Riyadh, we have a problem
We certainly do have a problem, all over the place to be fair. Most of all it is in the pitching staff, it shouldn’t be that way though. A lot of the pitchers are capable of a lot more, but have just underperformed. Ricardo Quadrado was probably the exception, after being moved from the bullpen to the rotation late in 2047 he proceeded to get four wins and a no-decision from his five starts. That led to him coming second in the “BURT Unsung Heroes” award voting as well as the September BURT Pitcher of the Month trophy. As a full time member of the rotation in 2048 he will have to continue that form. We will also need Bert Hackworth & Juan Rodriguez to both play as they should be, both are capable mid-rotation guys, but haven’t shown any sign of that yet. If Raymond Ortiz builds on a reasonable start in Riyadh then we might head back towards the 70 win mark. That’s a lot of ifs though, too many for us to realistically hope they will all come true.
The main problem with the hitters is the lack of power, only Masaki Sato consistently produces the long ball (although he was 13 down on his 2046 stats), Juan Martinez needs to continue his slight power improvement and we need to find a regular spot for Clive Timberlake. With Martin McLeish failing to reproduce his Triple-A mashing we might well see Clive back at 1B and Masaki restored to the DH role. We need more power, we can’t rely on scoring runs station-to-station with none of our regular hitters even managing a .300 batting average. Chris Glass did nothing in Cairo as a Rule 5 draftee but was a competent body as a Riyadh September call-up. If he can maintain that he has every chance of displacing one of our “regular” catchers who were in all honesty abysmal in 2047.