Neat Stuff, Post-Sim Thread: 2035, Season 29

[Nigel]

Hard to come into a new team (and a long forgotten league) right at the start of the season, especially when they've been losing money for the last four years, but I'm happy with the way it's going. The many Rule 5 players I received have helped no end to at least bring down average ages and the payroll; for the first year since 2030 it looks as if Calzones will make a profit.
I think San Antonio may well be a few years yet from turning the corner, even the average age of AAA Joplin is higher than it should be, but at least it's a small baby step on the way while remaining a solid middle of the road team in the IL Dixie, a division where everyone is playing for second place behind Florida

[JDC]

Sandor Vis of Amsterdam broke up Santiago Garcia's bid for a no-hitter with a lead-off double in the ninth. Coqui win 4-0.

[Borealis]

Neat??

Rookie SS Jose Aleman - he was 9-25 with a homer - his 10th, 2-2B and scored 6 R. That leaves the rook hitting 3rd in the SL (.304), and his rookie leading 4.3 WAR is 4th best in the SL. He leads all rookies in SLG and OBP - and thus OPS, 2nd to Tynan Stuckey in hits (14 fewer, though Tynan has 75 more AB), and with 39 SB, leads the rookie crop there as well. In 704 innings and 329 chances, he's committed just 4 E...

[Lions]

You can tell no one takes your team seriously when your closer goes down for the season and you don't even get an email about it let alone a news article. Kelsey Buck won't be back and will be an FA after the year. That's not how contract year is supposed to work!

[Borealis]

You can tell no one takes your team seriously when your closer goes down for the season and you don't even get an email about it let alone a news article. Kelsey Buck won't be back and will be an FA after the year. That's not how contract year is supposed to work!

Man... I hadn't noticed that. I had always like Kelsey in his early days with Aurora - and thought he'd do big things. He was even better...

[DrewV]

You can tell no one takes your team seriously when your closer goes down for the season and you don't even get an email about it let alone a news article. Kelsey Buck won't be back and will be an FA after the year. That's not how contract year is supposed to work!

Man... I hadn't noticed that. I had always like Kelsey in his early days with Aurora - and thought he'd do big things. He was even better...

Kelsey Buck, alas. He was how I figured out how Rule 5s work...

[Nigel]

The Calzones minor league system is still really a mess. Joplin in AAA are doing well but only because their average age is pushing 30 and the worst is Taku in short A, they lost four straight going into the Surf & Snow ASG and now unfortunately have lost 10 more after the break to extend the losing streak to 14. Will that change, will anyone care lol?

The Taku Winds are still second in the division though, despite that 14-game losing streak their overall record is 32-31

[Thoroughbreds]

One of my better prospects Luis Jimenez had his first start of the year and 5th of his career because SP Guttierez is gone for the season. He pitched a gem against Florida going 8 innings and giving up 2 runs, earning his 2nd career win.
Of course Florida made us pay by crushing us 13-1 the next day.

41 year old RP Aranda earned his 1st save of the season and his 587th of his career - all with Kentucky. He wants a contract for next year but apparently we are already over budget and my owner won't allow it.

Mesegue continues to be red hot since the trade. In 9 games he has an OPS+ of 215

Starter Jose Mora has won his last 7 starts and in his last 10 starts he is 9-0, lowering his ERA from 4.66 to 3.05 over that span

[Underground]

Well had a really strong 6-1 sim against two Transatlantic teams that were ahead of me in the standings. Havana remains ahead of course but I was able to jump all the way into 3rd in the Transatlantic and have gone from 7.5 games back in the wildcard to 1.5 games back in three weeks.

As mentioned in my last update next sim I will play Amsterdam six straight games. As they are currently the team clinging to that last WC spot it is obviously a pivitol series for both of us.

At some point this hot streak will have to cool, but I hope it goes a bit longer to give me a fighting chance at making the playoffs.

[Lions]

As mentioned in my last update next sim I will play Amsterdam six straight games. As they are currently the team clinging to that last WC spot it is obviously a pivitol series for both of us.

Clinging is definitely the right word here. We've had a lousy July, going 11-14, after our strong May and June. In August, we have 3 games against Manchester and there rest are within the division... so we'll know a lot more about the division and the WC by the end of it.

[Apollos]

These pesky Knights continue their run of not-so-bad play and have managed to somehow creep up to 3rd place in the DH following a pair of series wins against the Borealis and Zephyrs. It's heartening to see the results of the 5 year (and counting) rebuild are starting to bear fruit, and probably not coincidental that the upswing has coincided with the arrival of several of the first tranche of our minor league prospects in the big leagues. While you still have to squint pretty hard to see a formidable club in there, the rough outline exists for a team that can be competitive in 2037 and beyond which was always our real timetable anyway. The influx of talent continues during the next sim as CF Roberto Gutierrez, a trade acquisition from the Madison organization way back in the winter of '31 makes his ML debut to hopefully bring our OF play up to a more consistent level. His arrival should provide a nice defensive boost up the middle as well - and our scouts have long thought he was better than the BNN analysts seem to have him rated so this clash of prognoses will be put to the test over the seasons final two months.

[KenH]

Florida had a very quiet deadline with zero (0) moves made. In the end, we concluded that holding pat on what we had and letting our minors continue to metriculate would probably end up be a more winning strategy long-term. Of course, after you have already won 2 championships in a row, the answer should probably be to say "damn the future" but we plum messed up and got attached to all our young guys. It's annoying.

Otherwise, we're playing pretty good baseball as long as we aren't facing the Thoroughbreds who seem to have our number. We are 6-7 in our series matchup there which means that they account for a fourth (!) of our total losses. Pretty wild, really. I really don't want to face them in the playoffs.

George Moss going down for 12 months is rough. He was pitching so well and to see him go down the way he did was painful. Luckily, Santiago Sandoval was ready to go and made a very respectable start versus the Ponies. I'm not sure Sandoval is a long-term solution for us, but we will see.

I'm very excited as Boroa had another jump in potential and is now a certifiable 5-star starting pitcher. He's one of very few pitchers that sports a 10 "stuff" rating as a starter, and for that, I am very excited. Our other pitching prospects have done very well too, especially Hen-to Tse who is only 20 and is shoving in AAA right now.

While I think that we are in a good place to make a run for three in a row, I am concerned that perhaps I've taken one-too-many blows by way of losing Vito and George. I grumble and talk to myself under my breath regarding PEBA while I'm making dinner or doing other such things so much so that my wife is starting to worry about me. She doesn't understand.

[Underground]

At the macro level, just a fantastic sim for the Underground. We went in to it 1.5GB of the Wildcard and came out of it holding onto a wild card spot with a 2.5 game cushion beneath. 5-1 in a six game series against Amsterdam allowed us to not just jump over them in the WC but in the division. While we're still 8 games behind of Havana, to be second in the Trans Atlantic is a heady space for us after the last 5 years. In the last month we went for 11th in runs scored to T-4th, our other offensive areas have risen from 10th-12th to 4th-8th. Pitching remains steady state, with the bullpen sitting at 2nd best in the IL but the starters lagging a bit (mostly due to one outlier).

At the micro level the series with Amsterdam was extremely hard fought. Four of the games were decided by 2 runs or less and two of the games were decided in extra innings, including a thrilling 15 inning affair to finish off the series. Both extra innings games were decided by unlikely heroes - Gilberto Valdez sent the crowd home happy on Saturday with a 3 run homer. It was just his 4th of the year and brought him to just 21 RBI. Valdez has recently become an experimental starter for me after being a bench player most of the year, but is batting just .165/.231 thus far. On Sunday the hero was Luis Cervantes, who has played just two games in the PEBA since back spasms held him out for 7 weeks beginning in late May. Cervantes was having a season to forget even before the injury so by the time he returned he had lost his starting position and has actually tumbled down to 3rd on the outfield depth chart. Nonetheless he was called in to pinch hit in the 13th inning and in the 15th inning hit the game winning RBI double.

There is still a lot of baseball left to play and we only play Amsterdam for three of them so we will broadly go our own separate directions from here. Looking at the other wild card hopefuls though, I do have quite a few games left against the Claymores and San Juan as well as one more series against Manchester. From here on out we just need to buckle down and mind our business and we might pull off the improbable.

[JDC]

All-Star 3B Oscar Wetherby went 7-10 with three HRs at home, as the Coqui took 2 of 3 from the Claymores.

[Lions]

The second IL wildcard is going to be crazy this year. We went all in at the deadline to try to pull away and then crapped the bed with all those close losses to London. None of the new acquisitions endeared themselves to our fans. Pablo Ortiz and Christian Webb combined to go 3 for 36 with no extra base hits. Shinkichi Hasegawa had a save but then gave up that 10th inning home run to Valdez. The offense had a .465 OPS over the course of the 6 games. Just ugh. We've got some work to do to.