A 4-3 week for Riyadh (2046-26)

[Fat Nige]

First winning week
The numbers coming through the ”Players In” door might be slowing down as we approach the halfway point, but not because we’ve stopped looking & signing, more because the quality of players we’re currently finding we don’t think would add anything to what we’ve already got. I expect we’ll continue to sign a few here & there, but I suspect we’ll have to more or less settle where we are now until the off season, at least as far as the Red Crescents are concerned. The farm system is still recruiting at pace though, we currently have around 20 players “of interest” mulling over contract offers and juggling roster numbers we usually have around a dozen on waivers. We’d like to reduce that number, but no-one wants to claim them and we’re loth to pay them off.

One of the last pitchers in the door in Riyadh was Ricardo Quadrado and he made a good start, pitching 7+ innings in Bagdad giving up just six hits and a walk while striking out five batters. If he can carry that form on that will be a valuable source of possible extra wins for the team. Another pitcher we added that is doing well is Bert Hackworth, he currently has a record of 3-1 in eight starts with an ERA of 3.21 which leads the rotation. The pitching staff still ranks fifth out of five, but I feel confident that with the aid of Hackworth & Quadrado we can move up the staff rankings.

Our leading light with the bat, Masaki Sato, has 20 homers and 51 RBI as we stand one game short of the midpoint of the 2046 UMEBA season. We had had several enquiries about him, but at the moment we do not think it would be prudent to deal him. We have him under team control for another four years if as we hope he doesn’t opt-out of his contract at the end of this year and even at his highest contract year (2050) he only just cracks the top-10 highest paid UMEBA players of this year. We feel he’s a player we can build this franchise around. Torvald van Donkelaar has only just arrived and has just 12 games under his belt, but we feel he too could turn out to be a great capture for us. He’s currently hitting .356 with a 156 OPS+ and six EBH including three triples. With 84 innings at centre field, he is also proving to be our best man there with a positive ZR (just) which no-one else has managed there in this inaugural season. I’m much happier with our outfield alignment now, it’s just the infield, or more specifically, the middle infield we still have to improve. With injured third baseman, Juan Dominguez, due to be activated from the IL in three weeks we can then look to moving Freddy McCord round to second base to replace the vastly underperforming Leonardo Rincon

We’re certainly on target at the moment to reach my initial hopes of 60-odd wins when I took over and have the potential to be able to lift that up into the 70’s in our inaugural season if our new boys continue to push on with their form. We might not be able to threaten the Athens’ UMEBA expansion record of 85 wins, but I certainly hope to beat the second best expansion team record which was Kuwait’s 60 wins, both of course in the UMEBA’s previous expansion year of 2042. Our fellow expansionists Cairo are probably feeling they haven’t done as well as they could have in the first half and with only 26 wins at the moment will be more looking to Kuwait’s record rather than Athens’




2046 Riyadh Results

Vs BURT

Team	HW	HL	AW	AL	RF	RA	Series
Bagdad	2	4	5	5	65	86	7-9
Beirut	3	4	6	3	62	73	9-7
Jerusalem	5	4	1	6	55	96	6-10
Manama	4	5	3	6	85	94	7-11

Vs BANC

Team	HW	HL	AW	AL	RF	RA	Series
Athens	0	0	0	3	10	27	0-3
Bucharest	0	0	2	1	14	9	2-1
Cairo	0	0	1	2	10	22	1-2
Mumbai	0	2	0	0	5	9	0-2
Tripoli	0	0	2	1	12	8	2-1

[woods]

Interesting about the 60 wins non-record, I think I'll post that in my clubhouse too, give my guys a realistic goal to aim for. Don't know how on earth Athens managed 85.

[Fat Nige]

I think @Clayman was the Athens GM then and apart from being a smart manager it was a time when UMEBA participation wasn’t that high and it was a simple task to grab a lot of the decent players floating around

[Clayman]

Interesting about the 60 wins non-record, I think I'll post that in my clubhouse too, give my guys a realistic goal to aim for. Don't know how on earth Athens managed 85.

Built on bats with solid but not great pitching, 2 top class catchers in Saunders and North. Barajas could literally shut his eyes and still get on base, I think it was Barajas, Arbizo, Hardy and Cuervo at the top of the order pretty much set in stone.

We had luck as well, Gomez and Wooldridge both rookies who played well. We didn't have many injuries, non of which were like a month or above.

Also in FA I set a cap on players, went with the idea of spending $10m on 5 players rather than $10m on 1 or 2 players. Despite winning 85 games I blame myself on not getting into the play offs, we played Kuwait on the last day and I went with a 1 man rotation and every other pitcher in the bullpen, we lost that game. The sim continued with game 163 and my pitching wasn't set, like I say my fault. I still say if we'd got into the play offs a United Cup would be sat in the Athens trophy cabinet.

I loved that team though, infact the 2042 Athens Fighting Centaurs in something like 16 years of OOTP and playing in at least 1 online league each year and multiple solos have been my favourite team. I think the amount of spotlights I wrote for that team was proof of that.

ps For some reason I had a few players who wanted to play in the UMEBA rather than the BBA, Chip Saunders I know replied to an offer with "Team X of the BBA have sent me an offer but rather play for Athens" or some such reply. Useless info 101 Nige did the uniforms & logos, I based the concept round the Dodgers