Been fun. Thanks for making this series, wish I could stick around to see how your regime pans out. Thanks for inspiring my passion for baseball for years, Bailey.
I will never understand why you didn’t try Mason Miller out as a starter. If he got hurt you throw him back to the pen, and if he didn’t do well, it’s not like it ruins your playoff chances. SMH foolish
I like that you are using the waiver wire a bit. It can be kind of overwhelming to try and check it every day but I have found it helpful. I think it might be a good idea to try to keep your 40 man roster full at all times using waiver claims of optionable players. I just think with the higher injury frequency more depth would be helpful. And when you need to make a 40 man move you can just DFA a guy you recently claimed and not really lose anything important.
You’re so goated Bailey. Btw have personally found that any pitcher with 60+ control and 60+ home run allowed consistently performs well so if you can find any of those available I’d snag them.
And he took out Ben Bowden after 1 batter and 4 pitches! Despite the Red Sox about to have up a string of lefties hitting. I get Kopp is the better pitcher and he wanted him for the high leverage at the top of the lineup, but it really sucked to use one of his two lefties for 1 batter in a lefty heavy lineup.
Great series so far. This has come up a few times - I think you can actually pay draft picks over slot if you have the budget for it, but the budgets you get automatically from John Fisher won't cover slot for all your picks. You're able to change Scouting/Development/Draft budget before the season actually starts. I was able to pay way over slot for my first round pick on an A's save (Konnor Griffin hilariously), but this of course meant I had to take some guys way under slot later on to balance.
You’ve simply proven the A’s are broken. But really man, this series has been incredible and has made me consider picking up this game for fun. Please keep going. And if this is getting frustrating, try a slightly better fringe team (Reds, M’s, Blue Jays) and see if it’s more of starting so deep in the hole or if it’s a (foolish) fundamental problem.
Love this series. I hope you keep it going for a while. This is the first year where you sound a little perplexed by your team not getting better. I think the problem you’re running into is you’re not leaning into an overall philosophy. You should be looking for extreme players and get coaching to build them up. If you have a few heavy hr hitters who strike out a bunch you should lean into that as a philosophy and hire coaches that accentuate that. If you want an all defense team then target the most extreme guys in trades. As a low budget team where payroll isn’t expanding you should just keep your salaries low and max out player dev/scouting until you start winning. You can take higher ceiling lower floor guys in the draft and expect them to outperform because there’s good coaching and dev going on.
