OOTP Blitz 25: Solo RTS meets Moneyball

[Young Drachma]

Emergency Pod Energy: Making Sense of the Cardinals and Stags at the Break

Are we sure the Cardinals and Stags are good? Like, actually good? We're doing that thing again where we're trying to convince ourselves that two teams with obvious fatal flaws can somehow figure it out in the second half. Let's break this down, Bill Simmons style.

The "Oh No, We Might Have Made a Huge Mistake" Cardinals

Here's my favorite stat: The Cardinals are 23-20 at home, 21-19 on the road. They're basically the same team everywhere! That's either impressive consistency or depressing mediocrity, depending on how many prospects you traded away for this performance. (Spoiler: They traded all of them.)

The thing nobody wants to talk about? Their run differential is actually pretty good! They're outscoring opponents by a decent margin, ranking top-3 in the NL in both ERA (3.53) and batting average (.260). This feels like one of those teams that should be better than their record, but then you look up and realize they're 14 games behind Cincinnati and you're like "wait, what?"

The Mark Wleh thing is real (2.78 ERA, 149 K in 132.2 IP). The Leuri Ramírez thing is definitely real (.336/.384/.607 with 48 extra-base hits!). But we're officially at the "Are we sure Urban Henry isn't washed?" stage of the season (4.03 ERA at age 39), and that's concerning.

The "We Had One Year to Get This Right" Stags

This might be my favorite subplot of the 2063 season. The Trust finally lets them spend money, and their rotation immediately posts a 5.81 ERA. That's not just bad - that's historically bad. It's like they ordered a rotation from Wish.com.

But here's the thing nobody's talking about: Their offense is actually incredible! They're slashing .277/.354/.457 as a team. Paul Correa is having that classic "guy who breaks out the year before his team has to trade him" season (.317/.376/.592). Even their catcher, Otis Ramírez, is raking (.299/.371/.460).

The "What Would You Do?" Game

If I'm running the Cardinals, I'm making one more push. You've already traded away your future - might as well go down swinging. They need another starter (Henry's peripherals are scary) and maybe a catcher who can hit above .207 (sorry, Chris Carter).

The Stags? This is brutal, but they have to start taking calls. The Trust's mandate means this team is getting torn down regardless - might as well maximize the return. Correa, Ramírez, and Stan Wallace could bring back actual prospects. Sometimes you have to know when to fold 'em.

The Weird "What If?" Scenarios

What if the Cardinals had just... not traded away baseball's #8 prospect? What if the Stags had spent their one year of real money on, I don't know, pitchers who can actually pitch? These are the questions that keep fans up at night.

The verdict

We're watching two teams who went all-in with very different definitions of "all." The Cardinals mortgaged the future for a wild card race. The Stags got one year to dream and turned it into a nightmare. The real winners? Cincinnati and Sacramento, who are probably wondering how they became the AL West/NL Central powerhouses while nobody was looking.

Are we sure this isn't the darkest timeline?

[Young Drachma]

Baseball Doesn't Care About Your Cinderella Story

This was supposed to be the Indianapolis Arrows' funeral march. Their lame-duck season before relocating to New Jersey, where some tech bro consortium led by Ethereum millionaire Devon "Web3" Watson paid $2.1 billion to move them to a yet-to-be-built stadium in Newark. Instead, they're leading the AL Central with the third-lowest payroll in baseball ($38.1M), because the sport occasionally likes to punch you in the gut while grinning.

The worst part isn't that they're good. The worst part is that Indianapolis has collectively shrugged. The Arrows are drawing fewer fans than the damn Phillies, who are actively trying to lose games. Just over a million people have bothered to show up at midseason to watch a first-place team, because why get attached to something that's already got one foot out the door?

It's 2003 Montreal Expos all over again, except MLB isn't actively sabotaging this team - reality is doing that job just fine. The new ownership group has made it clear there will be no additional spending. The deadline will come and go without reinforcements. The cruel mathematics of baseball say this team should regress, and management seems perfectly content to let that happen.

This is what happens when the sport treats its teams like NFTs to be flipped rather than civic institutions to be nurtured. The Arrows are winning despite a payroll that wouldn't cover Aaron Judge's breakfast tab. Their starting rotation, led by Avery Prescott (2.70 ERA) and Estefan Cuello (3.26 ERA), is putting up numbers that would make Sandy Koufax blush. Raymond Nadeau (.297/.373/.441) is having the kind of season that usually leads to a statue outside the ballpark. Instead, it'll probably lead to a trade to a "real" contender.

The fans aren't stupid. They know this ends with moving trucks and heartbreak. Better to keep your distance now than watch your team win just enough games to make leaving hurt more. The incoming owners talk about "market inefficiencies" and "optimization strategies" while the current team is actually winning baseball games despite having a payroll that makes the Pirates look like the Yankees.

Baseball is the only sport where success can feel like a curse. The Arrows are proving they can win with nothing, which means the new owners will probably give them exactly that when they reach Newark. The few thousand diehards still showing up to games are watching their team win while dying, like a star burning brightest just before it collapses.

Somewhere, Omar Minaya is watching this and nodding knowingly. At least MLB had the decency to kill the Expos' dreams officially. Indianapolis just has to watch their team succeed while knowing every win brings them closer to goodbye.

The Arrows open a three-game set with Detroit tomorrow. Tickets are available. Lots of them.

[Young Drachma]

Should the Orioles Consider the Unthinkable?

When the final out of the 2062 World Series settled into Dylan Madden's glove, the Baltimore Orioles looked poised for a dynasty. Fast forward to the 2063 All-Star break, and they're 41-43, sitting 4 games back in a suddenly combustible AL East that features the surprising Red Sox and Marlins atop the division.

The easy narrative would be to chalk this up to a championship hangover. But the underlying metrics suggest something more concerning: this might be who the 2063 Orioles actually are.

The Warning Signs
- Run differential suggests they're playing to their record
- Rotation ERA has risen from 3.45 (1st in AL) to 3.99 (3rd)
- Team OPS down 42 points from 2062
- Only Jesús Dávilos (13-2, 2.36 ERA) performing at 2062 levels

The Farm System Opportunity
Here's where it gets interesting. Despite going all-in for their 2062 title run, the Orioles still possess baseball's 8th-ranked farm system. This creates a fascinating strategic opportunity that most defending champions don't have: they could actually sell high on certain pieces and potentially extend their competitive window rather than watching it close.

Trade Candidates With Value
- Spencer Van Doren (.291/.351/.500, 11 HR)
- Buster Moreno (.317, 18 HR, 50 RBI)
- Rod Pitkin (8-6, 4.11 ERA)

The Case for Retooling
1. AL East suddenly looks like a gauntlet
2. Farm system could become elite with right moves
3. Core pieces still young enough to build around
4. Could acquire MLB-ready talent rather than pure prospects

The Projection Systems' View
ZiPS gives the Orioles just a 24% chance of making the playoffs, down from 76% in preseason. More concerningly, their three-year projection has declined significantly since Opening Day.

The Smart Play
Rather than watching their window potentially close, the Orioles could thread the needle: sell high on certain pieces, restock the farm system, and potentially compete again as soon as 2064 with a more sustainable core built around Dávilos.

Comparables
The 2019 Red Sox faced a similar decision after their 2018 title. They chose to half-measure it and ended up worse off. The Orioles have the opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive.

The next two weeks could define the franchise's trajectory for the next half-decade. Sometimes the boldest move is being willing to take a small step back to take two steps forward.

The Verdict
If the Orioles can get premium returns for players like Van Doren and Moreno while keeping their core intact, they should strongly consider it. Their farm system strength gives them a unique opportunity to retool without rebuilding - an opportunity most defending champions never get.

Sometimes you have to be willing to make the unpopular move to make the right one.

[Young Drachma]

I already figured out my spinoff of this dynasty, right now I'm still too invested in reporting the outcomes and no one really cares but me. So I'm going to divest from Portland after this year as I mentioned already and my new 2nd team are going to be the Yankees. Except, we'll be committed to them becoming a barnstorming team half of their home dates and I'll use their roster for all sorts of weird experiments like "what would it look like to have a roster of 40-50 OVR guys on a big league team" or "can a whole team of international players be competitive across a whole season?" Or maybe just some odd sabermetrics immersion, since I'm still not as good at referencing that stuff as i should be.

I obviously am always notorious for moving teams in my dynasties and given I'm adding a third New York team again, I felt like this was also a funny way to get myself to get through some seasons faster while also getting to try some stuff out.

I might just end this storyline at the end of the season and go straight into the Yankees storyline, but will continue to run updates of the familiar players and franchises as things advance. It'll also allow us to delve a bit into the history that's lapsed since 2023 when this league started, we've had some crazy stat eras in this universe because I hadn't really stabilized the statistics in the earlier versions of the game and so, for instance the all-time strikeouts record has been long broken and other weird things like that (though not home runs)

Anyway, there's way more to delve into in this universe, I mostly just want to futz more quickly, but managing a good team makes me less inclined to do that so I'm gonna take a bad team over and write about it, because being weird right now might be more fun, then I can god-mode all of the storyline stuff that I care about around the margins while we watch from the cheapseats from Omaha or Boise or wherever else I might make them visit.


Baseball's Death Star Goes Mobile, and Everyone's Getting Paid to Like It

The New York Yankees, baseball's most insufferably successful franchise and walking monument to pinstriped hubris, just sold for $12.8 billion to a group of people who think baseball teams should operate like Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. And the worst part? They might not be entirely wrong.

Laverne Ng, the impossibly Yale-educated managing partner of Quantum Frontier Partners who probably relaxes by hostile-takeovers of family-owned bakeries, spent 47 minutes Thursday explaining why baseball's most valuable franchise should spend half its time wandering the countryside like a barnstorming circus act from the 1920s. She used terms like "experiential revenue optimization" and "globally scalable entertainment vehicle" while old-time Yankees beat writers quietly died inside.

"The Yankees aren't just a baseball team," Ng explained, somehow managing to sound both condescending and evangelical at once. "They're a premium content platform with unprecedented brand elasticity. We're simply unleashing their potential from the artificial constraints of geographical permanence."

In other words, the Yankees are about to become baseball's first touring franchise, because apparently nobody at MLB headquarters had the courage to say "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" when someone suggests turning the sport's most valuable team into a baseball version of Phish.

The plan, as far as anyone can decode it from the PowerPoint slides filled with charts that only go up, is to split the Yankees' home games between Yankee Stadium and a series of yet-to-be-announced venues across the globe. The Stadium itself will be transformed into what Ng calls a "365-day entertainment destination," which presumably means charging $45 for craft beer while showing Yankees highlights on the jumbotron year-round.

MLB's owners approved the sale unanimously, primarily because they were all too busy counting their own potential franchise valuations after this deal. When you sell the Yankees for $12.8 billion, suddenly every owner gets to add a zero to their own franchise's theoretical worth. It's the kind of math that makes billionaires giddy.

Bryce Romney IV, Quantum's head of "Legacy Asset Transformation" and someone who definitely has strong opinions about yacht manufacturers, insisted this is the future of sports entertainment. "We're not moving the Yankees," he said, straightening his Hermès tie. "We're expanding their footprint to match their cultural significance." The fact that this footprint now includes charging $500 for premium tickets in cities to be named later is, presumably, just a happy coincidence.

The Bronx, predictably, is taking this about as well as you'd expect. Local business owners around the stadium are furious, fans are threatening to cancel season tickets they've had since Mantle played center field, and politicians are writing strongly-worded letters that will be immediately recycled by Quantum's army of lawyers.

But here's the thing that makes this whole absurd venture just crazy enough to work: The Yankees actually might be the only franchise that could pull this off. Their brand is so culturally embedded, their mystique so artificially amplified, that they might actually be more valuable as a touring act than a traditional baseball team. They're baseball's Rolling Stones – everyone wants to see them once, even if half the audience is there ironically.

"The Yankees transcend baseball," Ng insisted, probably while mentally calculating the markup on limited edition market-specific merchandise. "We're not bound by convention. We're creating a new paradigm for sports entertainment."

The saddest part? She's probably right. In a world where teams routinely blackmail cities for stadium funding and treat fans like walking credit cards, turning baseball's most famous franchise into a touring roadshow isn't even the most cynical thing to happen to baseball this decade. It might not even be the most cynical thing to happen this week.

When asked about concerns that this plan fundamentally alters the nature of what a baseball team means to its community, Romney offered the kind of response that only someone who summers in the Hamptons could deliver with a straight face: "We're not altering tradition. We're amplifying it. The Yankees belong to the world now."

The Yankees will begin their transformation in 2064, and god help us all, because if this works, every private equity firm with a Bloomberg terminal and a PowerPoint license is going to start eyeing other franchises. Baseball teams as touring acts. What's next – timeshare ballparks? Pay-per-view batting practice?

Actually, don't answer that. Someone at Quantum Frontier is probably already working on the pitch deck.