Photo: K. Ross Way
The 2014 California League season came to an end last week as the Lancaster Jethawks won the championship with a 3-2 series win over the Visalia Rawhide. The Player Development Contract scramble was just heating up and Cal League clubs were mostly re-upping with their parent organizations, but Bakersfield and High Desert had some change coming. High Desert is still undecided.
The flurry of activity at season’s end has been every bit as enjoyable for me as following the daily activities during the regular season. This is the first year that I took a shot at blogging the league and it proved to be a bigger challenge than I was able to handle at times.
Photo: Steve Cummings/CalLeagueHeat.com
I made some very enjoyable road trips, but didn’t get all the way around the league. That’s something I thought I would do easily.
Getting familiar with the rosters was easy enough, but seeing up and down the organizational ladders was always a challenge. I was able to keep an eye on promoted players that starred in the Cal League like Patrick Kivlehan and Ben Lively, among many others. But, despite watching the Transactions page regularly, every so often while searching certain players from around the league I’d be surprised to see they were in AA.
That’s about it for the negatives, and they really have to do with the volume of players, coming and going all season, and the spread-out nature of the league.
Photo: Steve Cummings/CalLeagueHeat.com
The positives of this year are too numerous to list, but they really break down into two categories. The first is the game on the field. I love it and so does anyone reading this right now. I’ve got my reasons and you’ve got yours but however different they are, there’s a ton of crossover. The biggest thing I enjoy in a game, ANY game, is the cat-and-mouse between the pitcher/catcher and the batter. I could watch any AB involving anybody, probably anytime. Even if the first pitch of an AB gets knocked out of the park, you analyze it. Bad pitch call? Good call but bad location? Good pitch, but a better approach from the batter? It goes on and on and on.
The other category is the interaction with other baseball folks. That’s the real payoff here, for me. I talk baseball in my head almost all day long. The people I live around are either blind-love fans of one team or another, or fantasy junkies that see everything through that prism. Nobody that really shares my mindset.
Photo: Steve Cummings/CalLeagueHeat.com
With this blog, I’ve gotten to talk baseball around the clock with people who are all-in on the sport just the same as me and their different perspectives are absolutely invaluable. Some of the stuff I’ve posted here only came to me from a tweet or an email question or some other online item that made me think about something, look it up, take a look at this player, etc.
And, believe me, I don’t think what I’ve done here this year is rivaling anything at FanGraphs or BeyondTheBoxscore. Certainly not MLBFarm. The thing I will be doing much, much more of in the future is analysis. The game recaps are pertinent and the Road Trips, I have been told, are enjoyable to read. But next season this space will feature more thoughtful analysis on the players and what the organizations have lined up in their systems.
Photo: Steve Cummings/CalLeagueHeat.com
This offseason I will have posts pertinent to the California League here, with connections to the Arizona Fall League probably being most prominent among them in the near future. (I love the AFL, its kinda like having the Futures Game every day for six weeks). Of course, when High Desert’s affiliation gets finalized I’ll have that here and anything I can find out about the Cal League clubs, what they’re doing this offseason in their communities or organizational hires, etc. But before the 2015 season starts I’ll have a more feature-driven focus to go along with the news-of-the-day stuff.
I will also be diving back into my other blog, HotStoveHeat.com. That’s where I’ve been blogging about player movement and the financial side of baseball, and it wasn’t updated much during this season as I concentrated on the Cal League. But HSH will be my offseason home and in the coming days I’ll be cleaning it up and bringing it up to date as we close in on the Hot Stove season and all its glory: the GM meetings, the Winter Meetings, all the free agency/arbitration/non-tender/qualifying offer/etc. madness.
Photo: Steve Cummings/CalLeagueHeat.com
Thanks to everybody who made this a great year for me. That’s everybody. Cal League fans, the various clubs that gave me access and provided me with info, bloggers who pointed things out and debated various points. And the folks that work at the various parks made every trip like a homecoming as well. I appreciate everybody I was fortunate enough to cross paths with this year through this thing.
I’ve got to make a point about the true working media in the Cal League cities that cover the teams professionally. They all do a top-notch job and make it possible for me to sit here, dead in the middle of this sprawled out league, a long drive from almost all of the cities, and reap the benefits of their insider’s views of the teams.
Thanks, everybody. More to come.
The eventful 2014 Visalia Rawhide season saw the team go on lengthy streaks, both winning and losing, and ended up in an all-or-nothing game in the Cal League finals. Lancaster shot down Visalia’s dreams of ending the 36-year title drought that has become known as Chopper’s Curse with a 3-2 series win that gave the Jethawks their second California League title in three seasons.
