[Westheim]

Our newly added Capt'n Coma hard liquor sponsorship shows the first bad results among the dwindling fan base. This team is bottom 3 in all offensive categories worth mentioning. They just plainly can't. They ... can't.

Sadly.

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2006 DRAFT POOL EVALUATION

The Raccoons will have the third pick in every round of the 2006 Amateur Draft, as well as the second pick of 23 in the supplemental round, which is compensation for the Condors signing Ricardo Huerta.

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Vince Guerra used to hand me two hand-scribbled pages ripped out of a note pad with a list of guys he liked, some scrawled evaluation points of them, and all that in barely legible handwriting involving guesswork. Like when we drafted Darwin Tyler seven years ago with our first pick – who knew he actually wrote down Jon Merritt’s name to pick first?

Still, Vince’s instructions were pretty clear if you could get past his writing which was a result of only four years of formal education (and even then not during harvest time). I liked Vince.

I liked Vince even more once Whitebread handed me a hard drive with his draft evaluation. “What’s that?” I asked. “The draft pool evaluations.”, Mr. Well Studied replied. After an awkward length of silence, I repeated. “What’s that exactly?” - “The draft pool evaluations” – “I mean, what IS … THAT?” – “A portable hard drive disk. You have to plug it into your PC.” – “Which PC?”

Never has there been such devilry in my office! Neither a personal computer, nor political correctness! And now Mr. Smartass turns round the corner and demands this and that. I should have dumped him into the Willamette and disguised it as an accident when he came to me in April and asked for a number of whiteboards, a thousand or so magnetic metal bars and a label writer. Like there was room in our budget for any of that! We bought a 35-year supply of pencils and erasers back in 1989 (rosier times, you might argue), and he was supposed to make use of that.

Apparently he bought the hard disk machinery from his own money. Must check his salary. It is too generous!

Finally, Chad turned out to be useful. Between sniffing glue and dancing on the dugout in an oversized raccoon costume, he plugged the hard drive into a spare laptop and had me access the data, to have a good look at the stuff together with Honeypaws - much to my dismay, though. Still no proper list of players. And no ratings at all. Just cryptic stuff like wOBA and FIP, and a lot of formulae (I may or may not have accidentally overwritten some while browsing his files).

FIP, I figured, would be something like WHIP. Maybe a short form of that. Faults per Innings Pitched, probably. Today's youth - too lazy to even write four letters down! Anyway. There was this high school pitcher Manuel Rojas, who made zero faults per innings pitched. Does that mean he pitches a perfect game every time he goes out? Strikes out 19 per nine innings? What the **** does FIP- mean? Bad faults per inning? What is this misery!?

Abrams! … ABRAMS!!

(deep, frustrated sigh)

I would love to present a ranking right now, but I wasn’t left with one, and Whitebread seems to have gone to the village for an overpriced coffein-free soy latté.

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Fixed a nasty mistake (there are often some in the reviews, from typos to nonsensical sentences, and often I just let it be, but this one rolled up my toe nails this morning) in last week’s review. We did not face *no* right-handers, but *only* right-handers. You might have guessed already from facing Carl Bean on Wednesday. I’m **** and you know it.