Three wins this week, but just not enough now
Earlier in the season we might have snapped your hand off for three wins in a week, but it’s all become jaded and a little too late now. After all they were accompanied by four more losses. With just 64 games left in 2048, it’s a harsh reality that we have to win nearly a half of them to see any tangible improvement on last year and I have my doubts, severe doubts, whether we can achieve that feat. The fans are starting to lose hope as well, a couple of this week’s crowds dipped down to around the 10,000 mark and every week now we have our fingers clasped over our eyes as we peak at the latest average attendance figures, hoping we haven’t lost another thousand or so off our total.
Diesel “All-Star” Dave and Masaki Sato seem to be in their own little home run race, both have got 21 now, both on course for a total somewhere in the mid-30’s. Sato also has the joint lead in doubles (20) along with Jose Leyva; Sato's other achievment this week was to put some more ink in our record books when on Friday, July 17th at the Peoples Palace he launched a flyball over the leftfield wall in the first innings against Manama to become the first player to hit 100 homers for the Red Crescents; it was his 398th game for Riyadh. Jonathon O’Reilly, after two weeks, is still filling a hole nicely as a competent if unspectacular shortstop while Myeong-hwan Kim is improving at the top of the lineup, his OBP is .314 and he has only struckout five times, but we really still need to see more for what we are paying him. Grady Fern too isn’t quite hitting the heights he should be and it’s time now to give Clive Timberlake another shot at his weaker position.
Fernando Guerrero had a good first week as our new stopper, he pitched in four games and had a 0.88 WHIP, didn’t give up a run in 5.2 IP and snatched a win for us. Ricardo Quadrado despite having the highest ERA in the rotation grabbed his team leading eighth win. Just five of our pitching staff currently have a positive WAR, not hard to see where the problems lie. With some $25 million available next year it will be time to remodel the whole staff and hope it goes right this time, the two we brought in during the 46/47 off season were a disaster and didn’t see a year out.
2048 Riyadh Results against the UMEBA (up to July 20th)
Vs BURT
| Team | HW | HL | AW | AL | RF | RA | Series |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baghdad | 4 | 5 | 3 | 8 | 64 | 99 | 7-13 |
| Beirut | 2 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 58 | 115 | 4-15 |
| Jerusalem | 7 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 112 | 85 | 12-8 |
| Manama | 5 | 8 | 3 | 8 | 90 | 132 | 8-16 |
| Team | HW | HL | AW | AL | RF | RA | Series |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athens | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 26 | 27 | 2-4 |
| Bucharest | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 23 | 0-3 |
| Cairo | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 11 | 27 | 0-3 |
| Mumbai | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0-0 |
| Tripoli | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 11 | 9 | 2-1 |