[Westheim]

A few days after Game 4 of the Warriors’ romp over the Titans, I got a glowing message from Nick Valdes. Steve from Accounting had filed the final financials for the season and the Raccoons had turned just over $10m in profits for the Valdes Empire of Cruelty to Small Animals and Everything Else. This was a noted difference to the previous four years where the Critters usually dealt with high salaries and low win totals. This year had been the other way round. Me personally, I don’t care how we win a lot of games, as long as we win eight in October…

Of course we were also due a budget adjustment. Last year the Critters had ranked a sad 20th in the league with a $27.2M budget. As expected, we were given a slightly bigger allowance… but I had hoped for more. Ownership added $2.2M to the budget, for a total of $29.4M, which still had us mired way down in 19th place in the league with a significant gap to the midfield teams.

The top 5 teams in terms of budget were the Pacifics ($59M), Titans ($48M), Condors ($45M), Warriors ($43M), and Buffaloes ($40.5M). The bottom 5 would contain the Knights ($28.8M9, Loggers ($26.6M), Rebels ($25.8M), Aces ($25.6M), and Falcons ($22.4M).

The remaining CL North teams clocked in 6th (NYC, $39.5M), 10th (IND, $38M), and 17th (VAN, $31M).

The average budget was $35.9M, up $1.59M from the previous season. The median budget was $36.75M, up $3M from last season.

Looks like baseball smarts will be required to sort any of this out! … Maud? – Maud? – Can you come in and look at a few of these numbers?

+++

Initially, the team was not exactly flush with money given that a few of the kits, Wallace and Wise for example, were growing up to become adolescents and were going to rub their anal glands on my stash of money now. However, there were two option cases that could have a big effect on the budget going forwards.

The first of those was Tim Stalker. Acquired from the Blue Sox in a dismantling deadline deal in 2021, he had made his debut in ’22 and had been on the roster ever since, although he had for a few years taken a backseat on the bench when the Raccoons had deferred to playing Jarod Spencer instead, which in hindsight had turned out to have been a folly. Stalker had signed a 6-yr, $17M contract after the 2028 title campaign, with the final year – 2034 – a player option worth $2.6M, which if executed would make him the biggest earner on the roster, just ahead of Adrian Reichardt (who by the way had a vesting option worth $2.24M for next season, requiring appearance in 135 games). I didn’t see any immediate reason why Stalker would want out of the contract. On one hand he had delivered his best offensive season in a long time in addition to the usual stingy defense, but on the other hand there were also two huge red flags in that he had missed almost 50 games with injury and that he would turn 36 in July. He was unlikely to get another huge deal – he was a middle infielder after all. His best bet was to pick the $2.6M right in front of his nose… and he did exactly that rather than electing free agency. He would thus put in a 13th season as Critter.

Because it should be mentioned at some point – the Raccoons continued to have very few guaranteed contracts as a consequence of stripping the entire thing down to the bare bones in the 2030-32 period. Besides Stalker and Reichardt the only “big” contracts on the roster were those of Berto ($2.5M per year through 2038), Zeltser (two servings of $1.62M each), and Juan Camps (two years at $930k each). The only other guaranteed contracts were one more year each to Garavito and Hawkins, totaling $1M. That was it; everybody else was either headed for arbitration or made the minimum anyway.

The other case was Rico Gutierrez, who had signed an 8-yr, $16.96M contract after the 2026 title campaign (and no, we don’t go on title runs every year…) and before long the worms and maggots had crawled all over that contract… and Gutierrez. He pitched a full and meager season in ’27, then won the ERA title in the 2028 season. He started 2029 with a 1.98 ERA from 11 games… then tore his labrum. That all but ****ed him up for good. He was a mess ever after, posting ERA’s of 5.32, 5.69, 4.97, and 4.24 leading us up to the present day. He had another two years of $2.09M each on his contract… but the Coons elected out. We needed value out of the #5 slot and Gutierrez wasn’t going to deliver it.

So we instead opted to pay him $550k to void the contract, which made us pay more to a pitcher to NOT pitch for us as we’d pay to any two of the group including Sabre, del Rio, and Chavez combined while indeed hoping they *would* pitch for us.

Kicking out Gutierrez immediately created $2.2M of budget space, not including a swift million in cash, and that was before we could tinker with the salary arbitration table [which shall be printed in full below, unaltered].

Gutierrez would become the ninth player eligible for arbitration or free agency, but would not receive an offer, which could not be said right away about any of the eight other candidates. Our other two free agents were Mario Rosas, who had gone 4-7 with a 3.46 ERA as a Raccoon, which could be blamed on any number of things. He was going to be a type A free agent, but that sounded better than it probably was, since there was hardly a team with excess dough picking in the second half of the draft, so we were highly unlikely to receive a first-round pick. On the other hand, Rosas had only made $2.2M so far and was probably worth more, but then again our entire budget was hardly that much.

The other free agent would be Ed Blair, who pitched to a 1.87 ERA and was an interesting candidate to extend. His fate however probably hinged on what would happen to Rosas, because money was not infinite around here.

Then there was the arbitration table, which contained a few INTERESTING choices. First-time eligible players Chris Wise, Jimmy Wallace, and John Hennessy were no-brainers to keep around. Wise was the best thing to happen to us in terms of closers in a while, Hennessy was solid and cheap, and Wallace had a strong bat that was nice to have in the #3 slot, even though his defense continued to draw the sort of reviews normally reserved for B movies shot with handheld cameras. We were working on that… (lobs Jimmy Wallace a ball, very gently; Wallace swipes at it with both paws, misses, and is hit in the nose before falling over) … we are working on that!

There were three more arbitration eligible players. First was Travis Zitzner, who was doing a solid job, although I always loved players that hit 30 homers more than those that hit 20 homers. Just sayin’. He was due a hefty raise and it was probably worth exploring the possibility of a long-term deal here that would give us a discount this year. – This was all part of the plan to raise funds for a Rosas extension.

The other players were Billy Jennings and Fernando Garcia. Neither had exactly torn out any trees in his first season in Portland. Jennings had hit 12 homers for Cincy a year ago and only three as a Critter. His playing time had diminished at the end of the season with both Manny Fernandez and Adrian Reichardt on the roster at the same time. His arbitration estimate wasn’t exactly hysterical. The question was though whether we wanted to keep him at all. Between Wallace, Reichardt, Fernandez, and Camps we had four solid-to-plus outfielders, and we wouldn’t give a long-term deal to Jennings anyway (but Reichardt was also not expected to hang around for 2035). Technically there were also Catella, Pinkerton, Hooge, and Bobby Houston (who had yet to appear in the majors) on the extended or 40-man roster, none of whom was per se better than Jennings, but all would be cheaper.

The last case was Fernando Garcia, who was probably the most pronounced disappointment to have been added during 2033 that had seen the fewest words written about him. He had hit around .270 with up to 18 homers with the damn Elks, but managed only a .241, 7 HR, 30 RBI season in just over 300 plate-appearance. He was briefly on the DL, but the main reason for the low output was that Elliott Thompson played him into the short end of a platoon by May and he never managed to out-hit the himself only modestly successful Thompson (.257, 1 HR, 40 RBI). Both put up an OPS+ of 95. Thompson ultimately saw about 20% more plate appearances. Thompson played better defense, but caught fewer base runners.

Garcia’s arbitration estimate was $1.4M, an outrageous sum for a good defensive, but meh hitting catcher that didn’t figure to get more than another 300 plate appearances.

Outrageous, outrageous…!