This Week In The Trans Atlantic: Week 18, 2028 - Roundtable

Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
Vic
Triple-A
Triple-A
Posts: 739
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:56 pm

This Week In The Trans Atlantic: Week 18, 2028 - Roundtable

#1 Post by Vic »
































Intro Music: “In A Big Country,” by Big Country, gradually fades out ...

Esme Tattersall



Esme Tattersall: Welcome, welcome, one and all to a special edition of “Imperial Insiders,” our weekly look at what’s happening behind the scenes in the Imperial League. I’m your host, Esme Tattersall. You may be wondering, what’s so special about this edition of the show? Well, it goes without saying that they’re all special, but this week we’re going to take a closer look at that crazy Wild Card race that has fans from London to Connecticut on the edge of their seats!

Bailey Rohr: And while we’re at it, we’ll take a look at the teams of the Trans Atlantic Division, who are all right in the thick of the post season hunt. Havana, of course, pretty much has the division wrapped up, but the other three teams are all in the thick of the Wild Card chase.

Esme: That voice you heard was my co-host, Bailey Rohr, former London Undergroundshortstop extraordinaire who has his own nightly show here on talkSPORTS, where he discusses all things PEBA and Underground.

Bailey: Shortstop extraordinaire? You never saw me play, did you Esme?

Esme: Of course I did, Bailey!

Bailey: Then you should know I had one main attribute as a player, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice it from the stands.

Esme: Oh yeah? What was that Bailey?

Bailey: I was cheap!

Esme: Ah. Well, I’m sure the Underground appreciated that!

Bailey: More than you know, Esme.

Esme: Well, then. We also want to welcome two other guests to our little party here: Hamish Campbell, who covers the Scottish Claymores for the Edinburgh News, and Malcolm Wilkes, the Imperial League columnist for PEBA Weekly. Welcome, gentlemen!

Hamish Campbell: Thank you, Esme. Great to be here.

Esme: Hamish, let’s start with you. Catch us up, if you would, on what happened in the Wild Card scramble last week …

Hamish: Well, it got tighter, if that’s even possible. The Claymores can’t seem to stand prosperity, can they? They came off their best week of the season, where they went 6-1 against Amsterdam and New Orleans, and pretty much laid an egg. They lost 2 of 3 to Arlington and 2 of 3 to Havana, and that 3-game lead they had over San Juan and the 5 game lead they had over Hartford for the first wild card slot? Well, it’s down to 1 game over Hartford and 2 games over Arlington. Kentucky, New Orleans, and London are all still in it, too - although they're further back.

Hamish Campbell



Malcolm Wilkes: Yeah, and unspoken in all that was the lousy week San Juan had – 1-5 against Florida and Arlington.

Bailey: So, what happened there, Malcolm? Why did San Juan struggle so much?

Malcolm: Simple, Bailey. They got outscored about 2 to 1 on the week: between them, Florida and Arlington scored 33 runs and San Juan just scored 17. The Coqui scored 6 runs in their first game, the only one they won, and never scored more than 3 in a game the rest of the week. You can win scoring at that rate, but only if your pitching is almost perfect.

Bailey: Let me guess …

Malcolm: Right. Perfection eluded them – especially the starting staff. Luis Monsalve, Juan Santana, Fernando Castro and even Hou Hao got pretty much lit up. Now, on the offensive side, Dean Walden, their centerfielder, had a big week – 11 hits in 22 at bats, but there was one problem with that output.

Esme: What’s that? Sounds fantastic.

Malcolm: Oh, it was, it was – except Walden scored a total of zero runs and knocked in just 3 with all that. He generally bats towards the bottom of the order, and the folks in front of him weren’t getting in scoring position and the folks behind him weren’t bringing him in.

Esme: Ah. A dilemma, then, wasn’t it. So did San Juan have any bright spots?

Hamish: Well, the bullpen pitched really well. Of course, you can see that didn’t help a whole lot, since San Juan is now riding a 5-game losing streak. But, and it's a big but, they're still just 3 games out of the second Wild Card spot and 4 games out of the first spot. It's still all right there for them if they can put things together!

Bailey: Most definitely. Now, San Juan's performance sounds similar to what Scotland experienced last week, right?

Hamish: Well, not exactly. You can't really say the Claymores bullpen performed well at any point in all thatIn fact, one member of that bullpen in particular is becoming a real focus of concern for manager Hayato Sasaki.

Malcolm: I bet I know who …

Hamish: I bet you do, too: closer Ken Fisher.

Esme: Wait, he went to the All-Star game, didn’t he?

Hamish: Sure did. And he was lights out during the first half of the season, but since late June … and especially since the All-Star break … wow.

Sasaki, who’s kind of sabermetric geek, if you recall, has a couple of tools he uses, called Pure Quality Relief and then an equivalent of it called Pure Quality Starts. They both let you track and rate pitching appearances – I wrote about them both early in the season.

Malcolm: Oh dear, God. You’re one of THEM!

Hamish: If by ‘them’ you mean someone who actually uses 21st Century stats to figure out what I’m covering, then yes. Anyway, before I was interrupted by Mr. Luddite over there, what I was going to say is that the PQR logs on Fisher show that he was averaging nearly 4.5 PQR points per outing over his first 30 appearances – that’s Hall of Fame quality stuff. Over his last 20 appearances? He’s averaged a 3.0, and his ERA has ballooned from under 1.00 to 2.45. That, it’s safe to say, will not get you into the Hall.

Malcolm: Um, couldn’t you have figured out he was having problems just by seeing that his ERA went up?

Hamish: Of course, Malcolm, but you wouldn’t be able to put much of a time frame around it. Just give me a couple more seconds here, then feel free to slice me to ribbons …

Malcolm: Oh, I will. Don’t worry …

Hamish: One of Fisher’s problems has been that he’s suddenly giving up home run balls, which he didn’t do at all from April until the end of June. Last week, he gave up two – one in the bottom of the 9th against Arlingtonthat lost them the game, and the other a 3-run shot in the 9th against Havana that put a close game out of reach.

OK, I’m done. Malcolm?

Malcolm: It’s all good, brother Hamish. I’m surprised, but you used all that gibberish to make a decent point.

Hamish: Well, thanks. I think …

Esme: I have one more question about Scotland, then I want to move on to London and the other teams in the Wild Card race. And my question is this: The Claymores made a huge splash right before the trade deadline when they went to get Don Mercer from Duluth. He had kind of a rocky start in Edinburgh the first week he was there. How’d he do last week?

Malcolm: I can take that one. He did a lot better. In fact, this was kind of funny. The week before last, Mercer barely broke the Mendoza line, hitting .227 or so with 1 homer, but the rest of the team hit like crazy and picked him up.

Last week, Mercer went nuts – hit .435, a couple homers, 4 RBIs, basically played like Don Mercer. The rest of the lineup? Sucked.

Bailey Rohr



Bailey: Well, that’s not entirely fair – José Escobido and José Guillén both had nice weeks, hitting over .300 and scoring a bunch of runs …

Malcolm: Fine, fine, Mr. Fair and Balanced. But you know what I’m saying. There were five or six guys in that lineup who didn’t break the .200 mark, and Bob Swift – their third baseman – hit .071. That ain’t gonna get you into the postseason, son. Just ain’t.

Hamish: Yeah, Malcolm makes a point. The idea was to lean into offense and hope that Mercer would help make the Claymores a lean, mean run-scoring machine. Well, things are never quite that simple, are they?

Malcolm: No, not by half.

Esme: OK, so what happened with London last week?

Bailey: Well, they rather bit the big one.

Malcolm: I’m sensing a Trans Atlantic trend here …

Bailey: Yes, indeed. The Underground went 1-5 and dropped 7 games off the pace for the second Wild Card spot. New Orleans swept them at Wembley Stadium, and then the Thoroughbreds took 2 out of 3 at Kentucky.

Before I get into specifics, let me first recommend that anyone interested in the Underground should … well, first of all, listen to my own show regularly, but also check out the weekly updates Evan Seary posts on the team’s own site. Must reading if you’re an Underground fan.

Now, you’re going to ask, ‘Why did London lose all those games, Bailey?’ And I will tell you: they didn’t hit. Not even a little bit. As a staff, their pitchers put up an ERA of 2.89 for the week – which most starters would kill for. That wasn’t even remotely good enough.

London scored 8 runs all last week. Shigenobu Kawakami, their first baseman, hit .350 with a couple of doubles, which was a fine week. The next best hitter was the outfielder Bruce McGuire, who hit .250, then shortstop Tony Cuevas, who hit .231 … need I go on?

Esme: Good lord. Well, that explains that. I’m surprised they even won one game.

Bailey: You are not alone, Esme. You are not alone.

Esme: So, given that everyone in the Trans Atlantic – except for Havana, which just keeps floating above the fray up there in first place – jammed it in reverse last week, who do you guys see as the real contenders for the Wild Card?

Hamish: Well, I think both the Claymores and the Coqui will make a good fight, but they’re both deeply flawed teams: Scotland has trouble pitching, and San Juan has trouble hitting and they’re both so up and down. Win a few, lose a few.

So, if you want my opinion …

Malcolm: Well, she did ask you, Hamish …
Malcolm Wilkes


Hamish: I know, that was a rhetorical flourish.

Malcolm: Is that what that was? I thought you were just stalling for time …

Hamish: Well, sure. There’s that … OK, if I had a gun to my head …

Malcolm: Oh for God’s sake, Hamish, out with it, man!

Hamish: I think Hartford and Arlington might both sneak in there. I know they don’t necessarily look appreciably better than the Trans Atlantic teams on paper, but the Bureaucrats are 15-9 since the All-Star break and they have really responded to that new ownership group. They cleaned house a little bit, brought in a bunch of new faces and it seems to have done the trick.

I would say, if nothing else, they have built a sense of momentum that’s going to be hard to overturn.

Bailey: Well, that’s interesting coming from you, my sabermetric friend. I thought momentum was just a myth …

Hamish: Yeah, well, try telling that to the folks in Arlington right now.

Esme: Momentum for Arlington? What about Hartford? They’re, what, 18-6 since the break?

Hamish: Well, yes, I was going to get to that. My point here is that both of those teams have learned how to win consistently – they’re putting together strings of wins. Hartford was 17-7 in July and 5-0 so far in August.

If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on those two teams.

Bailey: You don’t see the Mercer trade panning out, then?

Hamish: Oh, Mercer will be just fine. He’ll be awesome, in fact. I just question whether he’ll be enough to offset that pitching staff. If the Scottish still had Francisco Robles and, to a lesser extent, Jorge Vazquez in the rotation, it might be a different story. But when those two went down to injury, it put extra pressure on a bullpen that’s just not strong enough to withstand it.

Um, hey, before we break here, could I just give a shout out to one of the Leones? If I were doing my usual “player of the week” bit here, I would have chosen him, even though he only hit .192 for the week.

Esme: How can I pass that up? Who is it?

Hamish: Second baseman Colby Peña, who hit 3 home runs last week – including 2 in one game against West Virginia on August 2. He’s got 10 on the season – and nearly a third of them came in one week!

Esme: It’s a strange game, sometimes.

Bailey: Isn’t it the truth? They paid me millions of dollars to be a .245 career hitter …

Malcolm: That ain’t strange. It’s horrifying!

Esme: OK now, folks, settle down. I want to thank my guests, Hamish Campbell of the Edinburgh News; Malcolm Wilkes of PEBA Weekly; and my co-host, Bailey Rohr of talkSPORTS and late of the London Underground.

Bailey: Late? I’m not dead yet …

Malcolm: Your career stats say otherwise, Bailey!

Bailey: You’d kill to have my stats, Malcolm! Or at least the checking account they bought …

The closing theme music, If I Should Fall From Grace With God by the Pogues, rises, drowning out the bickering in the background …

-----
Where They Stand
On the morning of August 7, here's how things stood in the Trans Atlantic Division: 1). Havana, 68-43; 2). Scotland, 60-51, 8 GB; 3). San Juan, 56-55, 12 GB; London, 52-59, 16 GB.

On the morning of August 7, here's how things stood in the Imperial League Wild Card race: First spot, Scotland, 60-51, +1; Second spot, Hartford, 59-52, -; Arlington Bureaucrats, 58-52, 1 GB; San Juan, 56-55, 3 GB; Kentucky, 53-58, 6 GB; London, 52-59, 7 GB; New Orleans, 51-60, 8 GB.
Last edited by Vic on Wed Mar 20, 2019 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
Vic Caleca
Scottish Claymores
User avatar
Fishermen
Double-A
Double-A
Posts: 311
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2019 3:22 pm

Re: This Week In The Trans Atlantic: Week 18, 2028 - Roundta

#2 Post by Fishermen »

Brilliant Vic, your pieces get better and better. You’re right as well, we did really appreciate Bailey in London, he was our go-to guy. It was probably his main fault, he was just too good at too many positions, he just ended up as the leading utility guy
Andy (Sim, Chaan-Shu)
GM Gloucester Fishermen
Post Reply

Return to “League News and Articles”