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...
