Manchester Boutique
November 5, 2013
L.H. Thompson

It is, at this late date, difficult to remember, let alone appreciate, the bursting expectations with which the Manchester Maulers began the 2013 Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance season.  It may well be better to simply forget those expectations, better to allow the foul taste of this wretched season of our Lord 2013 to dissolve from the collective palette.  But posterity – cruel master, that! – demands an explanation, if not an apology, for the dashed hopes and dreams of an entire region.

Start with the facts.  Having coughed up a 3-0 lead during the 2012 Planetary Extreme Championship series, eventually losing the Rodriguez Cup in seven games to the Tempe Knights, Manchester General Manager Morris Cooley responded aggressively.  Sensing that the championship window was now wide open, Cooley pursued a multi-pronged strategy meant to push the Maulers over the top.  He supplemented the core of the Imperial League pennant-winning squad in a variety of ways: through expensive forays into the free agency market (netting all-world catcher Jeff Cline, All-Star late reliever Peter Goodwin, and Japanese superstar closer Takeji Nakayama); with gutsy trades (acquiring All-Star left-fielder Brooks Erickson from Connecticut to general acclaim and shortstop Nathan Bolitho and swingman Sergio López from Reno to much lesser acclaim), and by promoting major league-ready prospects from his own farm system (first baseman Stephen Longchamps and, notably, IL Wunderkind candidate Carlos Reyes).

Yet all of these maneuvers were complimentary.  They were meant to build upon, not supplant, an apparently strong core that itself consisted of a mélange of veteran stars – pitchers Hamilton Cole, Yoritoki Ando, and Augusto León, and everyday players Kikuguro Memoto and Ted Boyd – and emerging young stars such as late-inning stud Nelson Ortíz, 2012 All-Star starting pitcher Ryan Dawson, 2012 playoff hero Patrick Hunter (who would be transitioned into the starting rotation), slick-fielding on-base demons Todd Hanna and Arturo García, and especially 2012 IL Wunderkind Ed Williams.  It was this core that had powered the Maulers unexpected Pan-Atlantic division championship season in 2011 and then its spectacular run through the playoffs in 2012.  Cooley bristled with confidence when he spoke of this group of players; he was so convinced of their coming glory that he persuaded owner Arturo Bruto to finance a second consecutive off-season of ballpark improvements to accommodate the ever-increasing throng of paying customers that would demand to see the Mauler juggernaut in person.  Yes, Cooley doubled down on these Maulers.  It was, it turns out, a poor bet.

Indeed, to understand the brutally disappointing 74-88 season that the Maulers recently completed, one must understand that, by and large, this core group of players underperformed Cooley’s reasonable expectations.  It is tempting to place the blame for the team’s failure on certain off-season acquisitions, such as Cline (who, in spite of yet another All-Star appearance, was a shell of his former self by August), Bolitho (who suffered a horrendous April and then, just as his bat was heating up, went down for the balance of the second half of the season with the dreaded high ankle sprain), and López (who began the season as the club’s 6^th starter at AAA, earned a mid-season promotion and then doused the Maulers’ fading hopes with gasoline in just over 56 PEBA innings).  But these individual failures, spectacular though they were, hardly compared to the ultimately far more damaging decline of that core of players who had won Cooley’s backing over the previous two seasons.  The reasons for their decline are as varied as are the failed players themselves, yet a general picture of their incompetence can, with care, be stitched together.

The problems started early.  Arturo García struggled through the early spring with a coterie of minor injuries: strained oblique, elbow contusion, intercostal strain – all in succession, all nagging.  García, a speedster whose 2012 rookie season revealed that he could play tremendous center field defense and display impressive on-base ability, never got untracked at the plate.  A dreadful April was followed by an even worse May.  A horrid June cost García his job; he was dispatched to AAA New Britain and never again cracked the Manchester lineup.  As of this writing, García’s future with the Maulers is at best uncertain and at worst bleak.

García’s flailings were not the worst that the new season had to offer, though.  Superstar closer Augusto León, who got off to a tremendous start with five quick saves, went down for the season on April 24 with a mysterious right shoulder condition.  Cooley was perplexed by the diagnosis of “shoulder inflammation”.  Surgery was never performed and León is allegedly close to beginning a throwing program, but uncertainty regarding the state of the Prince’s right shoulder remains.

Similarly mysterious were Hamilton Cole’s early season struggles.  Acquired in June of 2012 in a trade with Connecticut, Cole became the immediate ace of the Mauler staff, streaking to a dominant three-month stand that culminated with clutch playoff victories against Charleston and Arlington.  But his ERA was at 5.50 at the end of May as the Maulers stumbled out of the gate.  Cole rebounded with a strong June, at the end of which Manchester sat just 4.5 games behind the upstart New Jersey Hitmen for the 2^nd IL wild card spot.  It was then that Cole pulled up lame as well.  He would end up missing five crucial weeks in July and August, during which time the Maulers collapsed.

Manchester may have been able to withstand the blow caused to the rotation by Cole’s decline and injury had they not also had to deal with Ryan Dawson’s implosion.  Dawson’s 3^rd season in the Maulers’ rotation got off to an ominous start during spring training.  Coming off three tremendous starts against Arlington and Tempe in the 2012 playoffs, Dawson was primed to build off his 2012 All-Star campaign.  Instead, and for reasons that Cooley has never adequately explained, Dawson ended up throwing just 7 innings, all of them awful, during spring training.  The horror show carried into the regular season, with a 7.00 ERA in the month of June earning Dawson a demotion to the bullpen.  Interestingly, Dawson pitched well out of the bullpen while Sergio López attempted to stabilize the rotation in his stead.  When López bombed, Dawson was moved back to the rotation, but his second stint was no better than his first.  He is currently slated to move to the bullpen full-time for the 2014 season.

Slick-fielding Todd Hanna contributed mightily to the parade of disappointment.  Following two strong seasons at second base, Hanna was signed in the off-season to a multi-year contract that bought out his arbitration years.  Hanna responded to his new contract with an alarming drop in his walk rate.  From 113 walks in 2011 and 111 in 2012, Hanna dropped precipitously to just 63 walks in 2013.  His on-base percentage (Hanna’s offensive calling card) plummeted to a putrid .336 and he frequently looked lost at the plate.  Only a strong August kept Hanna’s dreadful season from being even worse.

All of these declines were upsetting and unforeseen and they all worked to torpedo the Maulers’ chances in the Pan-Atlantic division, but none came close to matching the pathos surrounding Ed Williams’ sophomore season.  Bursting onto the PEBA scene in 2012, Williams was the consensus IL Wunderkind award winner and seemed poised for superstardom.  But here again, the troubles started early.  Williams showed up to camp out of shape and surly, upset that Cooley was unwilling to negotiate a long-term contract with him during the off-season.  Although Williams made it widely known that he was worth “at least $1 gazillion”, his spring training performance made it unlikely that anyone would offer him more than $100.  The malaise appeared to carry into the season, as Williams got off to a pedestrian start.  He did get hot in May, but his disappearing act in July and August made Cooley’s refusal to give him a long-term contract look prescient.  Williams displays a poor work ethic and is not known for having a high baseball IQ.  A future that just eight months ago seemed so bright is now increasingly clouded.

Finally, there is the plight of the aging, though still All-Star-caliber, third baseman Ted Boyd.  The undisputed clubhouse leader, All-Leather fielder, and general spark plug at the top of the lineup, Boyd got off to a mediocre start but caught fire in May (posting a torrid .897 OPS during the month).  He pushed himself even harder as the Maulers struggled to remain in the wild card race in June.  But, in what has become an annual occurrence, Boyd soon broke down physically, suffering a major shoulder injury on July 1 that didn’t adequately heal until September.  Boyd’s injury spelled doom for the Maulers; the club spit out a horrific 18-37 record in July and August without him.  With García’s incompetence having already earned him a demotion and Hanna’s continued poor play, Cooley had no one to replace Boyd’s production at the top of the lineup.  The Mauler GM initially panicked, unwisely acquiring the decaying remains of Powell Clark from the Duluth Warriors in a desperate ploy to stave off the inevitable offensive disaster that Boyd’s disappearance occasioned.  [Ed. note: To Cooley’s credit, he quickly realized his mistake.  He ordered manager Pedro Pérez to bench Clark, and later released Clark in spite of the sizable amount of money still left on his guaranteed contract.]

All of this turned out to be prelude to a surprise move made by Boyd that produced even more convulsions in the fan base than his gimpy physical health: after the season ended, Boyd voided the final year of his contract with the Maulers and prepared to test the free agency market. Indeed, Boyd’s decision to opt out of his contract was the same sort of harbinger as was his inability to stay healthy.  Boyd’s injury sent the Maulers into a death spiral of baseball irrelevance during the season; his abandonment of the Maulers this off-season apparently spurred former fixtures Jesús González and, especially, Mauler icon Kikugoro Memoto to do the same.  All three opted out of their final contract years on the same day, shocking Cooley (who nevertheless seems strangely unaffected by their departures) and sending owner Bruto into an epic fit of spite that culminated in his posting an unhinged letter to the Maulers’ official web page that called out the departed trio for their “betrayal” and promised Maulers’ fans a Rodriguez Cup before any of the three “traitors” are able to secure one with their respective new teams.

Thus, the fallout from a failed 2013 season appears just to have begun.  In addition to the loss of these newly branded Benedict Arnolds (all of whom, according to Bruto, are “dead” to him), the Maulers will cut ties with Erickson, Goodwin, and Nakayama.  And two days after bitter division rival Arlington captured the Rodriguez Cup, Cooley boldly dealt clubhouse cancer Miguel Lluea to San Antonio in exchange for most of the Maulers’ high picks in the 2014 amateur draft.  All of which has left the Maulers’ fan base – so carefully and, arguably, cynically cultivated by Cooley over the last several seasons – disoriented and distraught.  The future is, indeed, suddenly and unexpectedly cloudy in Manchester.  Reports suggest that there is significant internal dissension over how exactly to rebuild this recently-proud franchise.

And yet, while those around him (most notably Bruto) are in a legitimate panic, Cooley appears to divine an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild the Maulers.  Indeed, unsubstantiated word out of the Maulers’ front office is that Cooley has a staggering amount of money (reports suggest as much as $70 million) to spend in a free agency market that promises to be deep and wide.  In addition, Cooley has been crowing for months about the state of the Maulers farm system, which he alleges to be robust.

Whether the coming rebuild will be as successful as the one that Cooley engineered in the 2011 off-season (which produced a playoff appearance in 2011 and an IL pennant in 2012) remains to be seen.  Until then, let us warm ourselves with the burning remnants of the dashed hopes and dreams of the 2013 Manchester Maulers baseball club.