A Luncheon Meeting With Lupin’s General Manager

December 25, 2021: Ashville, North Carolina (USA) – It’s Saturday morning, Christmas Day. The dust has barely settled in North Carolina, site of the annual PEBAverse Winter Meetings. Most teams have packed up and gone. The hotel staff is feverishly working to refurbish trashed rooms, clean spilled drinks, and vacuum rugs of … whatever that was. But the front office of the Lupin Cliff Hangers meets at 11:30 AM in the Rodriguez Room, where General Manager Ron Collins gives them a final pep-talk (more of a debrief), and sends them on their way for a long Christmas vacation.

“Have a great week,” he says. “I don’t want to see anyone in the office until the 3rd.”

Then the gang breaks up and goes their separate ways.

“It’s been a long three months,” Collins tells me as we settle in for a long and informal interview over lunch. We are at the hotel restaurant, and the crowd is more than sparse—everyone apparently enjoying the holiday with their family. “The team has worked tirelessly for the last 90 days straight to get ready for this. They deserved the time off.”

He orders a cod sandwich and fruit. Iced tea to drink. The restaurant is decorated with a combination of holiday schmaltz and PEBA logos. We are seated at a table with a long view alongside the now empty streets. Outside, the sky is overcast, though I know the breeze is still warm. Christmas music plays in the background. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

There are so many things I wanted to ask him right then, this man who guides a team that had such great expectations last season but that lost 103 games, this man who has had public struggles with his owner, and is dealing with a public relations disaster regarding one of his star young outfielders, this man who appears to have aged ten years since the last Winter Meetings. In the end, I settled for this:

“How are you feeling?”

“I feel great,” he said. “We’re going to come out of this well.”

He talked about the stadium renovations that are on-going as we speak. This is the third year in a row that the team has been able to afford to upgrade their ballpark, and Collins was clearly delighted with that result. He talked about making people happy when they see a ball game. He talked about clean views, and proper aisles for the controversial beergirl vendors. When this round of renovations is complete, he said, the Castle of Cagliostro will hold up to 50,000 fans—a number he hopes to hit fairly often.

“You can’t compete with Shin Seiki if you don’t fill your ballpark,” he said. “And you can’t fill your ballpark if it’s no fun to go to.”

I turned the conversation to the team itself. Last week, left fielder Okakura Ishikawa made headlines with his partying ways, and Collins has had several spats with mercurial owner Paul Walker regarding what Collins sees as a miserly approach to the budget he’s been given to work with. I asked how he was reading the temperature of the team right now.

“Relationships are good, you know?” he said as he picked a grape from his fruit plate. “Everyone wants to win. That’s the reason things are testy. And that’s how we want it. No one wants to work in an organization where you lose 100 games and everyone’s good with it. We’re a team with a champion’s history. We want to own that. That’s why we’re working hard to right the ship.”

Working hard is perhaps an understatement.

If the season were to start right now, the Lupin Cliff Hangers would likely field a team with two new starting pitchers (Tadamasa Hashimoto, and Hyeon-Cheong Yong), two new infielders (2B José Escobido, and 3B Kevin Forrest), and a fresh face behind the plate (rookie Eitoku Hirano is expected to be given a shot to claim the position with the loss of Shigikazu Munakata to Free Agency).

“You did all that through trades,” I said.

He sighed and glanced out the window, clearly frustrated. “Yeah, that’s right. If I’ve learned one thing the past few seasons, it’s that we’re just too small to make it happen in the free agent market.” The comment was more an admission than a complaint, and I got the feeling that, for a moment, the conversation became therapeutic. “We wanted to give Armando Gallegos $19M to come here next season, but he turned us down and went to Canton for less money. Then we put $16.5M in front of (Dean) O’Monahan and he basically said ‘well, that’s interesting…let me think about it.’ Seriously? You’re 37 years old, and you got shut down at the end of the season with a shoulder problem, and you’ve got to think about whether you’ll take $16.5M to play for a single year?”

He sits back and smiles.

“Does that fall back on Paul Walker?” I asked. “Some other teams throw around that kind of cash without remorse.”

He shrugged. “Look, it would be great if Paul and I were always on the same page, and, sure, I would like some more dough to work with. But the bottom line is that the organization has come a long way in the three, plus, seasons that Paul and I have been working together. I don’t think O’Monahan would have changed his answer if that $16.5 was suddenly transmogrified to $21.5M. It’s fairly obvious that free agents of note aren’t coming our way until we win games. It was that way last year, and it will be that way next year if we don’t win.”

“Are you going to win this year?”

“I’ve learned not to predict such things.”

“JSPN made an editorial last night that said you might play .500 ball.”

“All I can say is that we’ve got some really good baseball players, and that our coaching staff is both dedicated and focused. This game is humbling at times. But we’re doing our best to field a winning team, and we’re going to have fun doing it.”

“You had to give away a lot to get those players.”

“That’s the nature of the trade game.”

“Jo Kichida?”

“Great reliever, despite struggling a bit last year. We’ll definitely miss him. But we got an upper-quartile second baseman for him in Escobido, and we needed someone who could play every day.”

“Adrián Fuentes.”

“He’s brilliant. There will come a time where our fans will lambast us for trading him. But we got Tadamasa Hashimoto, and four good prospects for him. Six Pack is going to be an important cog in our rotation for several years, and we’re all just as high as we can be on Gillard and Tully.”

Gillard and Tully are 18-year-old Canadian John Gillard, who pitched effectively at the single-A level last season, and 17-year-old Trevor Tully, who held his own at the SSA level. Both players performed well above their age levels. The development of either of those two into star players would certainly ease the sting of losing Fuentes in the deal.

“Fred Wilton,” I said.

“Very good prospect. We hated to cut him loose. But after last season’s problems, I predict our fans will like Kevin Forest at third quite a bit.”

“Hyeon-Cheong Yong,” I said, changing the frame of reference to players the team has received.

Collins smiles. “He’s a brilliant pitcher. If he keeps the ball over the plate he’ll win 15+ games for the foreseeable future.”

“Will he keep the ball over the plate?”

“If we knew that, we would have had to give up half the team to acquire him.”

Collins is clearly happy with the deals they’ve made, and that happiness is probably justified. The bottom line register says that the team dealt star reliever Jo Kichida and four prospects for Hashimoto, Yong, Escobido, Forrest, and five prospects. The payroll has bulged, but nowhere near as far as it would have if the team had gone the free agent route—and with both Yong and Escobido on minimum salary contracts, and four seasons remaining on Hashimoto’s contract, they will stay under team control for some time. Perhaps more important is the fact that he kept hold of his club’s #1 draft pick (#3 overall).

Collins leans in and gives me a conspiratorial whisper. “You’re not talking about another key resource we picked up in the session.”

I frown, quizzical. “What’s that?”

He sits back and dabs the corner of his mouth with his napkin. “We used the new rule to pick up 20 Contributor’s Points in the Yong deal.”

I had forgotten about that. In an esoteric twist, the PEBA board authorized the trade of the licensing points the league uses to authorize certain administrative actions. Lupin acquired 20 of Aurora’s CP in the Yong deal. “What’s the big twist there?” I asked.

“Those twenty points were just enough that we can send a young player to Winter Ball. We’ve already got François Gosselin on an airplane.”

“Ah,” I said. Gosselin is the 22-year-old fire-baller that the club picked up in the Rule 5 draft that effectively began the Cliff Hangers’ off-season retooling. Team scouts have raved about the kid’s 99 MPH fastball, and talked about his slider in terms reserved for the great ones.

“We’re going to see if we can get him a third pitch,” Collins said with a certain degree of smugness. “If that works, then the Yong deal would become more than huge for us.”

I smiled then, and I felt the warmth of the sun as it broke through the clouds. Hope, it seems, is eternal. Especially at the Winter Meetings, when all futures are possible, and opening day is nearly four months away.