The clear out begins
The planned team cycle of three-years has ended, and it was decision time on most of the Riyadh players. Unsurprisingly there was several players not invited back as Riyadh’s 3-year performance had been slightly less than expected.
Raymond Ortiz (Riyadh career record 30 starts, 4-12, 6.52 ERA) was non-tendered while Bert Hackworth (14-23 from 63 starts, 4.88 ERA) and Raul Correa (3-6 with 5 saves from 99 appearances, 4.70 ERA) chose to retire on hearing that they wouldn’t be offered anything near their expectations, I might have offered Correa something but with the $4m he wanted I’m sure I could pick up two FA relievers who could at least both match those stats.
13 further players with significant UMEBA appearances for Riyadh also left, although to be fair most, anticipating that the contract negotiations weren’t going to go too well, decided early on that they would rather test free agency than face the humiliation of getting a miniscule offer from the Red Crescents. Sean Gardner, Clive Timberlake and Jamie Ramirez I would have gladly re-signed as backups if the price had been right while Jose Montano could have been a good cog, but wanting $6.5m and spending increasing amounts of time injured was not a good fit. Myeong-hwan Kim, Jake Garcia, Peter Dickerson, Gustavo Munoz, Jimmy Cook, Jose Tovar, Mike Schofield and Mike Martin all left without comment.
Added to all these, who at some time or another, could have called themselves Red Crescent regulars, was a list of hopefuls who came close, even played a few games in Riyadh, but for whom time had just run out. None of these would accept another minor league contract and just weren’t good enough unfortunately for the substantial major league contracts they wanted. So, it was farewell to Chris Glass, Burt Davies, Ashley Agar , Colin Adams, Doeke Soethout and Jordan Bodkin. We hope that perhaps somewhere, someday they realise their dream.
So, there we have it, 21 players in and around the fringes of Riyadh have departed. We have $25-30m to replace them and we’re not hopeful of doing so with any great or indeed any upgrade, that sort of money these days scarcely buys you three decent players. An early example of this was Gary Goodchild, a decent young leftie pitcher released early by Jerusalem. We thought we had the drop on him, he was keen on our sizable offer, he was a piece that we could have built the rotation around, but the BBA came calling with a few extra suitcases stuffed with money and that was that. It’s almost now not worth going after a division one player unless you’re just looking for maybe one or two replacements, you might as well go straight to the second or third tier players and hope for a bit of star dust there somehow.