Opening Day 1920 and Preview!

 

It's April 5th, 1920, at least inside my OOTP game. Opening Day games will be played from Boston to St. Louis, with the Yankees opening at home with Red Faber on the mound against his old White Sox team. The algorithm thinks the Red Sox will edge out the Yankees to take the pennant by a game (in the absence of injuries/trades/bad luck/etc.), while it sees the Phillies running away with the NL for a rematch of 1919 (and 1917--best two out of three?). It also foresees huge seasons from Joe Jackson (.388), Ty Cobb (.395), several pitchers (4 30-game winners and another 2 29-game winners‽), and most of all Babe Ruth (.374/41/143, and an OPS > 1.200!). Those 41 home runs would set a new record, needless to say.

Spring Training went without incident. I might have used some of the main players more than I needed--5 of the 6 players with the most spring AB were Yankees. But nobody got hurt, and I should be able to manage playing time going forward so nobody gets too tired. I let the AI deal with releasing players and ended up with a roster that was more or less what I would have picked, at least for the Yankees themselves.  I'd talked myself into having Bullet Rogan in the show, but the AI put him in Toronto. That's fine, it's not a slam dunk and I figured I'd take that advice. It also put Russell and Barnes in Toronto, though, and I pulled them up to New York in exchange for demoting Schorr and Beresky. The AI also kept Nunamaker as the backup catcher, and in the end I can't disagree--he had a good spring and I'd have to release him rather than demote him. Gilhooley and Blackwell were two other question marks that the AI kept in New York and I agree with.  Of course, both are outfielders and exacerbate the logjam the Yankees have--besides Gilhooley and Blackwell, the team has Cobb, Charleston, and Heilmann, who clearly need to get as many ABs as possible. There's also Cy Williams, who is basically the 4th outfielder despite being 2nd in the AL in home runs last year. 

When I asked the AI to set up the initial lineups and depth charts, and it tried to solve the problem by putting Heilmann at first base--not unreasonable since that's where he played historically in 1919-1920 before moving to the outfield. But he's a terrible fielder at first base, and Pipp is still very productive (and historically had a very good 1920). And if I'm not going to play Pipp at first base there's Terry in the wings, who's coming off of a Triple Crown winning year in Toronto. So he's obviously been promoted. Historically, Baker missed all of 1920 to take care of his sick family, but I expect him to play a full season. If not, I tried to hedge against it by playing Dobie Moore at 3B a lot to make him an acceptable fielder there. Sammy Hale is also on the big team, so I think I've got the infield backups covered. 

Pitching-wise, the algorithm thinks we'll be in the main pack of teams, about 0.4 runs per game worse than Boston (and Washington). It expects both Faber and Brown (a rookie!) to win 30 games for us, which needless to say, I don't expect. I'm starting the season with a rotation of Faber, Hendrix (our new acquisition!), Brown, and Barnes. All but Hendrix were 20-game winners in real life 1920. I'm certain the rotation will see some shuffling around, however. In particular, Dutch Ruether in the bullpen had a great 1920, and Pennock, Caldwell, and Mogridge could also slide into the rotation pretty easily. 

Looking down at the farm, I have no real sense of whether the Maple Leafs are better than last year's pennant winners or not--the Yankees have called up their best two hitters (Terry and Gilhooley) and their best pitcher (Brown, though he was also hurt during the stretch drive). On the other hand, Toronto now has Bullet Rogan and Goose Goslin, and will hopefully have a full year of Bernardo Baro. Dazzy Vance should also be moving toward being MLB-ready. The Pelicans weren't very good last year, and I also don't have a good sense of how they'll do this year.  Lefty O'Doul looks like he'll be the regular 1B, which should be fun.  The AI put Tommy Thomas and Sloppy Thurston down there, which seems too low, but I guess we'll see and I can always promote them. 

Looking at where 1920's top performers are are relative to where they were in real life: Babe Ruth is, obviously, still in Boston rather than New York. Tris Speaker is also still in Boston. Shoeless Joe is still blissfully in Cleveland rather than finishing his career in Chicago in star-crossed fashion. St. Louis' two big stars, George Sisler and Rogers Hornsby, are on the same teams they were in reality. While we don't have Ruth, the Yankees do have several of the other stars of 1920 that they didn't otherwise have--Eddie Collins, Cy Williams, and Oscar Charleston, in particular. Newark, of all places, benefits from having Edd Roush and Ross Youngs, though they're still slated by the algorithm for a last-place finish.

Turning to pitchers, Pete Alexander is still on the Phillies rather than the Cubs. Jim Bagby and Stan Covelesky are on the Tigers' AAA team and the Packers, respectively, rather than Cleveland. The Yankees look to potentially be the big losers here though--Shawkey's on the Browns, Mays is still on the Red Sox, Jack Quinn is retired, and Babe Adams (who wasn't on the Yankees in real life but was on my Yankees) is also retired. We do have Ruether and Brown, and Rube Curry and Pennock a bit lower down the list, but it's not clear that makes up for it... 

A quick catch-up during 1920 Spring Training

 Bullet points to catch you up!

• The Year of the Sweep continued, with the Red Sox avenging 1917 by sweeping the Phillies. Babe Ruth was the Series MVP, and I confess to having great trepidation about how well he's going to play in 1920.
• The Northeast Owls won the Barnstorming Tour and, I believe, Babe Ruth was again the MVP. 
• The Galveston Pirates moved to San Antonio and became the Bears. I basically went fully fictional with that park, taking Columbia Park (the Athletics' pre-Shibe home) and making some cosmetic changes and background changes. 
• Spring Training is underway, and the Yankees brought a full roster of 60 people including recent draftees Bullet Rogan and Goose Goslin. I think there are really only 2-3 roster spots that are realistically open, though, and that's only because Charles Bender and Babe Adams unexpectedly retired at the end of 1919. Birdie Cree has notably not retired, though I'm considering retiring him at the end of Spring Training because otherwise we kind of have to drop him. I don't see keeping Nunamaker on the roster, either--he's the 3rd catcher right now, and I'd just as soon have Pat Collins up (or one of the multi-position guys) to do that.
• I've let the AI do its thing as far as signing minor league free agents, and it's still trying to sign people. I'm imagining it'll drop people too, I guess we'll see.  We're probably going to have to drop 50 people at this point. 

OK, back to it!

(Sort-of Brief) 1919 World Series Preview

I thought I'd written and posted an update with a month to go, but I apparently didn't!  I did post to Twitter and Mastodon, though.  In any case, the Yankees trailed the Red Sox for the entire season by 4-5 games, but somehow managed to claw their way into a tie with 9 games remaining. This set the stage for a season-defining 3-game set at Fenway, which Boston swept. Typically for this season, the Yankees held a lead in each of the games but either the relievers couldn't hold a lead or the starters gave it right back. The third game was lost when Babe Ruth hit a 3-run home run in the 8th to set the MLB record for most home runs in a season. 

Still, it was hard to argue that Boston wasn't the better team this year, and it was hard to be upset with the Yankees.  They finished with 102 wins, it was just that Boston finished with 106. 

Anyhow, I intended this to be a brief World Series preview, so I should get to that!  The Red Sox will face the Phillies, who won 102 games themselves and ran away with the NL. This is a rematch of 1917, which the Phillies won in 5 games. This Red Sox team is allowing 0.1 run per game less and scoring 0.1 run per game more than the 1917 team, relative to the league average, while the Phillies are better than the league average by 0.2 runs per game relative to 1917. 

Many of the principals are still in place, as you might imagine. The Phillies are still led by Dave Bancroft and Pete Alexander, even if slugger Gavvy Cravath was traded to the Browns in June. The Red Sox still have 1917 MVP Tris Speaker in fine form, even if Babe Ruth has eclipsed him and looks to be a unanimous MVP. Boston also caught lightning in a bottle with Rudy Kallio, who spent the vast majority of his baseball career as a decent pitcher in the PDC in real life. In the simulation, the OOTP algorithm loves him for some reason, so he's gone 21-7 as a rookie and led the AL in ERA. 

OK, let me see. Every year I've played this game (since 1915) the NL has won every single World Series in 5 games. The Phillies beat the Red Sox in 1917 in 5 games, but seem maybe a bit better relative to the NL than the Red Sox do compared to the AL? It's been the year of the sweep in the minors, with Wichita sweeping Birmingham for the AA Governors' Cup and Seattle sweeping Toronto in the AAA Little World Series. But Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. I'll go with the Phillies in 5. 

Nearing the 1919 All-Star Break

It's a little less than a week until the All-Star Game, and a little bit more than halfway through the 1919 season. The Yankees are playing at a 100-win pace, but unfortunately the Red Sox are playing at a 112-win pace and have a comfortable lead. Over in the NL the Phillies lead the Pirates by 1 1/2 games as Pittsburgh is experiencing their annual mid-season fade. 

Some bullet points!

• As I noted, I thought I made the Yankees stronger. Maybe I even did!  I worked a couple of trades with the White Sox to get Eddie Collins for Heine Zimmerman and Red Faber for Alex Ferguson (who?). Collins and Faber are both a bit older, but both played well into the mid-1920s in real life while a mediocre 1919 was Zimmerman's last year and Ferguson certainly never was a household name. I did the usual January import of Negro League players who played that year but didn't appear in the draft, and made off with Charlie Blackwell. Blackwell started the year with the Yankees while Charleston was hurt and has stayed on the team as the 4th outfielder.
• Having the minor leagues has been an interesting addition. Toronto started the season terribly, but are now sitting in 3rd in the International League (and were briefly in 2nd). They've got really good hitters, with Terry, Collins, and Hale doing very well.  Bernardo Baro was also playing well before sustaining an injury that will keep him out for a while. Frank Gilhooley was sent down when I decided to keep Blackwell up, and he's up at .387 for Toronto. It's been hard to figure out how to balance the roster right--Gilhooley was out of the majors after 1919 but played pretty well in the minors after that.  Still, it's hard to rationalize keeping him down there. But I'm not going to send Birdie Cree (though I might hope that he retires soon) or Elmer Miller down. I've also got 11 pitchers, when I probably get away with just 9-10.  But it's not obvious which pitchers to send down, either. Babe Adams has had a few clunkers in a row, but had a great 1919-1920 in real life and I'm not sure I could send him down anyhow. Bender has the worst WAR on the staff but he had great years 1919-1922, but they were in the minors and, again, I'm not sure I could send him down. 
• The minor league races have been fun to follow. The Western League in particular has been very close and had a lot of ups and down. Part of the interesting dynamic, of course, is that good players get called up--Worcester was running away with the IL, and then their top players got brought up to the Robins and they fell back to the pack. I'd like Toronto to win the pennant, but if the Yankees need Bill Terry I won't hesitate to bring him up. I'm trying not to let the morale of players have any real role (since I have it turned off it shouldn't affect anything) but it's hard not to feel a bit bad that I've got Gilhooley toiling in Toronto after his years on the big league team.
• Offense feels like it's up, or perhaps pitching is down. The gap between the leagues has narrowed to it's smallest gap since I started playing--the NL ERA has been between one-third and one-half a run lower than the AL ERA, but so far this year it's only a quarter of a run. This mostly seems to have been due to better hitting in the NL. We are also apparently hitting and fielding as well this season as we did in 1918, just getting somewhat unlucky this year vs. lucky last year? Apparently our Pythagorean winning percentage is the same. But Boston has kicked it up a notch in both hitting and pitching...

Update: I've played a few more games since starting this post, and was offered Ty Cobb by Detroit while trying to see what I could get for a couple of no-name relievers. So now the outfield logjam has gotten a bit worse, but I'm going to stop here and play some more. :) 

1919 Season Underway!

Quick post here. I haven't had a ton of time to play over the past month or so, though I've been back to playing in the last few days.  The game thinks the Red Sox and Reds are the pennant favorites, but we'll see if we can do something about that. :) 

Oscar Charleston is starting the season on the IL, as is Babe Adams. I think the team is stronger this year than last year, though the minor leagues complicate matters a bit--Bill Terry isn't a left-handed pinch-hitter sitting on the bench and making spot starts, he's in Toronto. I've got a few people on the Yankees that I'd just as soon jettison or move down, but who can turn down minor league assignments. I'm still sorting out how much I care. 

The minor leagues are also pushing me to do a couple of things that weren't on my radar. While we had a reserve list, I only needed 1-2 people who could play a given position on that list and I had dozens of pitchers in case someone panned out. Moving to minor league teams means that we need 3-4 (or 5?) players at any position because New Orleans needs to have someone at 3rd base and a backup catcher, and so does Toronto.

 

A bit of catch-up for Alt-1919

 

We're a few days into 1919 Spring Training. There's lots going on, including the establishment of AAA and AA levels for the teams.  I'll get to that in a later post, but for now I just wanted to hit a few points.

The Barnstorming tour was fun to do. The game made all of the games sellouts, which makes since so many of the players on all the teams were very popular. The teams ended up pretty close to parity, with the Western team finishing a couple of games over .500 and winning the championship. I'll definitely want to think about balancing things a bit when I next do it--the pitching was a mess and some teams had a few folks playing out of position. But maybe that's all in the spirit of the real-life tours.  Some of the parks looked pretty good, others probably need some work to be interesting (I'm looking at you, Cheyenne), but it was nice to put the parks to some use.

After that, the Caribbean League was a bit anticlimactic. The Cuban teams, particularly Almendares, were pretty clearly better than the Florida ones, which were scuffling around .500 all year, but Jacksonville shocked the world and swept the championship from Almendares. With that, they became the first non-Cuban team to win the Caribbean League pennant. The Yankees' prospects didn't do a whole lot--Sammy Hale was often the Pensacola cleanup hitter and did OK, the others either were nondescript or awful. Nevertheless, Pensacola nearly took the Northern Division before fading at the end. Torriente won the MVP.  The season wrapped around from 1918 to 1919, but that didn't seem to make a difference or cause a problem.

The 1918 Rookie Draft didn't have a whole lot of star power, or at least not a lot of folks I'd heard of. Frankie Frisch went first (to the Packers), and that's it as far as Hall of Famers (I think).  Dickey Kerr when to the Reds (ironically, perhaps). I picked Dave Brown at the end of the first round, he was the ace for the Chicago American Giants at the dawn of the Negro Leagues.  I can only assume the next few draft classes will be full of gems.

Finally, I bit the bullet and decided to set up two levels of affiliated minor leagues. It's not at all clear to me what settings I have that let me do what I've done, but I'm under the impression that what I've set up won't reset at the start of the next season.  I guess we'll see.  I have two 10-team leagues at AAA (the PCL and International League) and at AA (the Southern League and Western League). I intend to have separate posts about them, but I've tried to keep more or less historical while also allowing some anachronisms that I thought would be fun and cool. For instance, I decided that San Diego would build a suitable PCL ballpark rather than be left out (or worse, have Tijuana or Long Beach do it) and made the Lane Field model someone else built look like it was from c. 1920. I now have a bunch more fields to make, but I'm not going to let that stop me from starting the season (or at least I don't plan to). We'll see how it goes...

Your Alt-1918 World Series Champions: The St. Louis Cardinals

 So, the title gets that out of the way.  I played the games themselves a couple of weeks ago by now--it was another NL win in 5 games, like every World Series since I started playing. I'm willing to consider that kind of an odd coincidence, though.

The Cardinals won the first two in St. Louis, 4-0 and 3-1. The Yankees won game 3 in New York 6-3 but then dropped the next two 2-1 and 9-8. The last game ended with the Yankees falling just short--Oscar Charleston singled representing the tying run but then was thrown out trying to steal second and Elmer Miller popped out to end it. Charleston's steal, which might otherwise be eye-popping, was driven by the Yankees' terrible propensity for grounding into double plays during the series. Claude Hendrix went 2-0 with an ERA of 0.50, added the game-winning RBI in Game 1, and won the Series MVP award.

The Yankees' offense more or less didn't show up in the Series, at least to the extent they did in the regular season. St. Louis out hit and out slugged them, though the Yankees did get 3 home runs to the Cardinals' 1. 

While Bill Terry made the most of his World Series experience by hitting a pinch-hit home run in Game 5 in his only Series at-bat, Del Pratt had the highest OPS of the regulars at 1.154. Charleston was also above 1.000, and Heilmann and Hornsby were both above .960. On the other hand, while Baker was a disappointment hitting .216 and Gilhooley a problem going 3 for 21, Peckinpaugh was a catastrophe, going zero for 20. Peckinpaugh's -0.21 Win Probability Added was only the 3rd worst on the team, though, with Santop bottoming out at -0.31 just behind Gilhooley's -0.29.  On the pitching side, Jesse Barnes' had a disastrous stint in Game 5, allowing 4 runs in 0.2 innings in a very high-leverage situation. 

So what now?   The Fall Barnstorming Tour is making its way west, with today's games taking place in Cheyenne and Salt Lake City. Each team, including the Yankees and Cardinals, has 4 players on the tour. Charleston got hurt early and had to be replaced by Wally Pipp, but Oscar should be fine well before the season starts. Rommel is doing his usual thing of pitching 3-4 good innings and then getting shelled. Russell hasn't been pitching much, and Dobie Moore is doing fine. But I did pull a major trade today, sending Heinie Zimmerman to the White Sox along with a couple of pitchers who will never amount to much  in exchange for Eddie Collins. If things vaguely follow history, Zimmerman's best days are behind him while Collins has a few more MVP-caliber years ahead and should be productive for another 5 or so years. I feel a bit bad since Zimmerman was a fan (and personal) favorite who I've gushed over in this very blog. But business is business, I suppose.

More admin stuff in the next post, I think, including my current thoughts about minor leagues.

1918 World Series Preview!! (part 2)

 

I'm going to try to keep this short-ish, since I'm actually hoping to play Game 1 when I'm done. One thing I should note after the last post is the different park factors in the Polo Grounds vs. Robison Field: the Yankees enjoy a 30% boost to home runs and about an 8% boost to batting average vs. Robison Field providing a generally more neutral environment and cutting batting average and home runs by 4%. So, the Yankees huge power and run-scoring advantage could be partly illusory. However, that makes its pitching look even better.

On a player-by-player basis, New York has a much more balanced team than St. Louis. The best player on either team is Rogers Hornsby of the Cardinals, who was NL MVP in Alt-1917 and is an excellent bet to repeat in 1918. 

I suspect the list of best players after Hornsby in the series is mostly Yankees, though. Oscar Charleston is my choice for #2, though sorting by 1918 Wins above Replacement (WAR) puts Peckinpaugh* 2nd and Charleston 3rd. 

The list of Yankees/Cardinals non-pitchers with WAR over 4.0 in order are Hornsby (STL), Peckinpaugh (NYY), Charleston (NYY), Pipp (NYY), Baker (NYY), Heilmann (NYY), Hyatt (STL), Zimmerman (NYY, injured), Pratt (STL), Santop (NYY), Gilhooley (NYY).  So that's...10 players (not counting Zimmerman, who can't play), and 3 of them are on St. Louis. 

The pitching is less clear to me, though again the Cardinals maybe hold a slight edge? Hendrix and Hoyt (both on the Cardinals) are far and away the pitching WAR leaders, and/because/but they racked up a lot more innings. Pennock had a similar year for the Yankees in terms of ERA+, FIP, and all that business, but pitched 100 fewer innings due to injury and my aversion to overworking my pitchers (even in 1918). I don't know what the Cardinals AI** will be doing, but I plan to keep managing in a more modern style. 

I'm reluctant to make a prediction for all sorts of reasons, but I guess I will. I think the Yankees will win, I'll say they do it in 6 games. But it wouldn't be a massive surprise to me if they swept or lost. How's that for confident? :)

*As noted here in other posts, the way OOTP does WAR seems to give an enormous boost to shortstops who aren't butchers. While I suspect Hornsby finishes #1 in WAR even without it, Peckinpaugh in particular doesn't always pass my eye test even though he's perennially among the league leaders in WAR.

**Jack Hendricks was the real-life manager for the 1918 Cardinals, he's available in OOTP (I'm not playing with coaching staffs on) so we can say he's managing here, too. Miller Huggins would potentially have made more sense--he was Cardinals manager from 1913-1917 after retiring from playing for them in 1916, but in this universe he was traded to the Terrapins/Orioles and retired. So maybe he's their manager?

1918 World Series Preview!! (part 1)

 

The World Series will be starting as soon as I get myself psyched up to do it, probably this weekend. But one item I wanted to scratch off the to-do list before playing the games was this preview. :)

The Yankees dominated the leaderboards for team statistics:

They saved their hottest stretch for September, and ultimately the Red Sox couldn't keep up with that 22-5 record, and wouldn't have won the pennant even if they'd swept the Yankees during that key September series I mentioned last time rather than the reverse.

The Cardinals had an even hotter August than the Yankees' September, which allowed them to scuffle a bit coming to the finish. They led a bunch of pitching categories (though were middle of the pack in walks and strikeouts), and led the league in runs (though were only 3rd in OPS and home runs):

Looking at that alone, we might favor the Yankees over St. Louis. However, we would also have (and kind of did) expect Boston to beat the Phillies last season, and take the White Sox over the Rustlers before that. The problem is the AL is rather stratified--the Packers have been historic-level bad for a few years, and the Peppers have been a more pedestrian bad. With the Packers giving out 114 wins to the rest of the league and Newark contributing another 97, it's not obvious how the Yankees (or Red Sox) would do if they were in the NL playing Baltimore and the Cubs instead*.

Looking at things a little bit more closely, though, I do think the Yankees dominated their league in general a bit more than the Cardinals. Even if you remove Newark and Kansas City, the Yankees beat the rest of the league at a 103-win pace. The Yanks were offensively very strong, scoring runs at a pace 20% more than the league average and with a team OPS 8% higher than the league. Those numbers are actually pretty similar to what the real-life 1998 Yankees did. For their opponents in St. Louis, those numbers were 10% more run scoring and 6% higher OPS. So, the Yankees seem to be a bit better than the Cards.

Pitching-wise, despite the Cardinals' gaudy numbers (Team ERA of 2.23!) they're not appreciably better than the Yankees relative to their leagues. St. Louis' ERA is 15% better than the NL average, and in runs per game they're 11% better. For the Yankees, though, those numbers are 13% and 15%. Certainly competitive.

I'd intended to also talk about positional comparisons between teams, but this is getting long so I'll do that next time. 

*Interestingly enough (to me), Buffalo went 74-88 and finished in 7th place largely because of their awful performance against terrible teams--they were 13-23 vs. Baltimore and the Cubs. If they'd gone 18-18 against them they would have been just below .500 and the season might feel different in the Queen City. If they'd won at the same pace against those teams that everyone else did, they'd've gone 21-15, finished over .500 and been seen as a team on the rise.  Maybe they are a team on the rise? Their Pythagorean record suggests they "should" have been 79-83...

The New York Yankees are the 1918 American League Champions

Last time I updated there were 26 games to go. The Yankees have won 16 of the 19 games since then, while the Red Sox have gone 9-11. The key series was held in the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees swept the Sox in front of 3 of the biggest crowds of the year and ran their lead up from 3.5 games to 6.5. New York hasn't looked back, and clinched the pennant in St. Louis after winning game 154. This is clearly the best team in Yankees history (to this point, of course), and while they can't reach the all-time AL record for team wins in a season, they could get pretty close. 

However, I'm mostly going to try to rest people up and hope to avoid injuries--Heinie Zimmerman tore his grown and is out for the season. Birdie Cree has been doing a great job filling in for him, and got his 1000th career hit during a 3-hit game. I brought Bill Terry up from the reserves when Zimmerman went down, and Terry's been on fire (in limited usage). 

In the NL, the Cardinals are grinding their way toward their first-ever pennant. So, this will probably be the first time since 1906 with two first-time participants. I'll hold off on a World Series preview until things are final, but I'm pleased that I managed to get the Yankees the pennant!

Home Stretch, 1918

 

We're into the final month of the 1918 season. The Yankees hold a slim, 1-game lead over Boston, and have gone 33-21 since July 1st and picking up 4 games on Boston in the process.  The bad news is that it was a 3-game lead not very long ago. But in the sense that you'd rather be in first place by a game than second place by a game, it's all good.  Both teams are down some key players right now--Tris Speaker has another week until his return, and Larry Gardner may or may not come back before the season ends. Herb Pennock has been sitting at 18 wins since an injury took him out, and he still has two weeks left before healed. That unfortunately makes him unlikely to play in the big Yankees-Red Sox series coming up at the Polo Grounds in about 10 days--a series that may decide the pennant winner.

With 26 games to go, though, there's a series left with just about everyone. The Yankees finish up their games vs. the Packers in the upcoming series, and finish the season with 4 games against Philadelphia. The Red Sox finish against the 3rd-place Spiders. We'll see how it goes.

Over in the other league, the Cardinals are cruising toward their first-ever pennant. I'll talk more about them another time, I suppose!

All-Star Break, 1918

 

The National League took the All-Star Game, held at Allston Grounds this year, 1-0. The game was simultaneously a pitchers' duel and rather sloppy (3 errors per team, including one that led to the single run). The Yankees had five starters--all of the infielders (Pipp, Zimmerman, Peckinpaugh, and Baker) plus Charleston in CF. I think my voting had a bigger effect than I intended, so I may not vote in future elections. Or maybe I will, who knows?

The Yankees find themselves 2.5 games behind Boston at the break. On the one hand, this is great because Boston is still playing really well and the Yankees are more or less hanging with them.  On the other hand, the Red Sox have lost Babe Ruth and Larry Gardner for an extended period, and this kind of needs to be the period where the Yankees make a move if a move is to be made.  Unfortunately, they've been scuffling a bit, including against some not-great teams. So, in a sense, the break didn't come too soon. The NL has been a real scrum, with the Rustlers currently ahead of the Cardinals (I believe) by 0.5 games. The Phillies led for a while but have dropped back. The surprising Buffalo Blues are in 3rd place several games back. I'm not convinced this will be the final ordering of the teams.

Let's do a little bit of qualitative grading of the Yankees' first half.  As per my recent custom, I'm not going to call up the stats if only because it's a bit of a hassle to do while OOTP isn't running. 

Exceeded Expectations: The pitching, for sure. I never would have expected the Yankees to be leading the league in ERA, let alone leading it by a lot. I'm not even totally sure where this great performance is originating--Pennock is pitching great, but everyone else seems to be making me sweat every time.  And Reuther is out with a long injury again for the second year in a row.  Nevertheless, props to the pitching staff.  

Zimmerman has been a great acquisition for the team. He's been a great answer to the 2B problem that the Yankees have had since I've started playing--miles ahead of Baumann (who he drove into retirement) and Cree and, at least as of now, Dobie Moore. 

And Zimmerman has catalyzed a suddenly-great defense--every infielder is above average, and all but Pipp are substantially above average. Gilhooley and Heilmann are above average, with Heilmann substantially above average in RF. Of the everyday regulars, only Charleston is iffy in the field. 

Met Expectations: I'm going to put the offense here. Even with heightened expectations given last year, the main group have more or less come through (I should probably rest them more, though). I can't tell if there are fewer home runs this year or if it's statistics of small numbers, but while Pipp, Baker, and Charleston aren't dominating the leaderboards like they did last year, they're doing fine. Gilhooley is hanging in there (though new acquisition Cy Williams is biding his time and will likely ease Gilhooley into a 4th outfielder role before too long). Miller has 2 pinch-hit home runs already this year, which is bananas when Baker is leading the league in home runs with 5.  So, solid work there. And the team has more or less been beating the teams they're supposed to. They've dropped a few to Kansas City this year, but there are a lot of teams they're going 6-2 or 6-3 against, which is good.

Has Not Met Expectations: First I'll note that the one baffling thing about the hitting is that we aren't scoring runs like I think we should. Boston is #2 in most offensive categories, but has been consistently scoring more runs than the Yankees have. Now, I don't know if they're overachieving, or if I'm being too conservative in terms of taking extra bases or (gulp) stealing, but it's been a (small) blemish on the offense.

To point fingers at individuals, Pat Collins has really had a terrible, terrible year so far. It took him close to (more than?) 30 at-bats to get his first hit, and he never really improved. after (I think?) 80 or so at-bats of a .100 batting average, I started looking for other options. That led to signing Negro League star Louis Santop (and having Cristobal Torriente become a free agent), and Santop is doing fine. Collins sat on the reserves for a bit, and I'm hoping he'll turn it around.

I'll also point to Jesse Barnes, who I was expecting to be a lights-out closer or great starter. He hasn't really done either and now is also sitting in the reserves. This may be unfair to him, so I'll give him some slack.

Fingers crossed that the Yankees can make up the ground on the Red Sox and bring home their first pennant!

One-third through 1918

 

I feel like I'm flying through the season--I guess that's what happens when you play 3-4 games a day. The Yankees are 1/3 of the way through their schedule, with other teams within 1-2 games of that. Since the last post, the three AL leaders have cooled off a bit, with the 4th-place Browns almost having caught the 3rd-place Spiders. The Yankees are actually in 1st place, with a slim lead over Boston and Cleveland just a bit further back. The Yanks dropped the most recent series they played (against the Spiders), but obviously have been playing well before then. 

The Yankees have been getting it done on offense, but their pitching has also been surprisingly (to me) excellent, with a league-leading ERA. I'm not sure if it's smoke and mirrors, but Pennock and Caldwell in particular are pitching very well. What concerns me right now is injuries--Reuther, Barnes, and Thomas have all spent time on the IL, and Pennock had to pulled from a game due to injury (though he was back the next day). The hitters have continued as in 1917, with Zimmerman serving as a great addition. The infield defense has been great, and the Yankees are averaging more than a double play per game, which is an amazing contrast to 1916 and certainly is much less frustrating. 

The other recent news is the signing of Louis Santop. This was driven by Pat Collins just not hitting at all. He started something like 1-for-30, and after something like 50-60 at-bats still only had maybe 5 hits. I started getting concerned that it might affect his development, but the team only has 3 catchers in the entire organization. So I cast around and realized a few Negro Leaguers weren't in the simulation, so I added them. Santop is a catcher, who I made an offer to (and who signed), and I also added Cristobal Torriente, who's a monster hitter and who I also made an offer to. Torriente knows he's a monster hitter, though, and wants to be the best-paid player in the game. So he's had offers but is still unsigned...

Over in the NL, the Phillies seem to be settling into spending the most time in first place, with a few teams (mostly the Rustlers) giving chase. 

End of April 1918

All right, just a quick note here before work starts. So I'm again going to go without looking at the stats, though I think I have a decent sense of what they say? 

We've gotten to the end of April 1918, teams have played 25-27 games. At the moment, the AL is split into a trio of teams playing roughly .700 ball (the Spiders, Yankees, and Red Sox), a mass of teams within a game or two .500 (presumably they'll differentiate as the season wears on), and the awful, awful Packers. Just a few game days before the end of April they were playing .154 ball, about a 135-loss pace. They've picked it up just a touch since then, but are still playing jaw-droppingly badly. 

The Yankees have been fun to watch/manage so far this year. At this writing they've won 9 in a row and are firing on all cylinders. Wally Pipp just won Player of the Week, Herb Pennock has thrown a couple of shutouts, and the defense has been good. I don't know how much of this can be laid at the feet of Heinie Zimmerman (not the pitching, obviously), but having a great-fielding second baseman who also can hit .300 has certainly helped a lot. There's a lot of the season left to go, and as noted the Yankees aren't running away with anything, but they're playing as well as I could have hoped.

I keep saying I need to pay closer attention to the NL, and that is still true. That league is much more bunched, with the Cardinals at the top at the moment just ahead of the Rustlers, Giants, among others. While the early going in the AL looks like it's setting up for a 3-team race, the NL looks like a total free-for-all. 

Depending on how the season plays out for the Packers (and the other former Feds), I could see it having some repercussions for the worldbuilding around the next round of expansion, too, which I'm still imagining for 1927 or so, which would put it at something like...2025-2026 given my pace of play? I guess I have time to think about it. :) 

Thoughts from 1917 about a third major league

 

Here's another piece that I thought I'd stick here so I don't lose it.  I actually ran across it a while ago while working on making Omaha's Vinton Park. It's a piece from the Omaha Bee from...October 7th? 1917. At least I think that's right--there's no date on the top of the page, and the most recent articles on this page are dated October 6th.

In any case, there's a discussion about the way the war might affect the minor leagues in the coming 1918 season, which is of local interest since Omaha played in the Western League, and it wasn't clear if that league would survive and/or if the Omaha team would move up or down a level. 

What's of most interest to me here is that one of the drivers is what happens to the major leagues. There was some amount of intrigue going on with the American League in general at this point, which isn't mentioned in the article, but they claim in the article that Ban Johnson (president of the American League) thinks a third major league was on the way. The further claim, though not ascribed to Johnson, is that such a league would have teams in Providence, Baltimore, Toronto, Buffalo, Newark, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Louisville. I've already got c. 1917 parks made for many of these cities, and Providence and Toronto were next on my list. So, I suppose I should hit Columbus after that... 

A few more thoughts about a few more team names

 

I figure I'll put this here so I don't forget about it.

I've changed the name of the Baltimore Terrapins to the Orioles (and even added a news story to the league news feed for it!), which has me thinking of other teams. I did run through this once before, including the possibility of renaming the Packers to be the Monarchs, which I'm now leaning more toward.  Perhaps at the time when the real Monarchs were formed in 1920?

I'm also still kicking around what to actually do with the Rustlers, driven for better or worse with what the team uniform situation is. In real life the team used neutral city name and/or "B" on their jerseys in 1915, then 1921-1924 before spending a few years with B on the home jerseys and "Braves" on the road ones. They then went back to full Boston/B from 1936-1944. At the pace I'm going it'll be a while before I need to worry about that, I suppose, but I have been thinking about alternate team names--there is potential for the Bruins, actually, since the founder of the NHL team owned the Braves a few years after founding the Bruins. Bears would be more obvious, except I'm saving that for Newark in case they stay. Bulldogs would be possible, but at another point the owner was the Harvard baseball and football coach, and he might not want the Yale mascot to be the name of the team. I'm also kicking around Shamrocks. But as 3-time World Series winners under the Rustlers name, they may not be changing it any time soon.

One other thing that I'll add here as an update--they could go with the Boston Rabbits as an homage to Rabbit Maranville, their very popular perennial All-Star and MVP candidate, who was the sparkplug of those three-time champions. It'd be consistent with some general practice at the time, even if it might just end up kicking the can down a bit (and I'd need to commission someone to make appropriate uniforms)...

1918: Halfway through Spring Training

 I thought I'd post a bit of an update. Spring Training got off to a little bit of a slow start due to ballpark making (as usual). San Diego continues to be the most glaring omissions from these tours since there's no suitable ballpark, which was also true in real life. They used City/Balboa Stadium for barnstorming tours, which suffers from very short foul lines. So, I'm going to keep putting off visits to San Diego.  I did build Maier Stadium in Vernon, and learned about the bizarre history of that location, though, and brought the Spring Training Tour through there. I also built parks in Dallas and Charlotte, and will have the Yankees end Spring Training in New Haven, another new one.

The Yankees started ST well, but have been scuffling of late. I'm hoping it's because I'm going with a very extended rotation so some pitchers are only now getting a second start after 18 games or so, and the pitchers are still rusty. The offense has also been a bit streaky, which of course has been a bit of a long-term issue anyhow. While the Yankees are at 10-8 along with a lot of other teams, the Red Sox are something like 14-4, which is somewhat ominous. Babe Ruth has been on fire this spring, perhaps presaging a monster season (also ominous). 

A data-free look back and ahead for the alt-Yankees

 

First, congratulations to the 1917 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. They handled the Red Sox in 5 games, without too much trouble. Dutch Leonard was awful in two starts for Boston, to the extent that if it were real life there might be some whispers about whether he threw the games. But no such worries here.

Following the World Series I took the Yankees on a barnstorming tour along with the Pirates. I decided that it would culminate in a 3-game tournament in Hawaii to decide MLB's bronze medal (so to speak). I also scheduled 1-day tournaments to determine city/state championships for Ohio, Baltimore-DC, St. Louis, and Chicago. I only realized after 2 games' worth of the 3-game tourney that these games were counting in the regular season stats. I don't think there's any real problem, just a weird quirk that I'll need to handle differently.

Meanwhile, it was a very tough couple of weeks for the American League and no doubt this universe's Ban Johnson is stewing at home. Bad enough that the favored Red Sox lost easily, but every single city/state series also went to the NL, and after winning 2/3 of the games on the barnstorming tour and game 1 in Honolulu, the Yankees dropped both game 2 in Hilo and game 3 back in Honolulu to let the Pirates claim 3rd place. This also marks the 4th straight year that the NL has won the World Series. Maybe perceptions of the AL get skewed because of the Packers--certainly going 18-0 against them changes perceptions of the Yankees. 

Which may be a good segue into a "what went wrong/what went right/what happens next?" discussion.

Outside the 18-0 record, the Yankees weren't particularly dominant against anyone.  I do think they mostly had winning records (I'm not going to look--the title says "data-free") but they were 10-8 or so. So, as an estimate let's say they were 10-11 games over .500 in 144 games. That's...77-67 or so? An 87-win pace? Not bad, but nothing to write home about. So, it's good they got the job done against the worst team (and part of the reason KC was the worst team was that they were 0-18 against the Yankees), but they definitely will need to step it up against everyone else.

Offensively, basically everything went right. The core of the Yankees lineup (Peckinpaugh, Baker, Charleston, Pipp, Heilmann) was basically healthy all year long. Heilmann was a mild disappointment at the bat, but Peckinpaugh hit about 30 points higher than I could have hoped for. Gilhooley was right around .300, and Baumann and Nunamaker were adequate or better. The Yanks were the top offensive team, and if they weren't that much better than Boston, it's hard to separate from the pack when the pack has prime Tris Speaker and a blooming Babe Ruth. Nevertheless, we can hope for Heilmann (and Charleston for that matter) to continue to develop and for the others to stay at their pace. We've also significantly upgraded 2B by trading for Heine Zimmerman. We sent the Cubs 4 players, but none of them are brand names and I don't think any of them had any realistic shot at making the Yankees lineup--Lou Guisto is maybe our 4th or 5th-best option at 1B after Pipp, Heilmann, Terry, and possibly Moore or even O'Doul at this point. So, with a recent All-Star at 2B, we can hope to give the offense just a bit more of a boost and/or hedge against regression.

Pitching was middle of the pack, and is the most obvious place to improve. This is also something I'm not sure I see a great path to improve. There's not a bunch of great pitching in the draft this year (or IRL MLB players at all), so at the moment I'm looking at the same gang as this year but hoping for a full year of Ruether and Barnes plus some improvement from Vance and a bit more consistency from Redding and the others. Vance is back down in Pensacola again this winter so hopefully he'll come along. I don't particularly want a short bench, but since Redding and Caldwell are great hitters I could use them as pinch hitters (or even in the field?) and have a couple more pitchers around. On the other hand, if I don't have great pitchers it's not clear if that will help. 

Looking a few years out, I think the team is set up to be excellent in the early/mid-20s. On the other hand, there's no reason to think I'll have any of the top historical 1920s Yankees--Ruth, Hoyt and Meusel are already on other teams, and I have a sneaking suspicion Gehrig will go first in that year's draft and go to someone other than me... On the other other hand, it's not clear that Gehrig would even have a place to play with all those first basemen I already mentioned...

OK, this has gotten long enough. Let's see how Pensacola does and how 1918 (free from war!) starts.