff), best-bench-bat-money-can-buy Pat Gurney (oblique), formidable slugger Bryce Toohey (claw), old veteran Manny Fernandez (wrist), and plucky platoon piece Gene Pellicano (wrist). The latter two were *perhaps* options for a World Series later in the month, but first we had to get there.

The Thunder had packed on 19 wins compared to their division title from last year, and this time had also won the season series against Portland, 5-4. They had thumped their way to #1 in runs scored with 856 markers on the board, and had come third in runs allowed. Their run differential was a mighty +226. Their defense was second-best to ours, and they had led the league in home runs – but could not steal bases all that efficiently, ranking in the bottom three in that category. They had shed two pitchers in Victor Marquez and Oscar Flores, and thus had to use rotation filler material, but let me get to that in our case in a moment… They still had three sturdy starters, a tight pen, and a lineup, where at least the first six could all significantly hurt your chances, including a core with Juan Benavides (.308, 30 HR, 108 RBI), Steve Humphreys (.235, 26 HR, 98 RBI), Jesus Adames (.320, 27 HR, 93 RBI), Ryan Cox (.284, 17 HR, 92 RBI) – and that was behind the CL batting champ Jonathan Ban (.367, 11 HR, 90 RBI) and behind likely leadoff man Angelo Zurita (.294, 7 HR, 69 RBI). That lineup was real trouble (or they would not have scored 5.3 runs a game, duh!). Handedness was best described as “varied”, including the switch-hitters Ban and Cox.

And the Raccoons? What did they have left, besides coming off a 12-15 September that was at times hard to watch?

This was actually a more complicated explanation than usual because September had been like the ******* Huertgen Forest for the Raccoons. Toohey, Gurney, and Pellicano had all gone down after the September cut-off date for nominal playoff roster eligibility. The Raccoons still retained 26 nominally (I will get to that right in a second) eligible players – whoever had been on the roster on August 31 plus those that had returned from the DL after that date, which included Herrera (from a rehab assignment that mostly delighted the accounting department – (Steve from Accounting pokes his head in)), Jackson, and Wheatley… and was still walking around without aid right now.

The 26 included our four surviving Opening Day starters (including Jackson), plus Baker and Harman, our standard seven bullpen contingent, plus Hitchcock, our catcher platoon, plus Dalton, but only five infielders (Adame, Waters, Maldo, Martell, Coen) and four outfielders (Baskins, Herrera, Mills, Mercado). For the additionally suffered injuries, the league gave us credit to add three more players to the roster that were *not* in the group of 26 players. And at this point we needed to go back to Jake Jackson, who was on the DL on August 31, returned in September, then duked it out with Eddie Moreno on the final Thursday of the season, and now was serving an 8-game suspension, of which there were 5 games remaining, so he could not ride into battle in this series unless it went all the way to a second trip to Oklahoma City.

So why put him on the roster? Here, the emergence of Jeremy Baker helped us out. While the rest of the makeshift starters we had employed through the year had been nothing but awful, Baker had been sent out 15 times and had put up a respectable 3.32 ERA with no run support and thus a 4-4 record in the end. Yeah, he hardly struck out anybody, but he also wasn’t exactly getting stomped into the ground by the opposition. Putting Baker on the roster for Game 4 in Portland rather than Jackson for a maybe Game 6 in Oklahoma seemed like a much more sensible options, especially given our pinches in other areas.

Hitchcock remained on the roster, but we now only had four starters, and adding a long option from here that could fill in should more injury woes arise sounded sensible. Chaney was not an option, having been removed from the 40-man roster. That left us with Harman, Alcala, and Cancel. I preferred a left-hander, so Oscar Alcala became one of the three freebies the league granted to us. Were nine relievers overkill? Probably. But not as bad as three catchers, so there was no room for Jimmy Dalton on the playoff roster. The other surviving batters were all picked up, leaving us with four other position players that could fill the final roster spot: Van Hoy, Carreno, Medina, and Shedd. The Thunder would have three right-handed starting pitchers, so I leaned lefty again here, and with all our established first basemen out, Evan Van Hoy lucked his way onto the playoff roster as the second freebie / injury replacement. Him and Coen might platoon with Maldo swinging back and forth from one corner to the other. Yes, Van Hoy had been in Ham Lake as late as July, and had all of 18 plate appearances of major league experience, but I can’t help it. Blame the baseball gods. We all do it.

The third freebie remained unused for the CLCS. Who knows – maybe we’d actually win this stupid thing and would then have to replace more players that listlessly stepped onto landmines on the basepaths…

For the record, this was our 19th playoff appearance, tying the Titans for most in the league, and the Thunder’s 18th. As you’d expect we were frequent CLCS foes. This was the seventh meeting overall and the third clash in three years. We had beaten them every time except for 1995, advancing to the World Series through them in 1983, 2010, 2026, 2045, and 2046. We had six rings (including the most freshly minted ones), and they had two, and none after 2000.