Wichita fill most of the gaps, still a few to find
While the Aviators haven’t graced the National News with their off season moves they have been busy and are now confident that, if the worse comes to the worse, we will have a shot at equalling 2041 while making the first profit for a long while. That’s not really a great mark, but when you haven’t a cent in the coffers, no Top-100 prospects and barely 20,000 fans a game it might well be a Year One landmark on a long road to recovery. There is no easy fix, we have maybe one or two players over 27-yr-old that people may trade for, that’s not going to help a top to bottom refit. It requires cost cutting everywhere, good drafting, lucky finds on the waiver wire / FA cess pool and good coaching. All personnel in 2042 will be playing for their jobs, they have to show that they can improve our minors; we have to turn pig’s ears into silk purses. Things will take years to turn the franchise round, patience is needed. We realise Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we need to see some sort of budding green shoots each year, every year the shoots aren’t there lengthens the recovery trail by another year.
New Skipper Al Lunn
Doom & Gloom all posted we can move into the progress we have made. After hard driven negotiations we finally agreed a three year deal with Al Lunn, the former Pitching Coach of Omaha, to be our manager. With assistant GM Kontos having an extra influence on our batters, we wanted Lunn to get in and help Pitching Coach Zach Bauer. At his interview he certainly proposed the most help for our pitching staff, we’ll see if this twin-up approach to helping the batters & pitchers actually seems to produce any visible improvement.
Hedde Aalbers, our 2041 Rule 5 pick
The Rule 5 draft was somewhat of a success this year for the Aviators. As expected no-one took a flyer on any Wichita player for the second straight year, we were able to grab one, hopefully very useful, player; not as many as we hoped, but at least it filled a big gap at a league minimum salary. The one player we did pick up with the second overall pick in the draft was 22-yr-old infielder Hedde Aalbers from the Hawaii Tropics. Hedde is young and hasn’t played above Double-A yet, but he is a competent defender at second, third & short and has great range and speed. He may well have a shot at being the starting second baseman for 2042, but the plan we are hoping will work is for Jim Abernathy to play at second and Aalbers to provide backup around the infield. That could be one of biggest position battles of Spring Training. Giving us an insurance for all this is the veteran Bryan Robson. He is ticketed to be a reserve outfielder in left & centre but is capable of being an extra backup at second & third. The addition of Aalbers is really great for us as it gives us a solid backup plan for the starters. The only position we are perhaps a bit light on cover for now is at right field. We’ve just signed 27-yr-old minor league free agent Raul Gasco who we feel might be able to prove in Spring Training that he can be an adequate backup not just at right but all round the outfield. Raul already has limited BBA experience with Huntsville and Chicago as well as winning the 2041 RHML (AAA) RL Clayton Chancey Glove Award at RF while with Rockville’s Triple-A team.
The one area we haven’t really been able to improve at the moment is our pitching staff. The free agents at the moment are still going for far more than we can realistically pay, we have what we feel is realistic contract offers out to a handful of pitchers who we are somewhat hopeful may sign with us. The probable result though will be the addition of maybe one or two pitchers at most. I feel we’ll probably end up searching hard in the bargain bins around Spring Training time, we could really do with one or two veteran arms to bolster the rotation, but at the end of the day I’m prepared to go with what we have rather than push us towards a continued debt situation again.
Our payroll for 2042 is currently estimated to be just a few dollars under $60 million which is, at the moment expected to mean we are losing around half a million on 2042, we are hopeful that we can do better than that. After dropping our ticket plans by around a third to $10 the early signs are encouraging. We have sold nearly 6,500 season plans at the turn of the year, a rate which is projected to finish with around 18,000 season plan holders, 20% up on 2041. From that it’s projected that our average crowd next season could be as high as 33,000 which would be over 50% higher, unfortunately due to the big ticket price drop we’ll probably end up a couple of percent down on our gameday gate revenue. If we can keep those levels up though it could mean nearly a million more people through the gates during the course of the season. To be honest with no hope of making the playoffs this year I’d be far happier gaining a million extra fans through the gates than 20 extra wins. I know winning boosts a lot of things but hopefully we can strike a balance between the money and the wins