[DoubleDub]

Hi Everyone, this isn't going to be a full season preview rather a few words about the players we added and lost during the offseason. I will also discuss a little bit about our approach to this offseason.

Also if you are thinking of joining the PBE then now is still a great time to do so. Anyone that creates now will still get to play in a full season of the Minor Leagues and then be drafted by a Major League team at the end of the season - the relevant links are in the first post of this thread but also feel free to reach out through this forum or through Discord (RJHadden96#4956) if you have any questions.

Well let's start with who we lost, unfortunately it includes our best player last season - Franklin DeMars - he is on his way up to play with the New York Voyagers. This is consistent with Enoch's (their GM) approach to minor league talent - bring up prospects as soon as they can contribute. You can't question the logic either, he currently has the Voyagers on the longest active playoff streak in the PBE.

DeMars was our standout bat last season, he finished second in each of the Triple Crown statistics and finished third in MVP voting for the Minor Leagues. So this is one spot that won't be easy to replace.

We are also losing Zodiac Bluesky who has been elevated by Cancun as they seek to not have the worst record in the league for the first time in 3 seasons. Bluesky has been a gold glove winning Catcher for the Dillos in each of the last two seasons. He is definitely deserving of the promotion but would have been great to have him for another year as we face the rest of Cancun's top tier prospects again including the reigning MVP - John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

We will be rooting for Zodiac as he moves onto Cancun this season.

We are also losing Duke Smith out of the bullpen, Smith is an inactive who has now aged out of the Minor Leagues. Even as an inactive Smith has been quite dominant the last 5 seasons, he never had an ERA higher than 3.70. While losing an inactive pitcher doesn't sound like much to overcome the truth is that our bullpen is incredibly thin coming into the offseason. With Smith's departure we are left with one active user - Crabstin D'Potson and then an assortment of bots with reduced TPE to use.

So moving onto the acquisitions, I will also discuss briefly the draft strategy that the Dillos had. Last season we went all in on the draft and ended up with 4 picks in the top 14 of the draft - you can't argue with this strategy considering it has already provided us with 2 all Stars and the Rookie of the Year.

This meant that coming into this draft we had one solitary pick which was 12th overall, we needed a Catcher, a middle infielder and pitching help. The draft was quite deep so we felt like we could get quality picking in the 2nd round but we also needed to add at least one more pick.

We had a player earmarked for 12th OA but understood that we would lose the opportunity to select him if we were to trade back. The decision was not taken lightly, we shopped the pick around and ended up moving back to 16th OA and landing the 31st OA pick as well. We thought through our scouting of other teams that there was a chance that the teams picking from 12 to 16 OA needed pitching and our middle infielder could slip through.

In the end he did and Zodiac and BazookaJoe fell over each other to make the pick and get Binker McTavish to the Dillos. The user (Snussu) is an old Dillo so we were pumped to get them back while addressing a position of need.

Binker will slot into the 2nd base spot while we move Tommy Olson to the outfield to man the vacant Left Field spot left by DeMars. We are sure that McTavish will be successful with us when we get stuck into this new season.

The attention turned to our 2nd pick, we selected Charlie Xu. His build has a lot of potential and we are hoping that Xu can become an active part of the Dillos this season and moving forward.

So that was the draft, with limited opportunities we were able to pick up bullpen help and an immediate contributor in the infield. Where to from here? Well fingers crossed that nothing changes but we may able to get the IA pitcher Joe Borris back for one season before he ages out of the minors.

None of the Major League teams have bid on Borris so far, therefore we are hopeful that we get him back as a stop gap solution in the bullpen.

We thought we were done at this point, we missed out on a highly valued waiver pick up. But accepted that fact and moved onto looking forward to Spring Training. But along came our knight in shining armour.

Cash Thompson created as a new user and being at the front of the waiver priority we were able to claim him. The best part … he is a Catcher.

The heir apparent to Bluesky has emerged at the 11th hour, we were ready to deploy a bot behind the plate. But with Thompson creating the Dillos have been able to Cash in and solidify the team behind the dish.

So there we have it, I will break down the Dillos in more detail in a season preview post but just wanted to peel back the curtain a little with a look at what our offseason was like.

I've enjoyed the process of my first offseason in the War Room, Zodiac and BazookaJoe have been awesome all season and let me scout a bunch of players and at least listened to my at times ridiculous suggestions of trades we could have made.