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Does the Heart Rule the Head? |
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Written by Kuwana Steel Dragons
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Monday, December 28th, 2015
Nigel Laverick looked down with satisfaction at the newly arrived fax. He finally had the signature of the free agent he most wanted. The new arrival wouldn’t be the most important piece of the Steel Dragons off-season rebuild, but Nigel was sure he would gladden the hearts of the faithful.
 At 40 years old, Shigemori Suzuki bucks the Steel Dragons’ trend towards youth, but there’s one big difference between him and the rest – Suzuki owns the Kuwana record book. It’s his name on the single-season and career records for wins, games started, innings pitched, strikeouts, K/BB, WHIP, and opponents’ average. It wasn’t all good in the old days, though. Sandwiched between setting the single-season mark for wins and later tying that record, Suzuki set the single-season mark for losses, and he also owns the career mark for home runs allowed.
After five years with Lodoss/Kuwana, Suzuki took to the road with Lupin and Hyakujuu, but it was the early years that gave him three All-Star appearances and his Sawamura Award. Now he was back, abandoned by the rest of the LRS. Kuwana offered Suzuki the chance to finish his career in the bosom of his greatest fans.
It wasn’t an easy chase. Shigemori demanded that a man of his ability deserved an extra two years, but I stuck to my guns – the most he was going to get was a year plus a team option to bring him back for the second. Eventually, he recognized my resolve and accepted the offer of a straight year in exchange for a few extra thousand in the back pocket.
Thousands of Kuwana fans now have the chance to see a living legend perform on Steelfire Stadium’s mound. To see him add to his rich Steel Dragons history. But only if he makes it through spring training. |
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Gnats Move Matthews, Wright; Acquire Romero |
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Written by Terrence Pines, The Daily Herald
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 12/18/2015: Asheville, NC – In a series of moves both before and during the PEBA Winter Meetings, Crystal Lake traded major league 1B Jarrod Wright and CF Jeffrey Matthews, acquiring MR Juan "Rattler" Romero from the Arlington Bureaucrats along with draft choices from San Antonio. Crystal Lake fans and media speculated for weeks that both Matthews and Wright were being shopped by the front office. Those rumors came to fruition over the last five days as the Sandgnats made their first significant moves of the 2015-16 off-season.
In moving the super-talented but oft-injured Matthews, Crystal Lake acquired Arlington MR Romero. Romero, a 2014-15 off-season signee by the Bureaucrats out of his native Dominican Republic, exceeded expectations in his rookie season by posting a 2.37 ERA across 64 2/3rd innings while striking out 68. The hard-throwing 31-year-old spent the previous eight seasons playing with the Moca Segadoras de Café of the Liga Dominicana de Béisbol Invernal. Romero is expected to be the primary setup and middle relief option for Crystal Lake in 2016, anchoring the back of a bullpen already thought to be well established with veterans Merlin Peters, Trent Roberts, and Willie Owens. Also moving to the Bureaucrats in the deal was minor league 2B Gerardo García.
Matthews, a fan favorite during his time in Crystal Lake, fell out of favor with the front office following an injury-riddled season during which he missed time with a broken elbow and a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Matthews is expected to miss all of spring training and likely the first one-to-two months of the regular season while he recuperates from reconstructive surgery on his ACL.
In exchange for Wright, the Gnats acquired second and fourth round draft picks from San Antonio. Likely viewed by most observers as too minimal a return for an established major leaguer with a quality batting eye and tremendous power, Crystal Lake will hope to parlay those picks into future assets much the same way they did with Wright, a former undrafted player from the days following the league's inception. During his Crystal Lake career, Wright managed a .245/.323/.453 batting line with 53 HR and 137 RBI in 948 AB across parts of three seasons. The Gnats acquisition of 1B António Carbezola in June clearly made Wright expendable despite the club's high hopes for the young slugger.
Rumors continue to circulate that the Gnats may be shopping other members of their major league roster, including injured SP Yoshitora Koyama. Most reports suggest that Crystal Lake is still pursuing another starting pitcher to round out their rotation, although it is unclear who the Gnats may be targeting given the dearth of pitching available on the trade market. Some have suggested that Crystal Lake GM Brian Hazelwood may also be shopping some of their young pitching talent in an effort to acquire a major league-ready piece. Keep following Gnats Nation and the Daily Herald for updates on Crystal Lake's continuing off-season roster retouching.
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Nutmeggers Choose Stadium Over Roster |
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Written by Samuel Platt
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 12/18/2015: Bridgeport, CT – Connecticut owner Paul Woodward must be hearing voices in his head. Despite the team’s stagnant record and inability to crack 80 wins in a season, the owner has decided to move forward with plans to expand Constitution Field by an additional 5,000 seats this winter. Given that the stadium averaged about 75% of capacity in 2015, this certainly seems like a strange decision. Just because the seats are there doesn’t mean anyone will fill them.
While the short-term outlook for the ballclub doesn’t appear as bright as for some of the other teams in the league, Woodward seems happy to ignore that fact. He told the press, “One thing we learned from Gloucester this past season is that anybody can find themselves suddenly in a pennant race. We want to prepare ourselves to accommodate our fans and make sure that our on-field success is sustainable financially.”
 The additional seats will be no-frills bleacher seats priced to sell, allowing the average ticket price to remain the same despite incremental increases in prices elsewhere in the stadium. In practice, these seats are likely just going to make the stadium look empty towards the end of the season when the team is well out of the running.
The only Pan-Atlantic team with a worse record than the Nutmeggers in 2015 was the Manchester Maulers, and they’ve been acquiring talent over the winter rather than getting rid of it. Connecticut has already traded SP Adrián Reséndez and DH Octávio Pexego. They’ve also allowed SS George Riley to leave for free agency and don’t appear to have the money to re-sign him. The rest of the roster will be hard pressed to replace the production of those three players. It’s clear that the front office is more interested in stadium construction than roster construction.
Building additional seating for a team that’s struggling to break even financially and is in a rebuilding mode seems strange. There’s little reason to think that the additional seats will have fans in them on any day after Opening Day, so there’s little reason to expect a return on the investment until the team is significantly better. It’s clear that Woodward’s impression of his team and the reality of competition in the IL don’t line up. His belief that the Nutmeggers could be this year’s Fishermen is less than wishful thinking; it’s depressing for the team’s fan base. An extra few million for a replacement shortstop or new starting pitcher might have helped fill the current stadium. Instead, Nutmeggers fans will have to watch second-tier players and rookies filling those roles.
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Crashing the Winter Meetings |
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Written by Tricia Takanawa
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 Sunday, December 20th, 2015
Tricia Takanawa, Player and Media Relations
You could feel the anger in the air. Jon Wood just entered the front office of Seoul Crushers owner Mark Kierstead. I could hear yelling from Wood aimed at our prestigious owner, sharp jabs at his personality and his past demons. Wood was clearly upset with his juuki designation. The following is what I could make out:
Yelling and screaming back and forth…
Wood: You lied to me! I kept my cool long enough. You tricked me into signing what I thought was an awesome deal.
Kierstead: Lies and assumptions can be also seen as opinion. In my opinion, I signed you to a juuki deal. In your eyes, you signed a multi-million dollar contract. You have to live with this. Be a man and suck it up. You and I know you won’t be back next year. This is year of the owner, and it is titled “Revenge”
Wood: I am going to talk to the Commissioner at the Winter Meetings to get this overturned. You can’t stop me. Remember what I did last time?
Kierstead: Well, I learn from my mistakes, and if you look behind you, you can see you are not going anywhere.
Wood: You can’t fool me with that trick. I turn and you hit me. No way.
Kierstead: You should know by now I like to keep my hands clean.
Silence for a short time, and then… a loud thud! Then the sound of dragging starts…
Kierstead exited the office with another Seoul player, one I will not name. He looked at me and smiled. Off he went to the yearly Winter Meetings. Kierstead patted the player on the back as he dropped a baseball bat in the hallway floor.
A barely audible whisper from Kierstead’s office: “You… a… def… t… ki… swing.”
Kierstead hopped in his limo and drove off. I looked into the office and saw a crumpled Jon Wood dragged behind Kierstead’s desk. I called to the team doctor to let him know Jon collapsed due to dehydration.
I am Tricia Takanawa, and it looked like a homerun. |
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Cyclones Expand Stadium for 2016; Lessons Learned |
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Written by By: Anderson Molloy
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 12/18/2015: Omaha,NE – In a press conference earlier this afternoon, Cyclones owner Grey Davidson announced a stadium expansion project that would add 5,000 bleacher seats in the outfield.
The move was in direct response to the public outcry about ticket prices in the Planetary Extreme Championship. Ticket prices were raised to over $34 on average for the series – the highest they have been in history. Management acknowledged that they made a serious gaffe by significantly raising ticket prices for what would be their final three home games against the Gloucester Fisherman.
“Less than 20,000 in game three,” commented General Manager Jason Warnke. “Then about 23,000 in games four and five. When you nearly sell out all season long in a stadium that seats 35,000 and then all of a sudden only fill 60% of the seats, you know you’ve made a serious error. We didn’t play well at home against the Fisherman. I will take some of the blame for scaring the fans away. We certainty did not have any home field advantage. That’s my fault. It was heartbreaking to see the stands so barren, especially with the phenomenal run we were on and the potential to bring a championship to the city. We… I mean , I was just too greedy. Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.”
The attendance in the final series was a far cry from the near sellouts that the team experienced throughout the Cinderella 2015 season. In fact, the team broke all previous attendance records, drawing over 2.9 million fans for the season and besting their second-highest attendance season (2013) by nearly a quarter million ticket sales.
The fans spoke, and management has listened.
Since Warnke took over the reins in mid-2011, he has managed to double the team’s revenue from a paltry $61 million to over $125 million. This massive increase in income has allowed the team to take on more salary and sign high-profile free agents. They have gone from a low-to-middle budget team to the lower end of the big-budget teams. With the greater Omaha area booming, they have an expanding market, as well.
With all of the new salary exposure, which is clearly much higher than in previous regimes, more income must be generated. However, it is clear that raising ticket prices too high is not the answer. Families are “priced out” of being able to enjoy an afternoon or evening at the ballpark.
As a solution, the new bleacher seats tickets will be sold for only $20 – nearly 30% less than the regular admission seats cost last season. While general admission prices will rise, the average cost per seat will be roughly $28 at the start of 2016. This should be a win-win for everyone: more cost-effective seating for families and a larger fishbowl for the team to generate income.
“Our goal over the next five seasons is to increase our capacity to about 45,000,” commented Warnke. “This will allow us to continue to grow our revenue base while keeping ticket prices just about the same. Our goal is to eventually be able to compete with Aurora and Crystal Lake in terms of spending capacity. Believe it or not, I do not feel that we are very far from that.”
The bleacher seats will be completed and ready for Opening Day.
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You Can Go Home Again: Hasegawa Returns to Ghosts in WM Deal |
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Written by Clarence Kukyama, Nipponese Baseball Prospectus National Columnist
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December 18, 2015: Tokyo, Japan – The Niihama-shi Ghosts declared unequivocally that they intend to contend in 2016 by trading away three top prospects to bring back the third baseman of their glorydays: Nobuhito Hasegawa. And your faithful correspondent admits that he didn’t see it coming for a second.
Sure, the LRS edition of the Winter Meetings was full of the usual rumors, innuendo, and wheeling-dealing. I was camped out in the hotel lobby, usually near the bar, sipping my Pellegrino while various GMs imbibed drinks much stronger. I thought I’d heard all the possible trade talk. We all knew Neo-Tokyo GM Ron Hiscock was shopping Hasegawa, but I heard that nothing was percolating. I thought I was on top of things.
I was wrong.
The first word came from Hasegawa himself, on his Twitter feed. Just two words: “Going home!” Suddenly, every scribe camped out in the lobby went diving for their laptops and iPads.
Going home? What could that possibly mean, we all wondered? “The Ghosts?” one of my colleagues speculated out loud. We all laughed. Just one year out of last place, it wouldn’t make any sense for the Ghosts to give up the house for Hasegawa. Plus, the perennial All-Star suffered a torn labrum at the tail end of the season and wouldn’t be able to play until May. The Ghosts surely wouldn’t roll the dice like that. They’re still in rebuilding mode.
We had our answer within minutes. They had done exactly that. The Commissioner’s Office put out the details:
Neo-Tokyo receives:
SP Iwane Sato (A)
MR Tomás León (A)
Niihama-shi receives:
3B Nobuhito Hasegawa (DL)
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