Off Topic
FOCUS SHIFTS TO EXHIBITION SEASON
September 1, 2046: YELLOW SPRINGS – The Yellow Springs Nine have won 80 baseball games this season, and in three of the four divisions, that would essentially put them at the front of the class, often well on their way to another crown. Unfortunately for YS9 fans, the team plays in the Heartland, which means they sit third, most likely too far from the disgusting Loserville Sluggers to give them a real run.
“It’s a shame,” manager Alberto Sanchez said earlier in the week. “We lost so many players at key times that it now appears we’ll have to look forward to the post-season exhibition schedule in order to show our true worth.”
At an extended point of the year, the club was without its entire left field contingent (all-star Rex Foster and his platoon mate Maximo Garcia), and without their diamond glove shortstop (Luis Pena), who until that time had been having the season of he career. Relievers Ernesto Martas and Jerry Borque have booth seen extended time on the Injured List, as did catcher Jesus “J2” Rodriguez. Others, of course, have been bumped and bruised and strained.
“But it’s part of the game,” Sanchez said. “The one key factor is that the front office mostly didn’t try to do too much, so we at least kept that out of the way—to some degree, at least.”
That last bit (to some degree) is likely refence to a pair of trades the team made, the first sending starter Tomas Ramirez to the Talons for LF Natsume Kondo. That deal has been at least semi-valuable, as the club needed what Kondo has brought. The later deal, sending star 3B Blaine Tyler to Las Vegas, has been mostly a disaster, seeing that Tyler has erupted for the Hustlers, and the club’s rookie replacement, Derek Cumming, has mostly looked out of his league…so to speak.
The good news is that with the roster expansion time neigh, the club is nearly healthy again—and with a five and a half game “lead” on a Wildcard slot, the club may be in a position to use September as a pseudo-spring training with the intention of focusing on the damned exhibition process.
“That’s fine,” Sanchez said at the end of the interview. “It seems like a lot of people actually care about that, so we’ll use it as well as we can.”
