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!