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.