1927 NEW YORK KNIGHTS TEAM PREVIEW
My proudest acquistion came pretty much at the start of my career here. We picked up
Brad Blanchard from Williamsport. He was one of three top flight hurlers we acquired from teams in a series of salary dumps, but it became pretty apparently quickly that we wouldn't be able to do the 3 Muskateers deal, because they would've commanded 4/5ths of our payroll, so I shipped them off to other teams and began the process of building the ballclub that had 9 guys on the ML roster when I arrived.
The minor leaguers were pretty barren, save for the few prospects I could manage to peddle off in those early deals.
One of the little known tricks of this league is that minor leaguers get free agency after 3 years. I do that on purpose so teams can't horde FA prospects for cheap, if they wanna horde 'em, they better pay 'em and well, most teams forget or don't.
We're talking the sorts of guys who are slow to develop, who probably won't ever develop or are 23-24 and you're just not sure about 'em.
Well, we munched on a steady diet of these players during the off-season, as there was no other way to fill out our roster.
Among the free agents we signed that weren't in this category, we picked up 15-game winner Roy Moore from Los Angeles as a free agent and 16-game winner Rodrigo Rivera from Cleveland in the same manner. Considering Brad Blanchard is our ace, but won just 13-games on an underachieving Williamsport club last year, we're thinking that we've got a Top 3 that have the makings of something pretty special.
Offensively, there are some proven newcomers coming over via trade or free agency. We're expecting a huge market correction offensively this year, as I was trying to implement some old offensive settings I had laying around from an earlier FOOL iteration and the average league ERA shot up about 3 runs in each league. Given everything has been fairly consistent for the past 100+ years, last year will stand out as an anomaly forever. It's okay, but...I do want to get offense up, as the problem over the past 40-50 years or so, is that players just aren't as good as the ones from the past, so their production isn't where theirs is and so, we've seen a steady decline in the league batting averages and ERA has dropped too.
But that's too much.
But according to last year's stats, we've got 5 100+ RBI guys on our club including 160 RBI guy Woody McCann and 30 HR/150 RBI guy Don Carter.
I was pretty sensitive to the idea of us having the largest payroll in the league, because I never like to do that, because I feel like as a human I shouldn't. But there's something to keep in mind -- I always overpay for talent I want and THREE players account for over $30 million of our payroll. So that number is a bit deceiving.
Ownership sees this as our opportunity to burnish the Knights within the New York faithful. The Gothams have 9 championships, tied with Carolina for #2 on the all-time list, but Carolina has been around since the beginning, the Gothams are 40 years younger.
Meanwhile, the Knights haven't quite established themselves in the city and are looking hard to do so.
A failure to succeed with this club will be another line in a frustration set of problems for this ballclub, so...we're hoping this is the start of something.
Do I think we'll make the playoffs? No. Do I expect to? Yes. We really should, even with so many question mark players in certain spots and a less than sure bullpen.
PREDICTION: 86-76, 2ND PL EAST