- 2038-YS9-HEARTLAND-BANNER.png (208.7 KiB) Viewed 246 times
The celebration went on late into the evening, and included (as irony would have it) a truckload of free pastries sent from Sinclair’s Éclairs, the business at the heart of the scandal that was the reason assistant GM Phillip Watson was the only member of the team who was noticeably absent.
Maise’s viewpoint regarding the world’s expectations of this event happening is not far off. Even recently, the team’s performance drew exclamations of surprise from high-profile podcasters.
Most pundits had seen the club’s 80-win, fourth-place finish of a season last year as a harbinger of things to come. Omaha had won the division, though some thought they might take a step back. Twin Cities was the consensus pick as Heartland’s top team. Not that you can’t see why the Nine were discounted, right? The team had just let their legendary manger walk, and brought in a guy in Bill Inkster who most thought of as a neophyte. It’s pitching staff seemed to be in shambles, and while GM Ron Collins went out and signed and elderly Alfredo Salazar, most observers weren’t high on the club’s offense, seeing is mostly a collection of warty misfits. Off season critics were abundant.
“Everyone said we needed a pitcher,” Collins said recently. “And they weren’t wrong. I thought that, too. But we couldn’t find anything in Free Agency or in trade that was in our price range, so we had to work in a different direction.”
That direction was to ask Inkster and Kyle Beard, his pitching coach to find inventive ways to juggle the rotation, and a new reliance on key bullpen arms. It also relied on that maturation of young closer Curt Phillips, whose 39 saves in now the 10th best performance in franchise history, and who, in his fourth season with the team has now registered 101 saves, 5th best in franchise history. “It took me a while to get my head on straight,” Phillips explained. “Sometimes I would just take things too seriously, and when I screwed up I’d carry it on to the next game.”
You could probably say that about a lot of kids on the team last year. The Nine of 2037 was among the youngest in the league, and in reality, they were still considerably youthful at the beginning of the season—with only Salazar and veteran holdouts of times past in Jose Chavez and Lucas McNeill being over 30 years old. Young teams, of course, have a habit of getting better, though admittedly it may have taken a big set of prognostication chutzpah to suggest such things as have happened to create this party.
Indeed most projections suggested only a modest improvement, if any, in the club’s fortunes for 2038. Yet, now the league’s high-profile StatsPlus outfit is still projecting the Nine to win 99 games, and possibly take a bye in the playoff system.
With apologies to those who focus on the mound, however, a lot of this has to do with the wave of young Nine hitters that rolled in and came together behind McNeill’s aging bat. Jose Machado dropped a season to be wondered at, and platoon mate John Ginn came into his own. The offense was really just that, an intricate collection of platoon partners and rotating starters that Inkster fiddled with all year, and who all seemed to step up at key times. “That’s how my daddy always told me a good team works,” Inkster said in a recent interview. “It’s been a lot of fun being with the guys.”
“It’s been a fun time on this end, too,” Maise said, sipping champagne while her office mates formed a conga line. “This press release is going to be a good one to write.”
Yes, it will. Because the old king is dispatched. For all the turmoil and effort it took, the Yellow Springs Nine have supplanted the Omaha Hawks and are the Heartland Division champions for the fifth time in the 2030s. Long reign the new king!
