Alt-1922: Home Stretch!

 

For starters, The AL won the All-Star Game 4-1 on the strength of a Babe Ruth home run. 

When last we left things, the Yankees were 7 1/2 games back, in third place just behind Newark. The Red Sox, who had gone 20-7 over the previous month, looked like they were cruising to an easy pennant. The defending AL champion Yankees had just gone 14-13 over that same stretch and seemed to be slogging their way to a 2nd place finish if they were lucky, but they were closer to 7th place than 1st.

At the start of play today, 1 September 2022, they are only 1 1/2 games behind Boston and much closer to the Sox than the now-3rd-place Spiders. In theory I should be happy about this, and in practice I am, but I nevertheless can't feel a bit disappointed--as it turns out this has been (or at least felt) less like the Yankees catching fire and the Red Sox coming back to Earth vs. the Yankees playing a bit better and the Red Sox collapsing.

Since 9 July, the Yankees have gone 28-18, a .609 pace that translates to 99 wins over a full season. That's good but far short of what I was speculating might be necessary at the end of the last post. Boston has gone 21-23 over that stretch, though. Cleveland, meanwhile, has gone 29-15, including a 12-game winning streak that's landed them 4 1/2 games out and in third place at this writing. The time since the ASG adds up to over a quarter of the season, so this is no mere blip. The frustration here is that the Yankees had actually caught the Red Sox and have spent a couple of days in first place (by 1/2 game) before dropping back, and could just as easily be up by 2-3 games at this point--they're 5 games off of their Pythag pace. 

Just a quick note about the Yankees' farm teams--the Maple Leafs are also sitting in 2nd place, a game behind Rochester. The Pelicans are in 8th place, per usual, but have played at a .540 pace in the past two months. I did something of a house cleaning for New Orleans rather than letting the AI do its thing, and since then the Pels have been much improved. 

The Yankees led the league in OPS in both July and August, though this was no change from their May-June slump. The pitching did turn around, though--the Yankees gave up 5.4 runs per game in May+June, which dropped to 4.05 in July + August. It's not completely obvious to me what drove that, though it's likely to have been an addition by subtraction thing of getting Alexander out of the starting rotation and really just doing mop-up work until he (hopefully) got himself sorted. I've been using Vance a lot more, driven by his ratings starting to come way up. Faber turned a slow decline into a slow improvement, and Luque has been pretty steady. Ruether and Pennock took Rixey and Alexander's rotation spots and Ruether in particular has pitched well. 

So, we'll see how the final month of Alt-1922 plays out. Rosters expand in about a week, I'm not totally sure who to bring up. If Toronto is still in the hunt for the IL pennant I probably won't bring up anyone yet...