Galaxy Gas 2060.10 – Valencia Finances One Year Later

[DugoutDesperado]

It has been one season since the new Valencia regime took over the front office. As it looks like Greathouse is using the same playbook that he referenced in Jacksonville back in the 2040’s, his first order of business is to get the finances in order to the point that the club has $20M in cash at the end of the season.

The financial update given by their lead consultant, Abbi Cuss, shows that the needle has moved a bit, but there is still a ways to go. At this point last year, the Stars coffers were $9M in the red in addition to being upside down on the stadium dues of roughly $1.7M. This current report for this year shows that the in-game cash is roughly $11M prior to the initial season ticket sales coming in with the bonus cash being evened out at $0.

While that may look good on the surface, there are a few things that may make this improvement look better than it actually is.

First, there was no IFA activity last season which save about $5M. One would ask, will the front office let loose of some purse strings and try to invest that into the future?

Next, not resigning Adam Hines and Martin Roman saved almost $12M off of last year’s payroll, but to date there are no real answers on who are going to replace these guys. The Stars have signed three free agents thus far (tripling the amount of signed free agents from last year), but there was only a total of $4.2M spent on those three players combined.

Valencia still has two years left in the Ruben Vazquez purgatory contract. It is down to $8.5M this season with a player option of $10.7M in 2061. It will take a lot to convince Ruben not to return for that final paycheck next year.

The Stars stood quiet in the trade deadline talks for the most part last year. After coming back to the league, Greathouse still has not made a trade and has only spent $5.6M on 4 free agents over the course of two off-seasons. Could this be Chris Ballard in disguise? (May have to follow the NFL/Colts for that reference).

[Trebro]

Between the v25 changes and the league changes financially, getting the house in order before doing anything else makes a lot of sense to me.

[trmmilwwi]

Took me a few years to figure this one out.