[Westheim]

I didn’t speak for three days, didn’t change clothes for five, and didn’t clean my fur for over a week after the brutal CLCS exit against the Bayhawks – nothing out of the ordinary here.

The first business of the new offseason was the notification by his secretary, who seemed younger and more generously supplied in the chest area than the previous secretary for the third year in a row, that Nick Brown in one of his rare clear moments had signed off on a budget increase to $60M, up $2M from last season.

As if that was gonna buy the bats we needed…

In New York, they axed their manager and GM along with eight figures off their old $88M budget, which was welcome news over here.

Top 5: Knights ($84M), Crusaders ($78M), Pacifics ($75M), Buffaloes ($74M), Thunder ($72M)
Bottom 5: Falcons ($47M), Cyclones ($41.5M), Loggers ($38.5M), Aces ($38M), Wolves ($38M)

The Raccoons slipped to 13th, down two spots, in the team rankings for budget size. The missing CL North teams ranked 8th (BOS, $65M), 18th (IND, $48M), and 19th (VAN, $47.5M).

The average budget for an ABL team now was $58.75M, which was an increase of $850k from last season. The median budget was $60.5M, an increase of $3.5M over 12 months.

+++

The first spending of the winter was Ryan Sullivan quickly executing his option for 2062 after missing almost all of this season with injury, so that was $1.5M spent that I had no say over. But would he really be worse than Paul Barton and Mike Abrams…?

Besides him there were only two prospective free agents, backup catcher Tim Fuller (who had made $1.3M last year and at one point batted well enough to get equal playing time with Angel Perez) and righty Ruben Mendez. The latter was going to be 36 years old, but hadn’t shown signs of letting up yet. We would want him for less than the $1.7M he made this year. The thing with righty relief was that we somehow didn’t have a lot in the pipeline. We were drowning in left-handers, but right-handers were not in huge supply from AAA.

There were also nine players that were eligible for arbitration. [full list below again]

Three of the nine were position players, including the irreplaceable Joel Starr, who batted 89 points less than Forbes Tomlin in 2061, but also had a BABIP of *.234* going, whilst Tomlin’s was .370. I had the haunting feeling that the baseball gods were trying to trick me into a bust by switching allegiance to Tomlin, and that I instead should sign Starr to an 8-yr, $40M contract that would TOTALLY pay off over the length of it. For comparison, Joel Starr, with a normal BABIP working for him, was an easy .900 OPS batter.

Joey Christopher had his applications as leadoff man and was a potent rightfielder… but he had slumped for most of the last year and never really got on track. He was however somebody we’d keep around. The same couldn’t quite be said for David Gonzales, who was in the bottomless bin of meager middle infielders that infested both the extended roster and the Florida branch office. He had cost half a million in ’61 for ten games with the Raccoons. He was also 28. He was surplus to requirements.

There were six pitchers, which included a few no-brainers like Chance Fox and Justin Rocco, who were obviously going to be kept around.

And then there were headaches. Justin DeRose had finally washed out as a starting pitcher and couldn’t even pitch long relief at the end of the year. Reynaldo Bravo was flushed all the way to St. Petersburg, and there he still couldn’t get anybody out. Ricky Herrera had served very well for a few years now… but the second half had seen him getting whacked around quite a bit. And Mike Abrams had been a waiver claim, had posted better numbers than with the Aces, but he was also a 33-year-old pitcher with barely over three years of service time, so expectations were naturally limited.

So the bullpen was a piece of work, but the rotation for next year was already together. Bobby H., Foxie Brown, Nick Robinson, and Tyler Riddle – in whichever order they would get arrayed in April – were all solid … most of the time. Angel Alba had made great improvements last year and won the fifth starter’s spot. At least somebody cheap in that rotation that would otherwise make roughly $13M in 2062.

And then we’d have to see how many bats we could add with … (opens wallet and finds nothing but a cobweb in there) … well maybe we’d quite rigorously trim those arbitration cases…!