We are moving into the meat and potatoes of the baseball season, the league. The March Madness of The Baseball Cup is done, the new sheen of the continental cups (Cup of the Americans, Asian Cup and European Cup) isn't coming for a few months and the firework display of the Champions League (and the bottle rocket of the Global Cup) only to come after the season, it's now time to focus on the by-far biggest chunk of each teams season. How it works
-Friday-Sunday games only, weekend 3-game series
-in 12 team leagues: home and away against each opponent for 66 games
-in the only 10 team league (Asia), that makes 54 games
-in WBA leagues and the EuroLeague, there are no playoffs. The winner has the most wins at the end.
-in USBL leagues and Asia, the top 3 teams make the playoffs. #1 gets a bye and a 3-game series between 2 and 3 decides who will play in the best-of-7 to win the league
Gerry Thomas Diaries: The Opening 6 Weeks
Overall Record: 9-9
Run Differential: -4
After two series, two of our highest paid players Chad Bamesberger (7% of budget) and Josh van Nort (10%) were a combined 2 for 45. We were in a disastrous place, our FIP was dead last in the league and our wOBA was 12th in the league. We had hit 2 home runs and were lucky to have two wins, mainly because we had played the decrepit Pittsburgh Rebels (1 finish above 6th in franchise history of 13 years and .327 career Baseball Cup winning %).
We then hosted Palo Alto and scored 1 run in the first 17 innings. It took 17 innings for us to beat them in the finale and stay at 3-6. Up top we were very proud of one of our Winter Market signings in the youngster Joe Duncan, he went 6 for 8 in the 17 inning game to have his average move to a preposterous .464 for the season. We still don't feel comfortable putting him on the field defensively, and probably won't this year, but man what a bat.
The next two weeks, vs Madison and California, finally gave us signs of life. We outscored them by 12 and won 5 of 6 to move above .500. We shuffled our rotation around, I think Bello might just not have it anymore, he's out.
Jorge Zamora might be more suited to be a closer, we will try him out of the pen.
Ben Buchanan and
Joe McCammant will get a shot at starting. Starting pitching is gold. You need reliability.
Buchanan has had around a 3 ERA over 125 or so relief innings in the big leagues, we think he can profile as a starter despite scouts never being huge on him.
Zamora has a 11+ K/9 rate as a reliever and scouts like him but as a starter his walk rate skied well above 4 in his 7 starts.
McCammant was a big Winter Market signing before I got there so carries a big contract (7% of budget) but carried a 1.4 WHIP as a starter as a rookie. He gets another chance now.
Jared Farr has been excellent, he fanned 10 vs Madison as Buchanan and McCammant delivered. We allowed just 2 runs vs the anemic Laker offense in the entire series! Our defense has been excellent so far, Stewart and Mallow are doing their job there and van Nort is a gold glove candidate in center.
The final series was disappointing as Farr and McCammant got shelled and we lost a series vs Nashville but back to .500 is encouraging after the poor start.
A big problem is finding a catcher, we tried Tiran Mezhunts in the Cup and he gave us this line
so we sent him down and tried Nate Guarino, who has given us this line
Now Mezhunts is back up.