I'm just intending this to be a short post since I'm on the verge of Opening Day. The big off-season news is that the Yankees, coming off of a 125-win regular season and easy World Series victory, worked a straight-up swap of young up-and-coming stud Goose Goslin for Babe Ruth. In-universe, there's probably some amount of dismay, but not as much as there should be. Goslin is a Hall-of-Famer, and had excellent production through to the mid/late 1930s. Babe Ruth outproduced him until 1933 and in the process had some of the most historic offensive seasons of all time. 1925 was an off year for him, which in combination with his being on the cusp of 30 years old probably made the Red Sox ready to move him.
The algorithm picks us to have a 111-win regular season and win the pennant by 11 games over the Packers. It has the Cardinals winning 100 games and winning the NL by 12 games over Baltimore and the Giants. It predicts a .418 season for Cobb and 43 home runs for Ruth, but only 220-inning seasons for the Yankees' main pitchers.
Even with Ruth's real-life off year in 1925, the Alt-Yankees have many of the WAR and other leaders from our universe: Heilmann, Rogan, Luque, and Winters all make the top 10 in WAR, though the game version I ended up with discounts Negro Leaguers, and Winters is actually cooling his heels in AA. Looking at the top-10 WAR for position players removes Winters and Rogan and adds the now-absent Goslin, but also adds Cobb.
So, I'm looking for a big year again and our 6th straight pennant. Hopefully we'll get back-to-back World Series championships for the first time while we're at it. Besides the Ruth pickup, we dropped Mogridge, who wasn't going to get many innings anyhow.
OK, let's do this thing.
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