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. :)