[Westheim]

I blinked, I rubbed my big black googly eyes once, and I rubbed my big black googly eyes twice, but the number on the screen didn’t change. Adam Valdes had slashed the Raccoons’ budget for the 2066 season down to $59M. That was a whopping *11* million dollares less than in 2065! And look how far we got with *that*!

Valdes explained himself with a lot of the returns on investment being below average for his other assets. Well yes, but we’re not a six-story apartment building in Slum City, Adam!! Just when I started to tolerate the guy…

Predictably, the Coons took a bit of a slide down the pecking order, going from 8th to 12th among the 24 teams in terms of disposable allowance.

Top 5: Knights ($87M), Titans ($85M), Stars ($84M), Thunder ($82M), Crusaders ($81M)
Bottom 5: Bayhawks ($50M), Cyclones ($49.5M), Falcons ($48.5M), Aces ($42.5M), Wolves ($39.5M)

The remaining CL North teams ranked 14th (VAN, $56M), 18th (IND, $53M), and MIL ($51M). The budget available went up for every position in the top and bottom five, but not in the soggy middle. The median budget went down $1M to $58.5M, while the average budget went up about $800k to $62.1M.

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To be fair, the budget slash, while seriously putting the daily donut buffet in jeopardy, made the first decision that was required to begin the offseason a lot easier. Bruce Burkart had a $4M team option for 2066 which the Raccoons would have had a long debate over whether it was worth keeping a 35-year-old catcher with degrading defense, but still with a nice stick around, if you didn’t mind that he had spent roughly two months of both his Coons seasons on the DL. Such luxuries were no longer on the table now, with the team in the read by more than $2M right off the bat. Thankfully, the Caps, from whom we had acquired him in a trade two years ago, had negotiated a rather cheap $340k buyout into his contract, and the Raccoons pulled the emergency parachute.

The Raccoons also had to clean out the 60-day DL, which held relievers Isaac McDaniel and Cruz Madrid. Scott Lawson and Marco Campos were waived and DFA’ed, even though neither McDaniel nor Madrid figured in our plans going forwards. The former had spent the entire second half of the season in AAA and was projected to cost actual money in salary arbitration and weren’t having that, and the latter would miss the entire 2066 season (the last on his contract) after elbow reconstruction surgery. Then again neither Lawson nor Campos were under consideration for a regular roster spot in ’66…

Speaking of players not under consideration anymore, besides Bruce Burkart that was also true for the other free agents we had coming up, which included Corey Garmon, who was the second regular outfielder managing to post a full NEGATIVE WAR, and relievers Juan Carrillo and Sansao Tyson, who had tried my patience long enough. At least those four departures and that of McDaniel would free up over $8M of budget space, which was something we needed…

There were five arbitration cases, all of which would be retained. Angel Alba had been through a horrendous season and seemed to be melting, but it wasn’t like we had something in AAA that looked like a solid bet of improving on his 7-16 record and 4.42 ERA and replacing him on the market was probably prohibitive unless we managed to clear a big salary first. The others were relievers Jeremy Garvey (a candidate for the closer’s job if we even needed a fixed closer at this stage…), and Kody Mello, potential starting (again) catcher Marcos Arellano, and outfielder Jose Corral, who had took a terrible plunge by 150 points of OPS this year and now had OPS values of 72, 129, 136, and 91 for the last four seasons. Go ahead, YOU have a guess at what he’s gonna do next year!

Going back to the idea of clearing big salaries… The three biggest salaries on the Coons were probably untradeable at this point, as we had picked up another $5.1M salary owed to Juan Sanchez in ’66, there were two years of $5M each owed to Rich Monck, who had also slashed his power numbers in half season-to-season, and Jeff Crowley was beyond awful and had posted a 7.28 ERA for his $4.5M salary when he wasn’t hurt to begin with. Crowley had a vesting option for the same salary for 2067, which would require 170 innings pitched this year, which I would do my utmost to not give to him.

After that you had the long deal to Shoma Nakayama with $14.4M over four years, nothing too wild there, and then Joel Starr with three to four years (team option) of $3.3M annually, and one more $2.5M salary owed to Chance Fox. Good 2065 campaigns amongst those six: nah. Few if any of them appeared tradeable for anything of value.

So immediately the Raccoons had no money and were stuck with some really ****** contracts, automatically making everybody consider whether it would get worse before it could get better……