Hold My Beer. Omaha alienates fan base further by sending 4 players to AAA Lincoln.(2051.16)

[niles08]

When a team is 34-52, you would think, not much more could alienate a fan base that is growing weary and tired of watching the team lose day in and day out. Well, the Omaha front office used an old one-liner this week by simply saying “Hold My Beer”.

Omaha announced that 4 members of the team, a few of the more popular ones that fans had been waiting what felt like ages to see perform in Omaha are now making the 46-mile trip on I80 West to Lincoln.

Heading to Lincoln are starting pitchers Takashi Nakamura and Jose Martinez. Nakamura was listed as the #1 prospect when the season began. He has struggled this season a bit, with a 5.44 ERA through his first 96 innings of BBA ball. Martinez has also struggled this season after posting a 3.49 ERA last year in 237 innings pitched. This year, he has thrown 113 innings and has a 5.78 ERA.

Joining those two pitchers are two corner outfielders, who are both having pretty good seasons. Amid Kasim finally made his debut this year and has a 158 OPS+ in his first 95 plate appearances thanks to a .389 on base percentage. Kasim was called up after Wilson Estrada was injured and played at first base for a bit while he recovered. He found his spot in the everyday lineup as the DH shortly after.

Maybe the most shocking, is outfielder, Eric Wagner. Wagner is graded by scouts as a 75 overall player, currently at the age of 23. He was having his best season in the big leagues of his 3-year BBA experience, with a 143 OPS+ and 2.2 WAR. In the past 2 seasons he had a 108 OPS+ and 112 OPS+ so his 143 OPS+ was a pretty big step in the right direction for him. Regardless, he finds himself heading down to Lincoln for the time being.

With cries of “service manipulation” coming from the player union, the front office responded.

“We feel all these players could use some additional seasoning. Wagner and Kasim have been great at the plate, but mediocre with their gloves. Jose needs some time to figure out what he is doing differently than last year, and Nakamura has some control issues. None of these guys were going to be voted for the all-star teams, so we felt it was in the team’s and players best interest to let them go down to AAA and work on things for a week while the BBA celebrates the all-star week. We’re not planning on any of these being long term departures from Omaha.” Said GM Justin Niles

It's worth pointing out the players have the following current "service time".

Nakamura: 97 days(up since opening day)
Martinez:1 yr, 97 days(up since opening day of last season)
Wagner: 2 years, 92 days
Kasim: 70 days

By those calculations, Nakamura & Martinez would need at least 2 weeks in the minors to push things out another year, while Wagner would need just over a week to avoid arbitration next season. Omaha has grown notorious for this type of practice, and with the team clearly out of things this season, one might wonder if they just leave Namamura and Martinez down now for a few weeks instead of spreading it over a few years as they have notoriously done in the past(Timo Dooley, Andre Ly).

[JimSlade]

I look forward to the eventual human interest stories, in which these young men proclaim that "being sent down was the best thing that could have happened to me."

[tylertoo]

Wait'll the players union gets wind of this!

[chicoruiz]

Reading this made me feel guilty for not spending more time manipulating this kind of thing. On the bright side, most of the players I bring up to the bigs don’t perform well enough for service time to become an issue…

[CTBrewCrew]

Cough-cough….send down Ferrell

[ae37jr]

Judging by the 19,000 fans lost per game this season, they probably won't even notice.

[niles08]

Judging by the 19,000 fans lost per game this season, they probably won't even notice.

I'm thinking maybe the drop in attendance is due to the inflation on ticket prices. They were $17.96 last year and this year are an eye-popping $40 a seat. While attendance is down 19,000, revenue is up 31% per game($250,000 per game). That's 81 home games X $250,000 which is just over $20,000,000 in revenue(not counting the gate share).

[ae37jr]

I must be missing something then. Reports say you made $39 million in gate revenue last year and only $7.5 this season whe being projected to lose almost $31 mil.

[niles08]

I must be missing something then. Reports say you made $39 million in gate revenue last year and only $7.5 this season whe being projected to lose almost $31 mil.

Those reports aren't ever completely the entire story. It says my "player payroll" is 103M, but the game "projected" says $114,686 for player expenses + another $14,277,469 in misc. player expenses so basically $128M in player expenses. It also doesn't show the $6,000,000 I traded in cash or updated my staff expenses to be the $9M+ they are now.

The "gate revenue" is an updated YTD today, which has my current projected at $24,000,000 because of the price increase (I just did it a few weeks ago), which is less than the $39M I made last year by 15M, but also doesn't disclose the $7M less in gate revenue I had to share, so I am about -8M in all on the revenue side. Merchandising revenue is the same as it is YTD.

Currently, thanks to all the nonsense from the trades/releasing players, my expenses are projected to be at $150,000,000 which is $34,000,000 more than last season which I think is throwing some stuff for sure, Because of the increased expenses, I am expected to lose about $25,000,000 this season. Thankfully I made $16,000,000 last year and have bonus funds of upwards of $35,000,000. If you take a look at my team's history, this is pretty normal for us as we typically have a season every few years when we lose around $30M or so(because we do some cleaning up), in 2038 we actually lost $47.5M lol but quickly made it up with a $43M profit in 2040.

[CTBrewCrew]

You should probably just dump Ferrel and is exorbitant salary.

[neugey]

Tell your hardcore fans to move to Gretna so they have equal access to both Omaha and the Lincoln AAA affiliate! (I used to live in Omaha)