The Franchise: A Year With The St. Louis Aviators (SLOP)

[Young Drachma]

I'm not sure we'll go beyond one year with this thing. But I thought it might be fun to do a setup of the upcoming SLOP season with my specific team, especially since it'll go so quickly thanks to the holiday.



Ok, so the basics are SLOP go like this. It's a fast-sim league. Unlike FOOL, which I created back in 2008 or so, SLOP sims an entire season in two sims rather than one. So one week we have a season and the other week, there's just the off-season.

When I finally decided I wanted to run an OOTP league again after take about two years off, it'd been after a while of testing and tweaking the fast-sim concept on my own to see what worked and what didn't. Then we spent about 3-4 years doing a small 8-team concept league to see how that'd work and once it was ready-ish for prime time, launched it and now we're 26 seasons into the concept.

It's now an 18-team league (9 teams per league) with 3 in each league making the playoffs. Thanks to the new flexible playoffs, we have 2 v. 3 seed play each other in the League Elimination Series (best of five) to determine who makes the LCS to play the top-seed. Then the two face off in a best-of-nine Championship called the Sunset Series for all the marbles.

I like to say SLOP has "less than ten rules" because the idea is to keep it pretty simple. Still, it's a pretty creative concept.

I'll just copy them, because I don't feel like typing it out:

Restricted Free Agents: Does your team have the next baseball version of Linsanity? Well you can RFA one guy per year and match any offer he receives on the open market. Keep those fans happy!

3 playoff teams per league: SLOP is a 18-team league with two leagues (one DH, one no-DH) of eight teams. The top 3 teams in each league make the playoffs, with 2 v. 3 duking it out in a best-of-five game Elimination Series to determine who makes the LCS (best-of-seven) with the winners meeting the Sunset Series (best-of-nine) annually.

Cap space trading: Our salary cap is $100m. Financials are consistent (and modern), so there's no historical alterations. Tanking or going to be a bottom feeder? You can trade cap space for picks & players. It's for one-season at a time, but it's added a whole new wrinkle to things.

Fast-sim with a mid-season break: We sim the whole year in two days. So we sim to the all-star break, then you get about a day or so to make deals, regroup and power through for the 2nd half of the year. Injuries are turned off. Fatigue isn't a huge factor, but is turned on.

So those are the basics. Now I'm going to talk about my team, the league we're in and our prospects for this upcoming season.

[Young Drachma]

So, the St. Louis Aviators were born seven years ago as the Milwaukee Blue Sox. I've been something of a church planter in SLOP, because as the league grew, more people wanted to take over established teams and so, I'd make them good and then when a new person joined let them take over my clubs and I'd take an expansion team.

So I took over the expansion Milwaukee club in '57 and intentionally built them with my eyes on the playoffs. Expansion teams in SLOP don't get the benefit of an expansion draft, mostly because those things are a logistical nightmare and people usually hate losing anyone. Plus, the players stink. So we just stock them with generated players which usually results in at least one or two bonafide prospects and then they have their entire cap space (save for $6.25m) to spend as they wish.

This gives them a chance to immediately become players if it's really a strong expansion year and so, that's precisely what I did with Milwaukee. I made some deals, moved some stuff around and we made the playoffs that year. We beat Memphis in the ALES in five games, but lost to Winnemucca in the ALCS in six games.

After one more season in Milwaukee, the team regressed to a 72-90 record and the franchise relocated to Denver and became the Denver Dinosaurs. That team just plain stunk. We also moved to the Nationwide League (NL), the no-DH league in SLOP, to accommodate an ownership group that preferred to play in the DH league, the Associated League (AL).

During both years in Denver, the Dinos lost 100+ games, (29-133, 62-100) and after that, packed up and moved back to the midwest becoming the St. Louis Aviators in 1861. The A's were an immediate hit. We'd been tanking for a few years, picked up some good talent in the draft and acquired quite a bit of cap space en route to what I hoped would be a title year.

We were seriously going for broke as evidenced by our $157m million payroll in '61. But despite returning to the playoffs for the first time since our first season (in Milwaukee) the team (96-66) lost to an upstart San Diego team in six games en route to them claiming the Series title.

Last year, we regressed to go 84-78, good for 5th in the Associated League where we returned back to after the move to St. Louis.

So now we're facing a new year with a lot of the same threats as last year and a wide-open league where truly anything can happen as it has the past few years. We'll take a look at the Aviators roster and let you know whether or not we think we've got a shot at this.

The 1st half of the season takes place on Monday night, so we'll know shortly whether the work I've done this off-season to try to patch the holes as I saw them in the rotation and lineup will pay any dividends at all.

[Young Drachma]

So tomorrow's the first half and I made a bunch of moves this weekend that I'm not sure where they're going to put us. We won 84 games last year, but we were basically playing in a league where parity is the story of the day. It's especially true in the NL, but in the AL, there are routinely 4-5 teams competing for a post-season spot.

Anyway, there are the moves I made.

Shakil Sa'eed to Denver: Sa'eed was overpriced and underperforming. Keeping him in the rotation was killing me, but he's only 24 and I just felt like he had something to offer. I signed him as a free- agent a year ago. Since winning 40 games combined 3-4 years ago, he's won just 12 he last year in Kauai and last year for us I took him out of the rotation because he was such a liability, but his work in the bullpen wasn't much to scream about.

Seems he lost the ability to throw strikes. So I dealt him to expansion Denver for a 3rd rounder. Essentially giving up on him, but including this year he still had 3 more years on his deal (w/ two options after that) and I just felt if we weren't going to use him, that saving that salary cap space would be smart.

Worst case, he turns it around and does so playing in the NL where I won't have to face him more than once a year at the absolute most.

Dave Ribic, Palmer Welch, Lowell MacNeill to Washington: So the centerpiece of this deal was 19-year old hurler Dave Ribic. I picked him up on the FFP market for a $60 million signing bonus three years ago. I envisioned him as a future ace, but he's really ended up being slotted somewhere between 3-5 since getting him. He's still young, though. Welch and MacNeill were just veterans that I signed for depth. So dealing them didn't really bother me all that much. Washington sent catcher Melvin Rugama who they picked up this year off the FFP market for $35 million.

For the uninitiated, the FFP market is a live in-forum auction that goes on for as long as a weeK. You can use available cap space to bid on pre-draft prospects akin to international scouting. If you sign a guy to an FFP contract (he goes to the highest bidder) then you pay his signing bonus the 1st year and then get him for 9 more years at league min. salary.

My calculus with this deal was the Rugama was valuable and in a position that super hard to fill with the kind of talent he possess and Ribic, while good, has fewer years and didn't strike me as a guy that was going to improve dramatically.

We'll see.