The Awesome Decline of the Milwaukee Zephyrs (1968-) (OOTP16)

[Young Drachma]

My league has over 300 years of history in OOTP, but in Star Trek fashion, I decided to create an alternate timeline starting in 1902. Now that I've basically perfected the league, what would happen if I did things differently?

I wasn't sure.

It turns out, my destiny was to take over the moribund Milwaukee Zephyrs who after have a successful run in the early 1950s including their first title in franchise history ended up being the subject of rumors about the club leaving the city for greener (literal) pastures.

My job as a green GM is to run the club without spending any real money, selling off assets and seeing where we end up.

The story is already occurring, I'm just recalling it here.

[Young Drachma]

Mostly because I hate having my stories trapped on the forum, because it almost makes it harder for me to write, I've been experimenting with writing them over at Medium.

Episode 1: A Hastily Planned News Conference

Episode 2: The Boy Owner

Episode 3: Last Place Blues

Episode 4: Rumors

[Young Drachma]

From here, the story is very high level where I do my thing and then write capsules of what happened over the entire season in brief. It's a good way for me to play as it fits my style and I'm still refining, but I like that it lets me give some insight and detail without having to slave over the minutiae that nobody cares about.

1968: My first season in Milwaukee. Slashed payroll and tried to sell off any assets we had for prospects, in the hope of a lotto ticket or two. Going into full rebuild mode, knowing the team is headed to a new city or at least, that’s the idea. (64-98, 7th place NL East)

1969: Team returns to Milwaukee after rumors abounded that the team was surely headed out of town. Kept payroll at lowest in the majors once again by design ($14.5 million). Traded our ace Carl Pennington after six years in Milwaukee to pitching starved Indiana for four prospects. Farm system ranked #5 in majors.’63 1st round pick Dan Baker wins NL Pulitzer (ROY) (67-95, 7th place NL East)

1970: The League Championship Series goes from best-of-five to best-of-seven starting this year.

Traded last year’s ROY Dan Baker to the New York Gothams in exchange for prospects. Sell high is the mantra in Cream City. (No, we have’t moved.) Actually did make one in-season signing, former Zephyr OF Devin Becker was released from his Japanese contract and we brought him for 2 years/$3m because we had the room and needed an outfielder. What a splurge!

Had the #1 pick in the draft. It was tough, our two options (see pics) were OFs Ryan Coles or Cuban Yamiel Reyes. Which would you have taken? (We took Reyes) We actually had TWO all-stars this year, so not just the mandatory one that every team gets. Go us! Despite our record, I don’t think we were worse, I just think everyone else was better. (62-100, 7th place NL East)

HERE ARE OUR DRAFT PICK OPTIONS... WHICH ONE WOULD YOU HAVE TAKEN?

[Young Drachma]

1971: Baseball realigned this year to a three-division (5/5/4) setup from two. A wild card was added for the first time, meaning for the first time in 70 years, a non-division champ could qualify for the postseason. I resisted it for as long as I could, but after 12 years of the LCS format, it was clear we weren’t getting the best two teams in each league in the post-season.

We’ll have a one-game Wild Card Game between the top two non-division champions, with the winner advancing to the Division Series where the bracket is reseeded by record, not position.

The new Division Series will be a best-of-seven series and the Sunset Series will be shortened (from a best-of-nine) to a best-of-seven to keep it uniform. The current schedule is heavily scheduled in your division, six games against teams outside of your division and then 2 interleave games against every team in the other league.



The minor benefit of this is that the Zephyrs (still in Milwaukee) are in the NL Central which has just four teams, meaning we can’t finish worst than 4th! Improvement!

SP Sully Hiller was the centerpiece of the deal sending Carl Pennington to Indiana two years ago. The 24-year old right-hander needed Tommy John surgery and will be out a year.


Payroll will again remain under $20m. The Zephyrs playoff drought is at 12 years and counting. Last year’s attendance was its lowest since 1947.



We didn’t make any moves this year, as we wait for our prospects to develop and to maybe turn things around. Alas, another disappointing year in the Land of Brats. We did have the 1st overall pick for the 2nd straight year. This time we took Catcher Dan Lowe over an outfielder named Ryan Fore. I’m telling you his name so if in a decade he’s a star, we can remember that I missed out. (61-101, 4th NL Central)

[Young Drachma]

1971 Postseason:

It’s fitting that in the first year of the wild card, a 2nd place team managed to win the whole damn thing. New Orleans, an 87-win team that’s two years removed from their last title sneaks into the playoffs, beats an 89-win Great Plains club, then summarily dispatches the team that won their division by nine games (Nashville) before THEN beating a 93-win Arizona team to face Providence in the 69th Sunset Series, sweeping them to capture their 2nd title in 3 years.

Welcome to the new normal!

[Young Drachma]

1972: 2nd best farm system in the bigs. I did some looking around to see what we’ve got cooking and I ran across this curious case. Because I usually fast-sim, I miss cool stories like this and these kids go off to suck and retire without me noticing.

Anyway, this kid Stevie Philabaum was drafted by the Zs in ’67 in the 1st round. Turns out he’s a two-way player, but the AI had him as a hitter. Only way I found out he had pitching ability was searching the team’s organizational rankings graphic and it showed him leading the rotation.

So I converted his position to pitcher after he’s spent the past four years in the organization as a hitter. We’ll see how it goes!





Fans are getting restless, the trust that owns the Milwaukee Zephyrs refuses to spend as the ABA will not allow the ownership group to sell to its preferred options due to “conflicts” with new potential owners.

After YEARS of lawsuits, rankling and ugliness between the sides, a court order has forced the trust to sell the team to the American Baseball Association in receivership to be sold this upcoming year.

After five years in limbo, it looks like this will finally be the last season that the Zephyrs spend in Milwaukee.

The ’72 schedule switched to a schedule where teams play fewer interleague series (18 games against the other league) as opposed to playing everybody, as well as an extra inter-division series, so it makes it less easy to fatten up on bad teams in your own division.

Not that it matters for us, we’ll be bad no matter who we play. That said, after four years of sucking I wanted to at least do SOMETHING. So in an effort to at least get the fans excited about the team for a while, even if it was a moot point, we paid the $3 million contract fee to acquire 5-time Japanese League MVP Ken Sato. He was tied to a long-term deal in Japan and at age 33 wasn’t going to be posted. We’re overpaying him obviously, given his advanced age (7 years/$66.5 million) but my idea here was that it’d just be fun to have someone to root for on this team for once and perhaps playing in a place with no expectations will extend his career somehow.



#1 pick again for the 3rd straight year. We take CF Jake Donahey over OF Miguel Garley out of Panama. I started moving some of the prospects we have that don’t look like they’re going to pan out, to at least recoup something for them. The injury bug wasn’t kind to us either, so dudes like Yamiel Reyes made the majors but couldn’t stay healthy. Still, after two seasons in the minors he’s the first of my top draft picks to make it to the bigs as a full-timer so that’s kind of exciting.

Sato had a solid first season in the majors and was one of three Zephyrs picked for the all-star team. Reliever Nick Sheets came in 3rd in the Reliever of the Year voting. (61-101, 4th NL Central)

1972 Postseason: In the 2nd year of the wild card era, we have our first Wild Card tie. Louisville and Virginia (88-74) tie for the 2nd wild card in the AL. Louisville beat them and advanced to the post-season.



Boston was really the catalyst for the playoff change. That team was good for years but kept missing the post-season because the NL East was too tough. This year after near misses including a wild card appearance last year, the Yanks won their first title in 17 years. Been a fun team to watch, their ace Matt Munroe is one of those guys who I thought might get dealt because the team wasn't going anywhere and turns out that his signing a long-term deal here was the right move.



I mentioned that I've really never had a team that I liked as much as this one. For years, I've been wondering what it'd be like to run an OOTP solo team -- I've had bad online ones before but that's different -- and just live through the moribund years because I don't normally do that.

But this has been fun to get immersed in the team, start liking the players even if the team is bad and hope your prospect develop. I usually trade them. Maybe this is a sign of progress, old age or both? Who knows.

[Young Drachma]

1973: The legal status of the Zephyrs is not in doubt — the team is owned by the big leagues — but there was no city quite ready to take them for just a year and no owner quite ready to swoop in. Alas, the Zephyrs remain for another year…and don’t expect any major changes in their status in the standings either. The team won’t have the 1st pick this year — the New York Titans will get have that honor — but we will pick 2nd.

I brought back Alexis Aranda who was the 2nd guy I traded when I took over the team six years ago. He’s like 100-something hits away from 3500 hits and so I figured it’d give the fans someone else they remember to watch while we stink up the joint since Sato can’t do all the work. It’s a one year deal worth just over a $1m. Not bad for a future Hall of Famer, even though he won’t go into the Hall as a Zephyr (he spent more time in San Francisco and Minnesota).

Turns out, by the draft (June 6th) we were at .500 and only 3.5 games out of 1st in the NL Central. Does this mean we make an attempt and go for it? I had to think about it. We were anchored by Top 5 pitching, but our offense needed a lot of work. We have some prospects obviously, which helped…and if you’ve read me before you know I can’t resist a pennant race or dealing prospects for a chance at a playoff spot.

I decided to see how things shook out through June before making any hasty moves, but honestly my draft picks haven’t really been panning out like I’d hoped (outside of Yamiel Reyes) so I wouldn’t mind packaging them up for an outside shot at the post-season, given that we’re not exactly moving forward. How fun would that be for our suffering fans?

On June 11th, we were 35-34 and just 2 games out of 1st in the NL Central. (1.5 GB in the Wild Card) We had ourselves a pennant race!

I acquired CL Steve Douglass from Florida for two bit prospects. It’s a rental, but Douglass is a closer with four pitches. I’d like to experiment with him in the rotation on a pitch count, tbh. So that’s why I went and got him.

At the end of June, we were 42-44 and somehow in BETTER shape, just .5 game out of 1st place. This is completely uncharted territory for this team in the modern era. It was also pretty obvious the only way we’re making the playoffs is out of the terrible NL Central. Which we’re totally cool with.

Our payroll is 27th in the majors at $39.27 million. The biggest trade i’ve made in six years was to acquire SP Travis Doty from the New York Titans.

Doty is 26 and was wasting away on a bad New York team. We sent five players, all of whom I had some hopes for at one time or another, but I felt like it was the right trigger to pull to get a top of the rotation starter. At just $4m and under team control for a few more years, it seemed like a solid move.



Somehow the Milwaukee Zephyrs are steaming into July with a 2.5 game lead (as of July 20th) in the NL Central. I’m not just surprised, I’m SHOCKED. There are no words for this. I’m half wanting to make moves to ensure we make the playoffs, I’m half wanting to do nothing and sim to the end to make sure it’s real.

It’s probably not real, right?

In non-DC typical fashion, I simmed to the end of July without making anymore deals. Our trade deadline is August 15th. On August 1st, we sat 57-54, a 1/2 game out of 1st in the division and a game out of the wild card, which is back in play now.

The team was one of the worst offensive teams in the NL, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that in mid-season without blowing things up and I just wasn’t comfortable doing that.

So I made a few role player trades, nothing extravagant like the deal to get Doty and just figured if we make it, we make it and if not, we don’t. This is very uncharacteristic for me and my teams, but…I just for once didn’t want to deal all of my prospects away.

Call it growth or old age, I don’t really know.

On September 1st, we sat 74-66, 2.5 games ahead of Ohio for the NL Central lead. We played them five times in September. I just simmed to the end of the season once we got to the 1st of that month and let the chips fall where they might.

And holy shit. (88-74, 1st NL Central)





35-year old Japanese import Ken Sato in his 2nd big league season led the NL in batting at .324. Yamiel Reyes in his 2nd full big league season was 3rd in RBI (115) and WAR (6.1) and somehow, my ragtag team is somehow going post-season dancing.

Guys, I’m going to bed. I’ll sim the playoffs tomorrow. This is crazy. If this is the last year of Zephyrs baseball, at least we're sending the fans out with a winner of some kind. I have no illusions this team can win a title, but an NLDS appearance is far beyond what I expected when we started simming.



Sidenote: I didn't realize I didn't turn on "cannot be fired" and so, it's a miracle that I was given a one-year extension to run this team and get here.

Five straight last place finishes. Then this.



It's the most interesting OOTP season I've ever had. EVER. And we're not even going to win the title and I'm saying that. I can't wait to unpack this one. So interesting!

[Young Drachma]

[Young Drachma]

1973 POSTSEASON:

DIVISION SERIES:


I felt like we were doomed. No way this team could get past the first round. We were taking on the Los Angeles Royals who have made the playoffs in 3 of the last 4 years. They finished 1st in the NL West (91-71) but when I first noticed we’d have their number during the regular season (6-3 against them) but I just thought there was no way.

Two of my late season acquisitions 3B Kyle Stearns and OF Aaron Holland hit over .400 in this series. Travis Doty, the ace we got from New York had a 1.54 ERA in three games. The Series went seven games, but Game 7 was an 11-0 victory by the Zephyrs, after being up 3 games to 1 and choking away that lead to be forced to a 7th game on the road.

NLCS:


The Philadelphia Quakers were everything LA wasn’t. They were 5-1 against us in the regular season, 2nd in the NL in runs scored and 4th in runs allowed. I just felt like going into this series there was just no way that we’d be able to beat them and yet, I didn’t stop to do anything.

I just simmed the games immediately and so, when we went up 3-0 on them, I realized we just hit them in the mouth before they had a chance to really catch their breath. Travis Doty, our ace didn’t even get a decision in this Series. It was the perennial Japanese MVP Ken Sato making his mark in America as the NLCS MVP. He hit an insane .526 in this series. Starter J.P. Britt, who has been on this team since his signing as a minor league FA in 1968 went 2-0 with 10Ks in this Series too.

And with that win, the Zephyrs won their first pennant since 1958.

71ST SUNSET SERIES: The 2-time defending Great Plains Flycatchers were our opponent in the Sunset Series. Led by three-time Sebastian Marot Award (Pitcher of the Year) winner 24-year old hard-throwing righty Dick Hall, I didn’t expect we had any real chance in this Series mostly because of him.

After we went down 3 games to 1 (format 2-2-1-1-1), I felt like “hey at least we got here. I’ll take it.” In Game 5, Series MVP SP Justin Fromm, who I acquired in an eight-player trade back in 1968 when I dealt our closer William Fevre to Salt Lake City pitched like an boss, going 8 2/3rd innings to save the season for us.

Five of the 7 games in this Series were one-run games, including all three of the last games Milwaukee won to capture the entire Series. Travis Doty went in Game 6, mostly because we needed to get to a Game 7 and felt like he gave us the best chance to do that. And he did his job.

In Game 7, I was so sure we were doomed. Dick Hall was 2-1, 1.17 ERA in this Series. That lone loss came in Game 7. Neither team hit especially well in this Series, but an RBI single from Ken Sato in the Top of the 6th scoring Kyle Stearns was the difference maker.



I didn’t control anything other than substitutions and Game 7 was the only playoff game I played out in the entire playoffs. With Britt on the mound, I basically told myself that if he could give us five solid innings, that we’d literally go by committee to get us to the 9th inning. I liked our chances, but Great Plains kept ticking away around our lead…which made me more nervous because again, all I was doing was controlling things in the hopes that we could get ourselves to at least extra innings if needed. I even warmed Doty up in the 9th just in case stuff went haywire but we ended up not needing him.





OOC: Winning a title didn’t save the New Jersey Devils, it took the commissioner stepping in to prevent their move to Nashville immediately after winning the Stanley Cup in 1995. If the Expos somehow made the post-season in 2003, they still would’ve ended up moving down the road, there was no saving them.

In that same way, as the Zephyrs kept reeling off wins, I was confused, excited — mystified — and yet, thinking “well does this mean I have to keep them in Milwaukee?” Then I thought about it and decided not to.

If you read the baseball-fever forums (I don’t anymore, but used to) there are these fans who love the Dodgers and Athletics and long missed teams that left their cities decades ago. What if the best memory of a team was an improbable “us against the world” championship that NOBODY saw coming? What if even in spite of that, it wasn’t enough to keep the team there?

What if the best memory of your favorite team was the year they won it all, then ended the chapter, closed the story and broke your heart? Our favorite shows go off the air. Our favorite stores, restaurants and even churches close. Our favorite band eventually breaks up or dies.

Maybe our favorite team can go away. Their history and the legacy of their journey can remain with us, but…what would that story be like?

I’ve always tried when I write stories to disconnect histories when teams move, because it’s better to keep teams disconnected from a different, more distant city, but what if there was a link to the past, especially when that link includes people who’ll make the transition from one uniform and one jersey to another?

I’m not sure, but we’re going to examine it because after a decade and more of playing this game, I’ve never found a more interesting story that’s captured my imagination with a league and characters that I can focus on without being overwhelmed. It’s kind of fascinating.

[Young Drachma]

Having never faced a situation quite like this one, baseball officials were not sure when to announce the sale of the Zephyrs -- who won a title while league owned -- to a group from Portland, Oregon for the start of the 1974 season.

Finally a few days after the Daylight Series, after the parade was done, the announcement was done. The Zephyrs were done. Packing their bags for the Pacific Northwest after 43 years in Milwaukee.

In an unprecedented move, the Commissioner of Baseball announced that while the league would respect the transfer of all players through the Zephyrs system to the Portland Baseball Club, the Zephyrs history would effectively be closed as of the 1973 season.

So there will be a lineage between the two clubs that binds them, but officially for recorded purposes the Portland club will be a retroactive expansion club.

[Young Drachma]

1974: The first season of Portland Beavers baseball involved a spending limit of no more than $40 million. We never got there though.

Our big signings this off-season were acquiring another Japanese export, this time in the form of export hurler SP Kozo Hoshino, who won a Marot award in his first year over here. Our big mid-season trade was to acquire catcher and former MVP Jeremy Le Borgne from Minnesota in exchange for four players, the centerpiece of that deal was our 1974 draft pick Josh Aubrey, a hard throwing 18-year old hurler who has the potential to be a starter. Fun fact, LeBorgne was the 1st rounder of the Milwaukee Zephyrs in 1960 but was dealt a year later for an part-time outfielder who spent four years in Milwaukee before I showed up.

We had a solid rotation all year, but the offense was slow to arrive. In the end, though the team won the NL West in the first season to switch divisions, but lost in the Sunset Series in 7 games to Nashville Blues who won their first title since moving from Toronto in 1968 and the franchise’s first title since the 1940s. (100-62, 1st NL West)

Taking a page from the Alex Anthopolous album, I’m going to quit over a contract dispute in Portland and take over a new team. It’ll be tough watching my guys from afar, but I think it makes for a better story and also..losing was interesting in a weird way.

[Young Drachma]

1975:

I'm considering taking this season off and just being a reporter on the entire league. I haven't figured out how to do that yet or what I want to do, exactly. I just think it might be interesting to not play for a year after leaving the team and seeing how things go before getting with another franchise.