1973 Off Season
Yaz, to be quite frank, was being a major cock in renegotiations. We kept agreeing to his demands and he kept asking for more. We finally got fed up and walked away from the table. Eff him.
We let Paul Blair walk
Closer, Bill Champion gets $80K in arbitration. I'm actually ok with that.
We sell off 3 decent prospects, pitchers Randy Tate, Ed Plank and Greg Terlecky to the Brewers for $265K.
Not ready to hand him 1B and having no place to put him, we send 1B Joe Staton to the Yankees for a couple of good, low level prospects in 19 year old RP Tom Hausman and 21 year old 2B Jorge Ortega.
We extend backup SS Bert Campaneris at 6 years for $40K per season and closer Bill Champion for 5 years at $70K per.
Middle reliever Dennis Musgraves wants much more than I think he's worth but I'm going to keep him this year and let him play out his contract.
The big news is that we extend Tommy John for 6 season at $430K per season. It's a lot of money, but when we let Yaz walk I had to use that money to lock John up long term.
Our pitching staff stays exactly the same, and I expect more of the same dominance. We are loaded with young arms in AAA. If anyone falters or gets injured we have at least 6 guys all just about ready.
Gary Matthews joins the lineup in LF and he'll bat 2nd. Greg Luzinski joins the bench. We shouldn't have any trouble scoring runs again this year. We have a solid group of veterans at AAA and while our everyday prospects aren't quite as good as our pitching prospects we do have some good youth at the lower levels.
With Tommy Johns deal we're way over budget this year. We have about $800K in cash and we're projected to lose $1.2M this year so that wouldn't be good. On the bright side we've beat projections our first two years in the Vet so hopefully we do this year too. If we do run into the trouble during the season I can always sell off a prospect or two.
So ok then, let's get the ball rolling on 1973.