Today is Saturday, April 3, 1926 in the sim. Spring Training ended yesterday, and Opening Day is Monday, with a full slate of games.
I divided up the teams into a Cactus League spending March out west and a Florida-based Grapefruit League, based (at least conceptually) on the real-life training sites for the teams in 1926. I even went to the trouble of assigning home Spring Training parks to all the games corresponding to the home team and pairing teams so that I could adjust the first part of the schedule from the strict AL/NL schedules that are automatically generated for ST. After the first off-day, however, I had the Yankees and whomever they were playing tour the Caribbean--two stops in Porto Rico (Ponce and the new San Juan park), Hospital Grounds on St. Croix, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Port-au-Prince. Then it was briefly back to Florida and a short tour back north for the home stretch.
The Yankees, who have to be considered* overwhelming favorites to repeat again as AL champions, made it through March relatively unscathed. Pennock got hurt in the final ST game about an inning before I was going to pull him, but it's only a day-to-day sore back. Pennock is the 4th ranked pitcher in the Boffins' Poll, with Vance, Luque, and Grove ranked #1, #2, and #3, respectively. Hornsby is the top ranked position player, but Cobb and Heilmann are #2 and #3, Ruth is #7, and Collins at #17. So, putting all that together, they seem to be in good shape at the very least. I'll wait for the Preseason Predictions before doing a more proper season preview, though.
I've made good progress on the last post's to-do list, knocking off all the US parks that needed to be done--Fairbanks, American Samoa, Guam, Spokane, and Ogden (though the last of these was a re-skinned 19th-century park). This leaves the three Canadian parks to complete the minor league set and two Australian parks to complete the Sesquicentennial Tour set.
I've gotten myself into a different rabbit hole, however. I figured that while I'm going to have fictional players for most of the teams in the Baseball World's Fair, that doesn't mean they can't have the names of real baseball players from the relevant countries, assuming I could find them. And indeed I could! But now while I'm trying not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I haven't run out of leads yet. So, I've got names for every country but France, but I'm also trying to use box scores from digitized papers to get all the Mexican League players from 1925 while I'm at it...
Otherwise, it's on we go. I'll post this now and then do the preview soon. I may wait a week and start the season on the 18th...
*I need to redo the Preseason Predictions, which came up at the start of Spring Training and showed William Bell winning 43 games, which certainly won't happen because he'll be starting the year in Toronto.
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