[mikev]

Crusaders At A Crossroads?

Another sim, another couple games back in the standings. The Crusaders only managed a 5-5 sim, while Vegas went 7-2 and LA went 6-3. Sweet. It's going to take a ****ing monumental run to make up enough ground to earn a playoff berth.

Anyway, the Francisco Reynoso deal has already payed dividends. In 3 starts, Reynoso has tossed 19.2 innings and allowed 3 earned runs. We'll take it, especially considering Blackley lumped to 1/3/4, down from 2/3/5. Great.

Frechette didn't have as solid a Crusader debut as Reynoso did, managing only 8 hits (all singles) in his first sim with the team.

Luckily, the rest of the offense was pretty well on fire. Aucoin (.345/.424/.621), Barro (.500/.571/.583 in limited time), Edwards (.375/.423/.875), Forest (.351/.442/.514), and Gonzalez (.378/.439/.486) all pretty much tore the cover off the ball.

The pitching wasn't horrible, either, aside from George Adams having a rough couple of starts, notably a 2.2 inning 8 run disaster against Vegas.

The short and sweet version is: We probably don't have "it" this year. The hard decision is going to be whether I keep some of these old dudes around another year or two and have another go at the postseason, or look to sell off what's valuable and see if we can rebuild the farm and have a new core group of players in a couple seasons. Right now, I'm just not sure. I'm confident that I didn't give up any real major pieces to get Reynoso/Frechette, so a low dollar extension probably won't be that big of a deal. The guy I'm kinda worried about is Alvarado, who's barely over a .700 OPS with California and wants a ****load of money to extend.

We shall see.