The story behind the season
On the face of it the season looks like another slide down the abyss to the eventual complete implosion of the franchise, but you have to look deeper into the stats to see the real picture of the 2045 season. The win tally of 54 is the lowest tally in franchise history as the losses rise to 523 in the last five years, there are a host of positives though but without doubt 2046 will now be the most crucial in the franchise history. The Chilis must have bottomed out, any increase in losses in 2046 must surely mean the end for me and maybe for the franchise.
Finances
The move to El Paso for the franchise had the planned effect, there was a massive rise in fan interest which with some manipulation was maintained all season, finally falling away a few points right at the end of 2045. Sales of season tickets were 48% up on 2044 to 22,700 and the average attendance for 2045 rose nearly 25% to 67 people short of 39,000, having been over 40,000 for most of the season. All of this has meant our matchday revenue has risen to a smidge over $117 million, up from just under $94 million, which should see our 2046 budget up over the salary cap for the first time in my tenure. We haven’t got the final profit/loss figure in yet for the year, but we will have certainly made only the third profit in the 11-year history of the franchise and may well surpass the highest ever profit of $11.5 million we made in 2038. We are now projected to have a profit of over $10 million in each of the next two years.
The Playing Staff
As we felt we couldn’t do worse we made the bold decision at the start of the year to go with six rookies on the roster, later rising to seven when we promoted Fernando Figueroa. As it was, we could do worse, four of the rotation qualified as rookies and all were well into double-digit losses for the year with most ERA’s heading for 7 and 8. On the plus (?) side, although no-one reached 10 wins, we did have three starters win eight games, Gerald Sizemore winning nine in his first ever BBA campaign. In the bullpen our best Stopper, Augusto Ramirez , didn’t improve as much as hoped for and spent quite a bit of time on the IL as well. We were helped there by the emergence of rookie Reynold Voermans who shouldered a lot of the stopper’s load and in the end ended up almost splitting the total saves with Ramirez.
The real big worry on the batting staff at the start of the year was the loss of Duane Whitley Jr and his haul of homers & RBI. Thankfully the signing of Tommy Cochran & Tony Hernandez more than solved that with both of them adding a total of 82 homers and 220 RBI. Jason Bowen slid backwards a bit though and the new platoon at shortstop of Jeremy Webb & Mike England didn’t really work out either. That did though provide some benefit though as England slid over to second base and improved the defence there against righties. New addition Ross Quicker was so successful (for our franchise) at third that he supplanted Jim Gouzzie at the hot corner and indeed has led to Gouzzie not being extended. Elmer Lomond has established himself as a solid left fielder and several injuries to Luis Maldonado has led to Rule 5 pick Kade Lebowski becoming our right fielder (and praying that Maldonado would take the unlikely option of exercising his opt-out this year), they could become a sound corner outfield pair. Chris Jenkins poor defence cost him his CF role and we took a flyer on calling up Figueroa for his BBA debut. He struggled with the bat, as he has throughout his pro career but has been a fantastic defensive CF; he has in the end upped his batting average from the .160’s to finish at .211, hopefully at 23-yrs-old he still has time to improve that further.
Summary
You can’t gloss over it; it was a dreadful first season for the Chilis but in amongst the ashes are a few green shoots. The move to El Paso worked as expected as far as the finances and revenue stream was concerned but on the surface the playing staff let us down in particular the pitchers who somehow managed to be worse than previous staffs. It probably was, in hindsight, a mistake to go with six rookie eligible pitchers (Ramon Guerrero wasn’t technically a complete rookie but had only a handful of previous appearances to his name). In all honesty we didn’t have much of a choice, we spent virtually all our limited funds on revamping the hitting staff and had no option but to thrust our promising rookies into the pitching staff. Hopefully we might be able to correct that a bit with the money we have this off-season. That is one success I can definitely claim though, in four years of hard work and frugal living I have achieved my objective of turning around the terrible finances of the franchises to the point where we should turn a profit every year instead of the eight previous years of losses, now we have to continue to improve the team’s playing roster before the fan’s interest and support crashes again.
The results, month by month, weren’t that bad for the most part. No, we didn’t have a winning month, but we started with three months with double-digit wins and were 2-3 before the All-Star break in July. Suddenly we crashed though and only won one game (12-3 !) over the rest of July ending with just three wins in 24 games. That really broke us and me in particular, I took to having no interest, spending all of every day in the bar drinking myself into a stupor. Eventually Bro Allred had to send his security staff (not paid staff, but they do have a club house in the Church of the all-inclusive Stadium as compensation) to drag me out of the bars and back to work.
The Allred's Security Staff
September was a poor month but might not have been so bad had we been in contention for reaching our targets, instead we gave several more prospects (and soon to be non-prospects anymore) than we normally do their BBA call-ups. It was that 3-21 record in July that completely crushed our season, without that we could have quite comfortably made our target of 60-70 wins. Had we done that we would have been raving about how we had improved in all the areas we planned. Instead, we have to suck it up and face the franchise’s worst ever season. If you dig deep into the stats, I now think that we are still on some sort of upward trend, abet a much shallower curve than I wanted, and with decent bumps and recruits in the off season we have the potential to get everything back on track in 2046.
So, there we are, in my opinion, not as bad a season in the long term, as it appears on the surface. Next time we will look at our targets and hopes for 2046.
