January 2045 (2045-8)
Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:23 am
First year in El Paso begins
It’s an interesting off season here in the portacabin in a building site that in short order will a brand new BBA baseball park. For the first time in my tenure Wichita/El Paso are actually sat on some money for free agency, not enough to sign the grade A FA’s that the team needs but enough maybe to hone off some of the rough edges.
Having decided to go with the young wave of upcoming pitchers there was no need real need to get involved in the FA starters, which was just as well as they were all out of our price range. What we did get was another bullpen arm, Adrian Garcia, on a one-year $3.2 million deal. The Chili’s are his fourth BBA team and he’s worked up a 53-46 record so far with 47 saves and a career ERA only just over 4.00. Over his 13 BBA seasons he has averaged mid-50’s in innings pitched, so that would be a real boost for the mid of the ‘pen as far as innings eating is concerned. We could be still looking for extra help there but there’s not a lot swilling round the market, the top one we fancy unfortunately doesn’t get on with our manager apparently.
Priced out of most of the batting options we have had had to settle for sticking a few plasters over gapping wounds. One of our biggest holes was at first base, all those homers & RBI that walked out with Duane Whitley Jr need to be filled. We had our irons in a few fires and lo & behold two turned up at the same time, 27-yr-old Tommy Cochran and 27-yr-old Tony Hernandez. Both first base / DH types Cochran will get to stand most of the time at first while Hernandez will sun himself at DH, both may well find themselves platooning with Matt Chambers or Clive Timberlake depending largely on how the players all cope with the new EP park. We acquired another 1B in the Rule 5 draft, Gustavo Aguilera from Calgary, who is now very much redundant and will be thrown back. Our other Rule 5 addition is an outfielder, 24-yr-old Kade Lebowski, who will more than likely spend 2045 doing a bit of pinch running and getting a few AB’s as a pinch hitter, it’s even possible that he might get a few defensive replacement innings out in right too if the sun gets too much for Luis Maldonado.
Our first Season Plan event held here in El Paso went really well. In our last year in Wichita we had just over 15,000 season ticket holders paying around nine bucks a game, in this first week of sale we signed up 8,000 season ticket holders who coughed up $15 a game. Our accountants are getting really excited about that, projecting that we could raise our revenue per game from just under $300K to around $700K. They’re also predicting our average attendance to go up about 14-15,000 to somewhere near the 44,000 mark. Nice if it all happens, it will only take 15 or so of the home games at that rate to pay off the year’s instalment due on the park, and if the crowd stays up it could leave a nice little nest egg in the kitty.