May the Moon always be Red
Is the slogan on our banner, unfortunately it might be a while until the moon turns red. We shall try though, a franchise isn’t built in a season. With little star quality up and down the franchise this season will be one of experimentation. Players had better get used to moving up and down the levels as we attempt to figure their worth to the franchise. All the time we will be scouring the waiver wire and free agent lists for players we think will improve on what we have already.
That has already started, just last week Guillaume Martin and Bert Hackworth climbed from Double-A & Triple-A respectively to make their UMEBA debuts and this week Rodrigo Morales, who has hit .125 in the last 12 games, has headed for Triple-A Port Elizabeth and Jose Cardona has come up to replace him in right field. Experiments will be made, the most pressing need at the moment is a replacement for Nikita Schipper who while being a very good defensive replacement cannot use his bat at all, hitting just .059 in his last 11 games. Unfortunately, we are sadly lacking in solid middle infielders at any level.
Pitching is always a hard thing to find, and it appears so far that we are no exception to that. The rotation isn’t as weak as it could be, but we might have to look hard at what we’re doing at the back end of the bullpen. Out of four losses last week, three went to extra innings and we lost all three. On paper it looks as though we have a solid set of relievers in the ‘pen but those three extra innings losses perhaps tells us we could do a bit of tinkering there.
In just about a week our rookie team, the Chinese Taipei baseball team, start their first ever campaign. While we are not expecting any great shakes from then we are hopeful that some of them might surprise us. We have at least been able to assemble a reasonable crop of rookies, the oldest of our 35 players on the roster is 22-yrs-old and we only have three over 20-yrs-old.
[And of course thank you as always to @CTBrewCrew for the excellant banners]
