[Westheim]

The early spring brought no real great or nasty surprises anymore, except for that one day Maud came in with a new haircut and I didn’t notice, because I wasn’t particularly looking, which saw my homemade muffin allowance slashed to zero for the rest of the week. That, admittedly, was rough.

Not so rough – these new deals for former Critters: the Knights took on Eduardo Avila for $1.54M; Pat Gurney got on the Scorpions for $444k; the Cyclones acquired the services of Rikuto Ito for $416k, and those of Nate Norris for $510k; Danny Landeta went to Topeka for $1.08M;

Apart from that the Raccoons made another waiver claim of a minor leaguer that was going to be outrighted off the 40-man roster, in that case Matt Knight, a former third-rounder in the Elks organization. Strong defensive shortstop with a bit of power, but he also spent four years in single-A, and hit .238 in AA as a 22-year-old in ’50, so there was that. The Raccoons put Tim Rogers on waivers in turn; the 27-year-old went unclaimed.

The damn Elks decided to get back at me with a trade proposal, offering Tyler Tomasello for Paul Miles and Rafael de la Cruz (as usual) just on the eve of the new season. I was already gearing up my booze intake at that point, but I wasn’t *that* drunk… yet.

We finished the offseason with $4.9M of unspent budget space. While we only had the 14th-biggest budget by now at $45.5M, we also only had a payroll just a sliver above $29M, 16th in the league.