I messed around with my team more than I have in many seasons and the result of all this tweaking was... Just a normal Raccoons season. But I can at least think that maybe we did better due to all the tweaking, even if it didn't help.
I experimented with a 4-man rotation towards the end and I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. I think I'll try it again next year and see how it goes. I also finally started training some guys to play more positions after not having done this for many seasons. So I'm training Appling to play 2B (so far I've only used him at 3B) and I'm training Ruth to play 1B and I'm finally training Maddox to max him out in all OF positions. I previously was using Maddox as my starting CF, but my acquisition of 100 Mays changed that.
Speaking of Mays, he had a fantastic year and might win the MVP. It's always nice to see a new player play so well. Frank Robinson hit .304 with 40 HRs so he could be in contention as well. In the bullpen, Tom Seaver has been amazing ever since I moved him there. He's won the reliever of the year award 3 times and was robbed last year by his teammate Hubbell (I'm going to log it as a bug - Seaver topped Hubbell in every category of importance except for K/9).
The Raccoons finished strong again this year, but that's because we played mostly our weaker division rivals. We did manage to sweep The Farm Boys in the 1st round, so that's encouraging. But our next opponent will either be Pittsburgh or Bridgeville and they're both better than the Raccoons, but not by too much.
We went 3-4 vs Bridgeville and 3-3 vs Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has perfect Young, Johnson and Pedro, but their offense is much weaker than Bridgeville's. Bridgeville has the #1 offense and has perfect Johnson and Pedro so I feel like there's not much difference for us here in who we play.
If we can make it to the WS, our chances for 2 straight WS wins look pretty good since the NC doesn't have any strong teams in it. But I don't feel very good about our chances in the LCS.
The final season standings: