The October to Believe – (Out Of The Park Baseball 26 Sim Year 4)

Written by: Im A Gausman

Catch last weeks episode below!

Bo Bichette 2027 MVP? The Saskatchewan Knights – (Out Of The Park Baseball 26 Sim Year 3)

Thank you again for tuning into Part 4 of this series chronicling the Saskatchewan Knights and Portland Phantoms expansion teams. It’s been a tough road so far, but there is optimism ahead of us!

We start the 2027 offseason in good spirits with our owner still despite the results, but some unfortunate decisions made based on performance. Our $220 million budget has been slashed down to $194 million. Acquiring and developing talent was already hard enough but it became a lot more difficult.

Zach Cone also gave us some updates goals for our rebuild wanting specifically a “Nationally” popular player and “More Drafted Players to Your Team”. Both of these options seem attainable and hopefully there is an old guy willing to take a deal to come to Saskatoon this offseason as it will be difficult to sign a huge name with this little cap to play with. We had the 26th largest budget and 29th largest player payroll last year… and received cuts.

Nick Pivetta executes his option year, coming back for his age 35 season at $18mil. Unfortunate as he wasn’t even consistently starting last year, but hopefully he doesn’t regress too much as he still eats almost 150 innings with a manageable ERA.

Award season starts and our old friend Casey Mize wins himself a Gold Glove in Kansas City. He mildly improved his ERA with them but still hasn’t impressed as an ace he was thought to be.

Clase and Kerkering win the Reliever of the Year awards – their 3rd and 2nd respectively. Clase already has 274 saves through his age 29 season. Will be fun to watch and see if he keeps it up and can compete with Mariano down the road.

Logan Gilbert wins a Cy Young in his first season as a Brewer where as Skubal 3-peats with 3 different teams which is actually an insane stat to comprehend. Maybe we should trade for him this offseason to make it 4/4.

Apologies, must’ve missed the screenshot for the pitching awards.

Aaron Judge, who has now moved to 1B, wins MVP for the 5th time and 4th straight. Mindboggling stuff his trophy cabinet is getting insanely large.

Crazy as that is, Rookie of the Year 3B Jesus Baez of the Mets also takes home MVP in his age 22 rookie season. A real shocker in a competitive race. He is a top prospect smashing bombs in High-A IRL in 2024 – excited to see if OOTP has predicted him well as Mets fans will love to see this one-two-three punch with Lindor and Soto.

Free Agency is dominated by pitchers. Tyler Stephenson and Ketel Marte are the biggest fish as hitters, otherwise the rest are pretty unexciting utility guys comparable to what we are already starting.

That said, after tweaking our development and scouting budgets, we have about $23 million in cap room to play with. There are also some contracts here we can look to move like Campusano and Bride that can free us up even more.

We do that almost immediately, moving Campusano for a few young prospects freeing up another $4mil of cap. We use this room to target a couple bigger FA’s. Nolan Arenado at 36 years old isn’t what he used to be, but still averaged .311 in 90 games with the Cardinals last year – we can get him on a 1 year / $8mil deal that can hopefully meet the owner goal of getting a nationally popular player.

The next one is probably our riskiest deal yet. CF Leody Taveras had a stellar year with Miami last season – putting up 5.0 WAR on a .307 AVG. It is a 5 year deal / $19.4mil AAV which could definitely hurt us long term but with the room to play and so little major FA’s available, I decide to make a splash and pick up the hottest batter on the market and hope he can produce similar results otherwise we have a Luis Arraez situation on our hands again.

With Leody on the team, we swing a deal for a crazy good prospect out of the International FA. I hate to give up Clase after he put on a great defensive and offensive season for us, but he was expendable and prospects like this don’t come up very often for players just above league average. I figure the risk is worth it though sad to see him go.

Draft lottery comes by and we only fall to 2nd with Portland winning the lottery AGAIN. The expansion teams pick #1 and #2 in 2028.

Rule 5 Draft comes by and we need pitching support. I take Canadian SP Matt Brash first overall and 2B Kevin McGonigle in the 2nd round. Hoping these two picks shore up some of our weaknesses and depth issues.

I look at the transaction report to see how Free Agency has played out and there are some fun stories. Felix Bautista and Clay Holmes go to the Yankees making me sad. Jordan Hicks returns to San Fran after a middling year in the pinstripes. And best of all, Jacob Degrom gets to end the last couple years of his career as a Met.

I haven’t covered the HOF so far yet on this series as there hasn’t been much news of note – but this year it changed with 4 new additions! Pujols, Cano, Rodriguez, and Molina. Looks like the voters finally put A-Rods history behind him and put him in the hall next to 3 legends.

As Spring Training starts I look and see how our offseason went. I unfortunately had to let Hentges, Fleming, and Cronin go from our bullpen which might come back and bite us later. Bizarrely, all 3 of them went to the Dodgers.

Opening day arrives! I had to fill up the roster with some minor league signing like Shota Imanaga, Danny Jansen, and Nick Lodolo. All fine pieces that can be role players and step in to bigger positions should injuries keep coming.

Let’s take a look at Portland as well! They’ve picked up a few pieces this offseason including Stephenson who is now their 3 hole hitter. It will be interesting to see how they keep pace.

Our farm system is stacked but we are still a year or two away from a lot of these guys making getting good enough for the show, but hopefully Big C does well enough with the Black Wolves that he can get here sometime this year.

Draft pool announcement – looks like C Ben Mentz is the favorite to go first as a catcher which is crazy. He has insane contact potential so it will be interesting to see if we can snag him at #2.

The season does not go well. So many guys under perform, and there isn’t much to discuss here as it feels like we are at least another year away from being close to competitive.

39-59 at the All-Star Break. The lack of improvement is starting to drain me. It feels like real MLB in that we have good players but they can’t get hot at the same time. Bichette, Santabria, and Tavares have been decent but have gone through cold streaks. Massey and Amaya are barely above the Mendoza line and no power to make up for it. We are shifting strategy and move away from a smallball to a more sabremetric approach – hard to say the difference that will make but we have to try something with these dead last bats. Pitching has been okay but Pivetta has been horrible generating over -1.6 WAR. We can’t send him down so we are stuck with him until seasons end.

Our sole representative at the All-Star game is Nick Lodolo…

Wait…

Nick Lodolo?

He only has started 2 games so far after we pushed Pivetta out to the bullpen. He has a 2.53 ERA over 60 innings which I guess was enough. Shota Imanaga had a sub 2 ERA until a few weeks ago but got blown up in his last few starts. Still – slightly embarrassing to have guys on minor league deals be our best performers. But I look at these young guys and see a rotation in 2 years that the league will fear.

While here, I realised I had forgotten to check league history to see we had a Perfect Game back in Year 2. Nick Martinez of all people shut down the Athletics which was nice to see!

While I was interested initially in Mr Ben Mentz, we actually take 1B Nate Statler in the first. As much as I like HOF level contract potential for Mentz, we can’t pass up a power hitting 1B like this.

We spiral towards the Trade Deadline and we get an offer we can’t refuse for Michael Massey. It’s become clear he needs a change of scenery and the Twins overpay with some good prospects. We take on Jimi Garcia in the deal, but Juan Arevalo is a player worth taking the risk on here as we try and retool for next season around Bichette, Tork, and Taveras.

Quiet deadline except for one deal.

DeGrom leaves the 54-65 Mets to join up with the 65-54 Mariners. It’s a fair deal but definitely not the retire at home we thought we were getting in the offseason.

Roster expansion happens on Sept 1st. I wish there was more to say about this season, but I feel I might be a broken record at this point. The team hasn’t improved meaningfully and are at 57-91. It is ugly, but I can promise you your loyalty will be rewarded. Once we get going and have our core generational players, there will be more in-depth coverage of the season as a whole. But for now, this 57-91 team needs a spark –

So it’s time.

We call up Dave Dominey. He’s still a bit green but getting big league innings might push his development up – plus it fills seats and gets people talking!

He makes his MLB debut Sept 3rd 2028 at home vs The Mets.

He was doing fine until the 3rd time though the order and the 5th inning fell apart. Marcus Stroman getting the save is pretty hilarious.

The years ends our worst yet: 59-103. It’s hard to really piece together where things really went wrong. Lost 9 straight to finish the year.

This offseason might see some big moves to try and right this ship.

Portland ends up at 65-97 which isn’t much better. Both these franchises need to see some hope soon. Thankfully we both have Top 10 prospects on the cusp of being at the show.

Somehow despite how terrible this team was, we had the 3rd best Bullpen in the NL? 5th best in the league? Frankly I don’t understand it as our bullpen was generally terrible according to WAR, but OOTP uses FIP in its equation as opposed to ERA. People can argue the merits of either but it definitely was a funny thing to see when looking back at this year.

The lineup – underwhelming? Nothing stands out as objectively terrible other than Tork only getting 15 Homers, but otherwise he wasn’t the albatross on this teams neck. Everyone was just fine to above average. Still, something needs to be done to give this batting order some life!

Looking at the statistical leaders across the league…

Quero generating 9.0 WAR as a catcher is insane given the historically poor way that WAR accumulates at that position. Aaron Judge continues to rake, and I am pretty confident these two will be locks for the respective MVPs. I have been wrong before as things can surprise you.

Yamamoto looks like he will take home his first Cy Young while Skubal will get his millionth it feels like. 4th team which is actually an impressive feat!

Let’s see how the playoffs shape out! A healthy Ohtani got the Dodgers back to 96 wins. Honestly shocked we haven’t seen them win a World Series in one of these yet, perhaps 2028 is the one.

Having all 3 AL East teams face each other early is a smart idea. Limits how much damage they can actually do to the postseason. Looks like Skubal wasn’t enough to get the Yankees over the Red Sox. The Royals also surprise everyone and make it to ALDS against the fresh rebranded Athletics.

The Royals keep the good times going as do the Padres and Diamondbacks upsetting their juggernaut opponents! 4 WILD CARD TEAMS IN THE LCS. This is the October to Believe!

Tatis v Witt. Machado v Jac Caglianone. Padres and Royal meet in the WS after passing the Sox and Snakes with little resistance.

The 83 win Royals make it all the way to the WS on the backs of Bobby Witt Jr and Chase DeLauter, the later of whom won Wild Card and Division Series MVP.

We also have our first Game 7 of the World Series in this simulation. It will be a crazy upset if these Royals can pull it off!