Alt-1925 At The Quarter Pole

 

I'm about 40 games in, and after a 1-4 start the Yankees have gone 26-9 and find themselves tied for first place with the Kansas City Packers. This is the case even though the Yanks have been hit with the injury bug--Ty Cobb only played 7 games before getting knocked out for a month, Santop spent two weeks on the IL, and nagging injuries have hit several other team members. Cobb's absence in particular exposed an awkward situation where the only people who could play CF competently (Arlett, Rogan, Charleston) weren't hitting particularly well and the only person who was hitting and could play CF at all (Cy Williams) was terrible out there. I've settled into a scheme where Williams starts the games and gets replaced in the 6th inning or so by Charleston, unless I need Charleston at 1B to spell Bill Terry (who also isn't hitting).  Traynor also got hurt, he'll have accrued about a month on the IL by the time he's back.

The early losses were also exacerbated by the bullpen, who was having one of their terrible stretches. Some of that is on me--I didn't realize right away that the new version of OOTP reset the defaults to require relievers to warm up, so I had a few games where I brought in relievers who were cold without realizing it. Happily, (most of) the starters have pitched very well, in particular Pennock and Luque. Terry, Lazzeri and Allen (called back up when Traynor got hurt) have been adequate but not great. Collins and Peckinpaugh have been lights out. Santop has been on fire. Ruth leads the league in home runs and RBI, but still feels a bit disappointing. Heilmann has also been performing up to what you'd reasonably expect, but he'd been living up to unreasonable expectations before. 

In the NL, the Giants got off to a crazy hot start, but cooled off considerably and the Cardinals are now holding down first place. The Maple Leafs are scuffling around .500, but the Pelicans are in first place and hoping to get their first-ever pennant. Lots yet to play, of course. 

One more thing to note--the draft pool was announced, and a whole lot of Negro League players who are already in the league were duplicated there. I think it's because of the change so that these players are now recognized as MLB players, but before then they only had Minor League IDs. I removed all the duplicates for players who hadn't retired, but before deleting them I copied their ratings over to the existing player profiles with the rationale that these shouldn't have the discounted ratings that they'd had before. So, OTL Negro League players basically all got boosted at some level. For the Yankees, that especially helped Charleston and Rogan in particular. 

I'll close here. I'm getting the vibe of those seasons where the Yankees take a little time to hit the right gear and then run away in the second half of the season.  There have already been a lot of injuries, though, and the bench is absolutely thinner than it might appear. So we'll see how it goes!