[Westheim]

February and March 1993

February 4 – LF/RF Manny Espinosa (.271, 85 HR, 543 RBI) played for the Aces and Bayhawks in 1992, and will be a Capital now, signing a 3-yr, $1.68M contract.
February 5 – Charlotte Falcons owner Miguel Lopez passes away. His son Chance takes over the reigns of the team. Insiders consider it unlikely that the younger Lopez will be more willing to spend big money on the team than his father did.
February 5 – Los Angeles grabs 1B/2B/3B Douglas Donaldson (.275, 48 HR, 364 RBI) for 3-yr, $1.47M. The 29-year old was with the Crusaders since 1989.
February 7 – The Blue Sox have themselves a new closer in Juan Miranda (46-63, 2.99 ERA, 354 SV). The 35-year old ex-Gold Sox signs for 3-yr, $2.01M.
February 7 – CL Ricardo Medina, 29, also has a new home in Vancouver, where he will make $610k for one year. The former Falcon is 44-41 with a 2.66 ERA and 162 SV in his career.
February 10 – As closers fall into place, all-time saves leader Andres Ramirez (62-73, 2.56 ERA, 484 SV) finds a new home in Cincinnati, getting a 3-yr, $2.07M payday. Ramirez, 33, has bounced around in the last few years, last closing for the Indians.
February 10 – The Warriors improve their roster with ex-VAN SS Art Garrett (.268, 85 HR, 551 RBI), giving the 32-year old a 2-yr, $840k deal.
February 13 – SP Chris O’Keefe (71-74, 4.06 ERA) is signed by the Titans for 3-yr, $1.25M. O’Keefe pitched for the Bayhawks all of his career, and interestingly no-hit the Titans on June 25, 1991. So they know what he can do…
March 26 – Vancouver Canadiens owner Matt Neal passed away after a brief illness, leaving the team to his son Jerry, a tolerant economizer.

Long-time Raccoon and still career home run leader with 304 shots Mark Dawson has retired after waiting 18 months for offers to restart his career that came to a crashing stop when we released him in 1991. He never played for another team. Unless something happens to Richmond’s Gabriel Cruz this season, he will break through that mark set by Mark. Cruz stands at 288 HR in second place. Next? Michael Root (243 and counting), Tetsu Osanai (219 and counting very slowly), Daniel Hall (217 and not counting for very much longer). No other player so far has hit 200+.

Dawson also still leads the RBI board with 1,268 driven in, but there the closest challenger is none other than ageless Hector Atilano, only 62 behind.

Richard Cunningham – former Coons first round pick and armed with killer stuff – remains on the free agent list well into the year. I would have been tempted to make an offer, but he is a type A free agent, and I’m not gonna blow our only decent draft pick for a 33-yr old right-handed reliever, who posted a 5.02 ERA in 1992. Granted, I blame the Stars for the ERA. They made him strike out *129* batters last season, riding Cunningham for an unheard of 109 1/3 innings!! If you look at his stats, we rode him up to or over 80 innings a few times in his career, and those were pretty much his worst seasons. He is way over-used with 100 innings despite killing stuff. Cunningham eventually signed with the Thunder for $155k for one year.

Maybe if Morales would have been signed …? But nobody showed any remote sign of interest in a run-of-the-mill 29-year old infielder who happened to be a type A free agent. Huh. I wonder where that came from.

By March, no truly big names remained on the market. Ex-Coon SP Antonio Lopez signed on March 24 with the Buffaloes for a paltry $190k. There was seemingly no money left to dish out. The Raccoons left their $1.2M where they were and moved on.

On March 24, almost two weeks before Opening Day, I sat down with the managerial staff of the team. The main focus of the talks was on the Japanese marble column with the .721 OPS – barely league average. Would we expose him to waivers on the extremely thin chance for one of the 14 teams in the ABL that were mathematically able to swallow his contract would actually be so dumb to do so? In the end, we agreed not to. He was extremely popular with the fan base, and the last thing anybody wanted to do was to draw the ire of the paying costumers in a more medium-sized market and a team owner sitting somewhere down in Mexico where the biggest fun he had was to spend all winter counting the profit his baseball team in the frozen tundras of Oregon had turned him the previous season.

Daniel Hall had a huge turnaround season last year at age 36/37. Before that he had lowered his career OPS an astonishing seven years in a row, before posting a career high .920 in 1992. (I don’t expect him to match that mark again this year, since it would be tooooo sweet)

The marble column has posted sub-career average OPS numbers for three years in a row. I sure hope there’s no 7-year rule in place here.