Alt-1916: A quick post about the NL

 It'll be a quick post because I honestly haven't been paying terribly close attention to the Senior Circuit. The Boston Rustlers, winners of the 1914 and 1915 World Series in this timeline, have been in the driver's seat during the 1916 season thus far as well.  Brooklyn, the pennant winner in real life, had a short stint atop the league, but Boston was never far behind and when Brooklyn had a mediocre June they were able to step back up to the top. 

The NL batting leaders are, honestly, mostly people I'd never heard of other than HR leader Gavvy Cravath. Max Flack of the Giants leads the league in batting at .333 and real-life leader Jake Daubart is nowhere to be seen on the leader boards. A presumably-clean Hal Chase on the Buffalo Blues is in the hunt for various awards and leads the league in hits.  Rabbit Maranville leads in WAR via whatever formula it is that seems to make anyone who can play shortstop well into a WAR leader. 

Pitching-wise, it's more familiar faces like Pete Alexander and Tom Hughes leading the league in important categories. 

Taking a step back and looking at the former Federal League teams, the Newark Peppers are hanging around in 7th place and only a few games below .500 thanks to a recent 4-game winning streak. The Packers with their 22-game losing streak are deep in last. This is a bit of a reversal of fortune compared to 1915 for these teams. Similarly, Buffalo is playing...not well, but well enough to be a long-ish winning streak from .500 while Baltimore is pretty firmly in last place. And also similarly, this is a reversal from last year, though Buffalo escaped the cellar. 

Alt-1916: Status at the "All-Star Break"

Since last time, I've plowed forward with running the 1916 season.  I've gotten to the July break where the All-Star Game would go if there were to be one, though of course there isn't. So it's a bit more than halfway through the season. Last season's pennant winners, the White Sox and Rustlers, are in good shape to repeat (in the Rustlers' case, it'd be three in a row). The Yankees have had a very streaky season, and to my dismay the streaks haven't made any sense--we had a rotten April (11-14), a great May (18-11), and a mediocre June (14-12).  The Yankees have a winning record against every team in the league except Chicago (3-10) and the 9th-place St. Louis Browns (4-8), and they've lost 6 in a row against the Browns. Indeed, if the Yankees were 8-4 against St. Louis instead of 4-8 they'd be hot on the heels of the White Sox.

The Red Sox have overcome a slow start and are now sitting in 2nd place, a few games ahead of the scrum that the Yankees are currently leading. The Philadelphia Athletics had a torrid start and were 35-19 at the end of May, though they've gone 12-24 since then. Since the 1916 A's were historically bad the more recent performance is more what I was expecting, though the fact Mack's dismantling of the team was interrupted in this timeline is clearly one of the major points of departure--a lot of players who ended up fueling the Red Sox pennants in 1916 and 1918 may stay in Philadelphia. Looking further ahead, the presumed lack of a Black Sox scandal may keep the Chicago team strong into the 20s. Since the White Sox have already won a pennant ahead of schedule and are on track to win in 1916, they may dominate for a while...

At the other end of the American League is the Kansas City Packers.  They're on pace for a 108-loss season and endured a 4-24 June, which mostly included a jaw-dropping 22-game losing streak. This losing streak would have been the longest in the 20th century, and has only been exceeded in real life by the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies and a few 19th-century teams. 

Stats-wise I'll just put up a few images with the American League batting and pitching leaders, and then call it a post. Click on the images to see the whole thing rather than the crop that shows up otherwise.