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 |
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 |