[Westheim]

Odd notes about the surprise breakout of ’07:

• The Raccoons paid the least money for a win, $128k per victory
• Tomas Castro received a ridiculously low $30,612 for each point of WAR he accumulated
• Most WAR gained despite missing a third of the season: Vic Flores, who’s a free agent
• Whitebread warned me not to extend Daniel Sharp and to get rid of Luke Black due to their lowly .330 wOBA (woolly obese balls average?)
• Luke Black still led the team in most easily countable stats (HR, RBI, XBH, … and K)
• Daniel Sharp hid himself very well, but led the team with 38 doubles
• Ironically, Kel Yates ended a 4-year strikeout leadership the very year he led the league in wins and ERA
• Most shutouts by a Raccoon in 2007: Jose Dominguez (2)
• If Kel doesn’t become Pitcher of the Year with his 21-3, 2.37 ERA, 241 K, 5.6 K/BB, 6.20 H/9, 1.70 BB/9, 9.51 K/9 season, I will throw rocks at the league office
• Best fielding percentage: Matt Pruitt, of all people (.994), but let’s not talk about his zone rating
• Most errors: Daniel Sharp, who else (18)
• Another stat Duke Smack led the team in: zone rating! (+19.3)
• Adrian Quebell was part in turning 97 double plays, and hit into almost as many (okay, 13)

The Raccoons had put up their first winning season in 11 years, and in fact had posted their third-best season ever after 1996 (108-54) and 1992 (99-63). Nobody had quite seen it coming, everybody had had an ecstatic summer in Portland (only to get slapped in the head with a fall depression), yet the Mexican Prick was not impressed. He wrote that with the team barely making it above .500 (it LITERALLY says that! That giant ***hole!!), there was a lot of hard work to be done.

Carlosito let me know that not enough people had consumed hot dogs at the games, and he barely had been able to turn a profit (can’t live off $6M with the bread prices in Mexico, huh?), and as such couldn’t afford to give us much more money. As a sign of goodwill (I almost spit out my donut I was chewing on at that point), he would raise the budget to a flat $20M for 2008, up from $18.8M in 2007.

While this was not exactly good news, at least the Raccoons weren’t stricken with the smallest budget in the league anymore. The Rebels, Loggers, and Aces all had smaller budgets for 2008. The ancient Titans, who might be in for some hard years, have the biggest budget at $32.5M, while the Aces are last with $17.6M. The average budget is $25.0M, the median is $25.8M. In our division, the average budget is $25.6M, the median $26.3M. Those numbers are higher than the league average because while the division has two of the four paupers of the league, it also holds the Crusaders with the third-highest budget overall. The Canadiens and Indians are right in the middle of it all.

That’s a lot of talk about money, but money is a relevant topic for the Raccoons, as always. The offseason traditionally starts with free agency and salary arbitration, and well, we were right in the thick of it.

And, uh, yes, we’re supposed to make the playoffs (per Carlos Dumb**** jr.) this year. No excuses. Also, simultaneously I’m supposed to load the farm, increase on-base percentage with a team that almost as a whole takes ball four as an insult (that one comes definitely from that pale-faced college kid in the basement!), and to get people to the place we play at, we are supposed to acquire a hometown player.

Yeah, people always flocked in because of Grant West MAYBE closing a game…

(I checked after that dumb task first, because I don’t have anything else to do ‘round here, and there are at best three worthwhile players in the entire league from the Portland area, and that includes the Thunder’s future superstar centerfielder Tom Reese, whom we are certainly not going to get unless we play an abduction card – but hey, Carlosito’s got experience in that, I’m sure. The “best” candidate is New York’s mop-up guy Nathan Harrison, an extreme flyball pitcher in his 30s… Oh look, he’s a free agent! I’M SURE PEOPLE WILL DIE TO COME TO SEE HIM GIVE UP THREE HOMERS IN THE SIXTH OF A 9-1 BLOWOUT.)

Pfff.

Without further enragements, here comes our free agency and salary arbitration overview. Players are listed with 2007 production, 2007 salary, and where applicable compensation eligibility or 2008 salary estimate and service time.

Salary arbitration:
SP Raúl Fuentes, 31 – 10-13, 4.78 ERA - $326k - $370k – 5.018
MR Ed Bryan, 26 – 6-2, 2.73 ERA - $150k - $230k – 3.010
SP/MR Felipe Garcia, 30 – (minors) - $284k – (none) – 3.119
MR Ward Jackson, 30 – 0-0, 1.40 ERA - $355k - $400k – 3.171
MR Kazuhiko Kichida, 27 – 5-5, 3.86 ERA - $150k - $230k – 3.104
MR Lawrence Rockburn, 27 – 5-2, 2.18 ERA - $150k - $230k – 3.084
CL Angel Casas, 25 – 6-1, 1.04 ERA, 48 SV - $150k - $472k – 3.059
1B/2B Ieyoshi Nomura, 23 - .242/.317/.301, 1 HR, 37 RBI - $150k - $230k – 3.044
OF Jose Carlos Crespo, 27 - .256/.297/.411, 9 HR, 35 RBI - $150k - $230k – 3.036
LF/CF Tomas Castro, 23 - .321/.356/.482, 19 HR, 87 RBI - $150k - $630k – 3.008

Free agents:
1B/3B Daniel Sharp, 30 - .273/.342/.379, 4 HR, 60 RBI - $600k – type-B free agent
MR John Bennett, 35 – 4-1, 3.03 ERA - $1.28M – no comp.
MR Marcos Bruno, 31 – 7-1, 1.44 ERA - $340k – no comp.
INF Victor Flores, 28 - .350/.397/.497, 5 HR, 39 RBI - $400k – no comp.
SS/2B Kunimatsu Sato, 30 - .246/.317/.340, 1 HR, 23 RBI - $440k – no comp.

The crunch point on which many other things get tangled up is Vic Flores not being compensation eligible, assumedly because he did not qualify for the batting title too because of insufficient plate appearances? I have no clue. In any case, the whole latter half of the year, I was under the assumption that Flores would be a type-A free agent, and we would let him go to cash in on the draft picks (same with Sharp, but we’ll get to him in a sec).

Vic NOT being eligible for compensation changes this dramatically. How can you let him go!? On the flip side, he is probably going to demand a metric crap ton of money, and we have other holes to stuff (starting pitching, anyone?).

The infield as a whole has been quite the mess, although we regularly had the same configuration with Sharp, Flores, Yoshi, and Quebell from left to right. Well, Vic was injured for lengthy periods, during which Sato played quite well, and Ryan Miller, our hope for the future, not so much. Yoshi was so bad this year that he had to platoon by the end of the year with Gutierrez and whomever else we bothered sticking at second. After a steady 2006, Daniel Sharp committed almost 20 errors again, and the bat was not the same as pre-2006. Quebell might be the biggest disappointment of them all, playing the entire season and not getting a home run until the All Star break, and then hitting only five in total. We need to upgrade at first base, really hard, and by now it is blatantly obvious that we horrendously overpaid for his services when he exchanged him for Randy Farley and Dan Nordahl, two former first round picks who were established in the majors, who are now chugging along steadily in the Federal League, Dan even closing games with success for the Warriors. That was one of the worst trades I’ve done – ever. Add into the calculation that we essentially donated Al Martin into AAA slavery. Emotionally broken, Al has had three home runs in the majors since the trade, and 30 in the minors…

Daniel Sharp is a fickly issue. His third base defense over the years could be best described as “sub-par”. His total zone rating since debuting in 2000 is -34.5 at third base, and +3.0 at first base, but more than 90% of his chances have come at third, where he has a total of 107 errors, with a high of 23 in 2005, when he cost the team more than a full point of WAR with his glove. The bat had been steady from his sophomore year in 2001 through 2005, with more or less the same results every year, a slash around .290/.365/.390, with five to eight home runs, and 33+ doubles in three of those years, but in 2003 he missed 51 games due to injuries, so he gets a pass there.

In 2006, he batted .236/.325/.313 with three homers, while wickedly playing good defense. This year, the glove was gone, but he didn’t come close to his former slash line with a .273/.342/.379 mark and four homers. He had 38 doubles, though.

It’s tough to make something out of that. But I know that he’s the only compensation-eligible player we have, and I also know that we have two talents in AAA (Ryan Miller and Ricardo Martinez) that want to see him gone. Overall, all things considered, Daniel Sharp might be a net negative. You could switch him to first, but at first base you are looking at two players (Sharp and Quebell) with almost exactly the same skill set, except they are batting from opposite sides of the plate. No way we’re going to platoon those two guys.

Now Ryan Miller’s major league output has been mood-dampening at best, and dispiriting at worst, batting .227/.261/.301 in 229 AB between 2006 and 2007. We certainly hoped for more. He’s more of a glove guy, true. He never killed pitching in AAA, either, putting up .710-ish OPS numbers in both of the last two years there. Then there’s 3B Ricardo Martinez, 21, who missed some time with injuries in 2007, but batted .260/.320/.422 with 15 dingers and stole 11 bases in 117 games in AAA. Defensively, he’s basically as bad as Sharp. But he’d be much cheaper.

We haven’t even gone into our starting pitching and our bullpen yet. This will be a tense winter at the Willamette.