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.
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