I will be very very proactive in trying to get a marginal prospect for any players before releasing him....but I am not going to hold my breath. I am trying not to give away too much of my specific intentions, rather I will try to explain what I did and why I did it after the fact, but you all seem to havee fixed upon the logical way to fill my ML roster. I intend to be very active in the rule V draft. The kind of players I anticipate needing to fill the roster just might be available. As far as the arbitration players with the exception of Sandy Weston (2nd year), I will only be offering arb to 1st year players. I anticipate spending right around $10 - 11M for 7 - 8 players.

Quote: Originally Posted By Skid22 on 8/28/2009I will be very very proactive in trying to get a marginal prospect for any players before releasing him....but I am not going to hold my breath. I am trying not to give away too much of my specific intentions, rather I will try to explain what I did and why I did it after the fact, but you all seem to havee fixed upon the logical way to fill my ML roster. I intend to be very active in the rule V draft. The kind of players I anticipate needing to fill the roster just might be available. As far as the arbitration players with the exception of Sandy Weston (2nd year), I will only be offering arb to 1st year players. I anticipate spending right around $10 - 11M for 7 - 8 players.

Deleted my post above, sorry about that. I realized after the fact it could make playing GM for the team a little more difficult with those takes being public.

You've got more quality experience under your belt than I do, so I've no doubt you'll be in good shape turning things around.

zbrent I welcome your input. The whole idea here is to document and discuss the trials and tribulations of rebuilding 2 fairly well decimated franchises over a period of 3 or 4 seasons, or as long as it takes. Please continue to chime in when ever you feel the urge.

Quote: Originally Posted By Skid22 on 8/28/2009
zbrent I welcome your input. The whole idea here is to document and discuss the trials and tribulations of rebuilding 2 fairly well decimated franchises over a period of 3 or 4 seasons, or as long as it takes. Please continue to chime in when ever you feel the urge.

No doubt I will.

I was on the fence about posting anything so specific to begin with, just because it could impact valuation and such when the owners didn't specifically ask for it. Though I took my other post down after your response, I didn't take any offense to it or do it because I felt attacked in any way.

Quote: Originally posted by toddcommish on 8/28/2009Although I saw a stage show once with this chick that could breathe through her...  oh, never mind.

Suddenly I'm having Videodrome flashbacks.

I have made my first trade of the reconstruction process Alex Paniagua and the 2 years at $11M on his contract has been dealt. I received 2 minor leaguers in return.Neifi Javier & Esmailyn Osuna will be coming my way. I also inclued $2.5M in the deal making it a savings of $19.5M. Paniagua was limited to field or 1st base. I have 2 players who I wish to play in those positions for the forseeable future.

I have my eye on a couple of free agents so long as the numbers don't get out of control.

On the arbitration front I held hearings with 7 players and won 3 of them saving $590,000. I spent just under $10M for the 7 players so my budget surplus stands at well over $40M. It will be critical to the turnaround to spend that money wisely.

The first couple of days of free agency were interesting. There was 1 free agent I was particuarly enamored with, Victor Morales. He is 27 years old and the reigning MVP. His original request was for 4 years at $11.5. I felt that he was going to be effective for the next 10 years so I would take a shot. I started off at 5 yrs at 12.5M and was rebuffed. I continued to bid and went to 5yrs at almost $74M. I felt any higher than that would be something I would regret in 3 or 4 years when my budget constraints would obviously be different. I didn't even get a sniff. The Washington franchise gave him a max contract, $130M. He is a very very good player, but in my situation I am happy I didn't get him. If the great players are going to be max players, or close to it, I will have to build entirely from within. But these are sometimes isolated incidents so we will not make any rash decisions.

I did sign a free agent. Roger Vitiello, defensive catcher will be with us for at least the next 4 seasons. His ability to keep runners honest along with his high pitch calling rating should be a plus when my young pitchers get to the bigs in a couple of years. He doesn't have a lick of power, but should hit for a respectable average and not be an automatic out. For a true catcher of the future I will begin to look elsewhere as he wasn't available on the free agent market this season. I don't think there are any more free agents that it make sense for me to pursue. We will fill out the roster from the rule V draft and see what we have at that point.

Hiring coaches is a phase of the game most GMs despise. Nobody knows for sure just how important good coaches are, but I think we all have seen how much damage bad coaches can do. With that in mind I felt my minor league coaches were more important to me than major league base coaches.

My AA team is probably my most critical at this time. I have 3 starting pitchers there who I plan on being in my major league rotation in 2 years. Therefore I paid $1M for the highest rated available pitching coach. I also signed a bench coach at AA with a pitching rating of 74. I need these pitchers to continue to develop.

The rest of my minor league coaches are all well above average, most with ratings in the mid 70s in their specialty. The one exception being my RL hitting coach. This year there will not be any true hitting prospects on my RL team.

On the ML level I hired decent coaches at decent discounts. I only have about 5 players who I expect to be on my ML roster for any significant time and they are for the most part fully developed. I only want those coaches to help maintain the status quo, which they should be able to do.

The best part of the hiring process was that I only spent $7.8M. This will open up a few more dollars for the player development program

The season begins for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys tonight. We have an attitude of cautious optimism as the challenge gets underway. Last season the major league squad had a record of 58 - 104. Our goal for this season is to keep the losses in double digits. 63 wins would be satisfactory. The previous season saw the team score 710 runs. We think we have improved out on base percentage enough and added some speed. A 100 run improvement is not out of the question is we progress as expected.

The pitching is another story. We decided not to overpay for mediocre middle aged pitchers, and that was basically all that was available on the free agent market. We have promoted afew pitchers from within and taken a few in the rule V draft to fill out the roster. Last season the team allowed 629 walks ( 29th in the league rankings ). We hope to cut that down by more than 25% and keep the total under 450. So although opur pitchers should allow fewer free passes. there will be hits, plenty of hits. They allowed 962 runs to score last season. If we can cut that by 5% and bring it down to 915 we would be thrilled. Unfortunately that is probably a little out of reach because quite frankly, our pitching is bad.

Our AA squad will hopefully be the shining star of the franchise. We have 3 pitchers, 2 are 20, 1 is 21 who we believe are future all-stars. We will introduce them to you as the season goes along. We feel the AA team which had a record 0f 59 - 85 can reverse it's record and win 85 games this season. The players on this team will make up the core of the Allegheny franchise for the next decade.

The Jacksonville Jokers also open up there season tonight against the Toledo Mud Hens who finished last year 2nd in the division, 19 games above the Joker's 3rd place finish. After taking a look at the stats from last year, the team realizes that there is only one direction to go and that is up. In pitching the only category that we didn't finish last in was HR given up, where we finished 2nd to last and our fielding was nearly just as bad. During the rule V draft we tried to fill those holes, grabing some utility defensive players that can play a majority of positions and a few pitchers. We did manage to grab 2 pitchers off of free agency when their demands lowered as we'll need the extra arms this year.

The offense wasn't quite as terrible as the pitching and fielding last year, finishing in the lower third in every category isn't exactly something to get excited about, but when there isn't much to cheer about we'll take what we can get. No new bats came in to help ignite more offense although some of the younger players have developed another year and project to have some nice bats.

With the minors being depleted of talent and the payroll maxed out, the Jokers roster looks like it is set for the year. We'll get the lineup out in the next few days as the season gets underway and look forward to seeing who we can snag with the fourth pick in the draft.

The first season of the Belle Turnaround Challenge is complete. Since niether Jacksonville or Pittsburgh reached the .500 threshhold with our major league squad the challenge will move on to season II.

Pittsburgh finished the regular season with a record of 65 - 97. An improvment of 7 games over last season. We improved our run production from 710 to 742 runs scored and cut down the runs allowed from 962 to 922. At this point we have 3 or 4 players on the major league team who we expect to be there in season III when we are planning on contending.

As we have informed you our players of the future were young and at the AA level this season. We had hoped they would get to 85 victories. They surpassed our hopes with a regular season record of 89 - 55. They made it to the world series where we held the home field advantage and promptly lost the 1st 2 games at home. They then bounced back and won the next 4 games to win the world series. 11 players from this team have already been promoted to AAA to continue their development. We will have excellent coaching at AAA next season. Money will not be a factor.

Overall our minor league teams totaled 50 more victories than the previous season.

Season 2 of the Joey Belle Turnaround Challenge between the Jacksonville Jokers and the Pittsburgh Alleghenys is ready to get underway!


The first year of the challenge found the Jokers with a ML record of 71 - 91 that was good enough to finish 2nd in their divison, 12 games back from 1st place, although with the sub .500 record they were immediately eliminated from winning the challenge. The total points accumulated from the challenge for the Jokers was 1,162. Pittsburgh finished up their ML season with a 65 - 97 record, finishing 4th and 60 games back in their division, which also eliminated them from taking the challenge crown. The Alleghenys total points for the 1st year of the challenge came to 1,117. Needless to say the challenge carries over for year 2, which will occur with the 14th season in the world of Joey Belle.

To start the season, the Jokers find themselves having the number 10th pick in the draft. Pitching was absolutely horrible in S12 before the challenge, with an era of 6.57. S13 with grabbing a pitcher off of Rule 5 draft, the era dropped significantly to 4.39 and hopes to continue in that direction was the focus of S13 draft, grabbing 3 pitchers with the first 3 picks that should all contribute on the ML level in the next 2 seasons. The offense finished in the middle, a batting avg. of .265 and an OBP of .321. The farm system is still
very depleted so management has decided to put RF Kevin Grabowski on the trading block to begin the season in hopes of landing one of the many young pitching prospects that have shown up on the trading block. There are still too many large contracts that are not deserved on team but the good news is we start out with a $48.5M payroll, next season it's down to $32.1, and S16 down further to $12.3M. Free agency occured today, with a Type A set-up pitcher allowing to test free agency in hopes of a couple draft picks and the rest all upper 30 players that were asking to much in a rebuilding franchise. The Jokers main goal will be to add to the young core of pitching that was picked up in last year's draft and putting some pieces together to challenge for the division as they were only 12 games out last year.