Results not too bad despite surrounding events
It was always going to be a down year in Palm Bay as the top prospects, who had brought the last two division crowns home, moved onwards & upwards towards the BBA. No-one though expected it to be such a strange year way down in Florida.
Firstly, for some unknown reason the Florida Prospect League started four days earlier and the rag-tag bunch that were rushed down to the Aviators team ended up losing all four of those game, a big deal as Palm Bay had only lost six games in the last two years. To cap it all off, when the real team selection turned up, the emergency players took it upon themselves to go on an extended holiday and the secret police of the Commissioner had to round them up and return them to their previous teams. The adventure didn’t end there for Chili’s fourth round draft pick, Paul Burton, who lost his service record cards in all the running around and found himself conscripted by Louisville in the BBA’s Rule 5 draft. Thankfully the Commissioner was able to intervene again and he is currently been transported by Prison transport to El Paso where he will be reassigned to a minor league affiliate.
Once the proper allocated players got stuck into the FPL it wasn’t as bad as feared. They opened with two shutout wins against West Palm Beach and Apalachicola, 2-0 & 9-0, very good if it had been the opening salvo of the FPL, but remember the Aviators were already 0-4 down from those early start games. The rest of November the Aviators didn’t lose more than a single game in a row, but unfortunately couldn’t string more than two wins in a row together either. Still they improved from that 0-4 start to a 12-10 record by the end of the main month of the league, hitting double figure runs in five games and posting four shutouts. The last six games of the 2044 FPL were in December and brought a 3-3 record, one of the wins being another 9-0 shutout. Overall 15-13 wasn’t too bad for a team that wasn’t expected to get anywhere near the 50 wins the team had achieved in the last two years, but if the team had won three or even all four of those early start games they could have been close to the target of 20 wins set by Palm Bay.
Columbus first baseman Fernando Casimiro got in amongst the league leaders by hitting 10 homers (third in the FPL) and 30 RBI (joint second in the FBL). On the pitching front Albuquerque’s Josh Hayworth had a brilliant tournament, posting a 0.30 ERA in five starts, leading the FPL. He went 4-1 in those starts (one win off the FPL best of five wins in 2044), allowing just one run, three walks and striking out 42 batters in his 30 innings pitched. His 0.30 ERA was an all-time record single-season record for the FPL, the only record set this year in the FPL record books. In the Palm Bay record books Mike Sears .382 batting avg & .467 OBP put him fifth all-time in those categories whilst Casimiro wrote himself all over the single season records too. His .711 SLG was second overall, his 1.115 OPS was fourth overall, his 10 homers equalled the best set by fellow Brown Sox (now Patriot Panda) Bill Burke in 2042 and his 30 RBI was good enough for fourth all-time. Another Patriot Panda, Cecillo Gaona, tied the Aviators all-time triples record with four, set by Chris Jenkins in 2042.
On the pitching side it was Hayworth and Patriot Panda Joe Jones who led and assault on the single season records for the Aviators. Hayworth topped the records for ERA (0.30), WAR (1.7), rWAR (2.3), BB/9 (0.9), K/9 (12.6, equalling his own record set in 2043), K/BB (14.00) and was the second best all time in WHIP (0.73), OAVG (.181), OSLG (.200) and OOPS (.411) meanwhile Jones was getting on the all-time list in his second pro year, he was fourth all time in ERA with 2.33, fifth in WAR (1.3), fifth in K/BB (6.50), fourth in Whip (0.85) and sixth in rWAR (1.6). All of this having started twice for Palm Bay in those opening four games and being tagged with the loss both times.
Palm Bay Team Leaders 2044
