1919 Season Underway!

Quick post here. I haven't had a ton of time to play over the past month or so, though I've been back to playing in the last few days.  The game thinks the Red Sox and Reds are the pennant favorites, but we'll see if we can do something about that. :) 

Oscar Charleston is starting the season on the IL, as is Babe Adams. I think the team is stronger this year than last year, though the minor leagues complicate matters a bit--Bill Terry isn't a left-handed pinch-hitter sitting on the bench and making spot starts, he's in Toronto. I've got a few people on the Yankees that I'd just as soon jettison or move down, but who can turn down minor league assignments. I'm still sorting out how much I care. 

The minor leagues are also pushing me to do a couple of things that weren't on my radar. While we had a reserve list, I only needed 1-2 people who could play a given position on that list and I had dozens of pitchers in case someone panned out. Moving to minor league teams means that we need 3-4 (or 5?) players at any position because New Orleans needs to have someone at 3rd base and a backup catcher, and so does Toronto.

 

A bit of catch-up for Alt-1919

 

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...

Your Alt-1918 World Series Champions: The St. Louis Cardinals

 So, the title gets that out of the way.  I played the games themselves a couple of weeks ago by now--it was another NL win in 5 games, like every World Series since I started playing. I'm willing to consider that kind of an odd coincidence, though.

The Cardinals won the first two in St. Louis, 4-0 and 3-1. The Yankees won game 3 in New York 6-3 but then dropped the next two 2-1 and 9-8. The last game ended with the Yankees falling just short--Oscar Charleston singled representing the tying run but then was thrown out trying to steal second and Elmer Miller popped out to end it. Charleston's steal, which might otherwise be eye-popping, was driven by the Yankees' terrible propensity for grounding into double plays during the series. Claude Hendrix went 2-0 with an ERA of 0.50, added the game-winning RBI in Game 1, and won the Series MVP award.

The Yankees' offense more or less didn't show up in the Series, at least to the extent they did in the regular season. St. Louis out hit and out slugged them, though the Yankees did get 3 home runs to the Cardinals' 1. 

While Bill Terry made the most of his World Series experience by hitting a pinch-hit home run in Game 5 in his only Series at-bat, Del Pratt had the highest OPS of the regulars at 1.154. Charleston was also above 1.000, and Heilmann and Hornsby were both above .960. On the other hand, while Baker was a disappointment hitting .216 and Gilhooley a problem going 3 for 21, Peckinpaugh was a catastrophe, going zero for 20. Peckinpaugh's -0.21 Win Probability Added was only the 3rd worst on the team, though, with Santop bottoming out at -0.31 just behind Gilhooley's -0.29.  On the pitching side, Jesse Barnes' had a disastrous stint in Game 5, allowing 4 runs in 0.2 innings in a very high-leverage situation. 

So what now?   The Fall Barnstorming Tour is making its way west, with today's games taking place in Cheyenne and Salt Lake City. Each team, including the Yankees and Cardinals, has 4 players on the tour. Charleston got hurt early and had to be replaced by Wally Pipp, but Oscar should be fine well before the season starts. Rommel is doing his usual thing of pitching 3-4 good innings and then getting shelled. Russell hasn't been pitching much, and Dobie Moore is doing fine. But I did pull a major trade today, sending Heinie Zimmerman to the White Sox along with a couple of pitchers who will never amount to much  in exchange for Eddie Collins. If things vaguely follow history, Zimmerman's best days are behind him while Collins has a few more MVP-caliber years ahead and should be productive for another 5 or so years. I feel a bit bad since Zimmerman was a fan (and personal) favorite who I've gushed over in this very blog. But business is business, I suppose.

More admin stuff in the next post, I think, including my current thoughts about minor leagues.

1918 World Series Preview!! (part 2)

 

I'm going to try to keep this short-ish, since I'm actually hoping to play Game 1 when I'm done. One thing I should note after the last post is the different park factors in the Polo Grounds vs. Robison Field: the Yankees enjoy a 30% boost to home runs and about an 8% boost to batting average vs. Robison Field providing a generally more neutral environment and cutting batting average and home runs by 4%. So, the Yankees huge power and run-scoring advantage could be partly illusory. However, that makes its pitching look even better.

On a player-by-player basis, New York has a much more balanced team than St. Louis. The best player on either team is Rogers Hornsby of the Cardinals, who was NL MVP in Alt-1917 and is an excellent bet to repeat in 1918. 

I suspect the list of best players after Hornsby in the series is mostly Yankees, though. Oscar Charleston is my choice for #2, though sorting by 1918 Wins above Replacement (WAR) puts Peckinpaugh* 2nd and Charleston 3rd. 

The list of Yankees/Cardinals non-pitchers with WAR over 4.0 in order are Hornsby (STL), Peckinpaugh (NYY), Charleston (NYY), Pipp (NYY), Baker (NYY), Heilmann (NYY), Hyatt (STL), Zimmerman (NYY, injured), Pratt (STL), Santop (NYY), Gilhooley (NYY).  So that's...10 players (not counting Zimmerman, who can't play), and 3 of them are on St. Louis. 

The pitching is less clear to me, though again the Cardinals maybe hold a slight edge? Hendrix and Hoyt (both on the Cardinals) are far and away the pitching WAR leaders, and/because/but they racked up a lot more innings. Pennock had a similar year for the Yankees in terms of ERA+, FIP, and all that business, but pitched 100 fewer innings due to injury and my aversion to overworking my pitchers (even in 1918). I don't know what the Cardinals AI** will be doing, but I plan to keep managing in a more modern style. 

I'm reluctant to make a prediction for all sorts of reasons, but I guess I will. I think the Yankees will win, I'll say they do it in 6 games. But it wouldn't be a massive surprise to me if they swept or lost. How's that for confident? :)

*As noted here in other posts, the way OOTP does WAR seems to give an enormous boost to shortstops who aren't butchers. While I suspect Hornsby finishes #1 in WAR even without it, Peckinpaugh in particular doesn't always pass my eye test even though he's perennially among the league leaders in WAR.

**Jack Hendricks was the real-life manager for the 1918 Cardinals, he's available in OOTP (I'm not playing with coaching staffs on) so we can say he's managing here, too. Miller Huggins would potentially have made more sense--he was Cardinals manager from 1913-1917 after retiring from playing for them in 1916, but in this universe he was traded to the Terrapins/Orioles and retired. So maybe he's their manager?

1918 World Series Preview!! (part 1)

 

The World Series will be starting as soon as I get myself psyched up to do it, probably this weekend. But one item I wanted to scratch off the to-do list before playing the games was this preview. :)

The Yankees dominated the leaderboards for team statistics:

They saved their hottest stretch for September, and ultimately the Red Sox couldn't keep up with that 22-5 record, and wouldn't have won the pennant even if they'd swept the Yankees during that key September series I mentioned last time rather than the reverse.

The Cardinals had an even hotter August than the Yankees' September, which allowed them to scuffle a bit coming to the finish. They led a bunch of pitching categories (though were middle of the pack in walks and strikeouts), and led the league in runs (though were only 3rd in OPS and home runs):

Looking at that alone, we might favor the Yankees over St. Louis. However, we would also have (and kind of did) expect Boston to beat the Phillies last season, and take the White Sox over the Rustlers before that. The problem is the AL is rather stratified--the Packers have been historic-level bad for a few years, and the Peppers have been a more pedestrian bad. With the Packers giving out 114 wins to the rest of the league and Newark contributing another 97, it's not obvious how the Yankees (or Red Sox) would do if they were in the NL playing Baltimore and the Cubs instead*.

Looking at things a little bit more closely, though, I do think the Yankees dominated their league in general a bit more than the Cardinals. Even if you remove Newark and Kansas City, the Yankees beat the rest of the league at a 103-win pace. The Yanks were offensively very strong, scoring runs at a pace 20% more than the league average and with a team OPS 8% higher than the league. Those numbers are actually pretty similar to what the real-life 1998 Yankees did. For their opponents in St. Louis, those numbers were 10% more run scoring and 6% higher OPS. So, the Yankees seem to be a bit better than the Cards.

Pitching-wise, despite the Cardinals' gaudy numbers (Team ERA of 2.23!) they're not appreciably better than the Yankees relative to their leagues. St. Louis' ERA is 15% better than the NL average, and in runs per game they're 11% better. For the Yankees, though, those numbers are 13% and 15%. Certainly competitive.

I'd intended to also talk about positional comparisons between teams, but this is getting long so I'll do that next time. 

*Interestingly enough (to me), Buffalo went 74-88 and finished in 7th place largely because of their awful performance against terrible teams--they were 13-23 vs. Baltimore and the Cubs. If they'd gone 18-18 against them they would have been just below .500 and the season might feel different in the Queen City. If they'd won at the same pace against those teams that everyone else did, they'd've gone 21-15, finished over .500 and been seen as a team on the rise.  Maybe they are a team on the rise? Their Pythagorean record suggests they "should" have been 79-83...

The New York Yankees are the 1918 American League Champions

Last time I updated there were 26 games to go. The Yankees have won 16 of the 19 games since then, while the Red Sox have gone 9-11. The key series was held in the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees swept the Sox in front of 3 of the biggest crowds of the year and ran their lead up from 3.5 games to 6.5. New York hasn't looked back, and clinched the pennant in St. Louis after winning game 154. This is clearly the best team in Yankees history (to this point, of course), and while they can't reach the all-time AL record for team wins in a season, they could get pretty close. 

However, I'm mostly going to try to rest people up and hope to avoid injuries--Heinie Zimmerman tore his grown and is out for the season. Birdie Cree has been doing a great job filling in for him, and got his 1000th career hit during a 3-hit game. I brought Bill Terry up from the reserves when Zimmerman went down, and Terry's been on fire (in limited usage). 

In the NL, the Cardinals are grinding their way toward their first-ever pennant. So, this will probably be the first time since 1906 with two first-time participants. I'll hold off on a World Series preview until things are final, but I'm pleased that I managed to get the Yankees the pennant!

Home Stretch, 1918

 

We're into the final month of the 1918 season. The Yankees hold a slim, 1-game lead over Boston, and have gone 33-21 since July 1st and picking up 4 games on Boston in the process.  The bad news is that it was a 3-game lead not very long ago. But in the sense that you'd rather be in first place by a game than second place by a game, it's all good.  Both teams are down some key players right now--Tris Speaker has another week until his return, and Larry Gardner may or may not come back before the season ends. Herb Pennock has been sitting at 18 wins since an injury took him out, and he still has two weeks left before healed. That unfortunately makes him unlikely to play in the big Yankees-Red Sox series coming up at the Polo Grounds in about 10 days--a series that may decide the pennant winner.

With 26 games to go, though, there's a series left with just about everyone. The Yankees finish up their games vs. the Packers in the upcoming series, and finish the season with 4 games against Philadelphia. The Red Sox finish against the 3rd-place Spiders. We'll see how it goes.

Over in the other league, the Cardinals are cruising toward their first-ever pennant. I'll talk more about them another time, I suppose!

All-Star Break, 1918

 

The National League took the All-Star Game, held at Allston Grounds this year, 1-0. The game was simultaneously a pitchers' duel and rather sloppy (3 errors per team, including one that led to the single run). The Yankees had five starters--all of the infielders (Pipp, Zimmerman, Peckinpaugh, and Baker) plus Charleston in CF. I think my voting had a bigger effect than I intended, so I may not vote in future elections. Or maybe I will, who knows?

The Yankees find themselves 2.5 games behind Boston at the break. On the one hand, this is great because Boston is still playing really well and the Yankees are more or less hanging with them.  On the other hand, the Red Sox have lost Babe Ruth and Larry Gardner for an extended period, and this kind of needs to be the period where the Yankees make a move if a move is to be made.  Unfortunately, they've been scuffling a bit, including against some not-great teams. So, in a sense, the break didn't come too soon. The NL has been a real scrum, with the Rustlers currently ahead of the Cardinals (I believe) by 0.5 games. The Phillies led for a while but have dropped back. The surprising Buffalo Blues are in 3rd place several games back. I'm not convinced this will be the final ordering of the teams.

Let's do a little bit of qualitative grading of the Yankees' first half.  As per my recent custom, I'm not going to call up the stats if only because it's a bit of a hassle to do while OOTP isn't running. 

Exceeded Expectations: The pitching, for sure. I never would have expected the Yankees to be leading the league in ERA, let alone leading it by a lot. I'm not even totally sure where this great performance is originating--Pennock is pitching great, but everyone else seems to be making me sweat every time.  And Reuther is out with a long injury again for the second year in a row.  Nevertheless, props to the pitching staff.  

Zimmerman has been a great acquisition for the team. He's been a great answer to the 2B problem that the Yankees have had since I've started playing--miles ahead of Baumann (who he drove into retirement) and Cree and, at least as of now, Dobie Moore. 

And Zimmerman has catalyzed a suddenly-great defense--every infielder is above average, and all but Pipp are substantially above average. Gilhooley and Heilmann are above average, with Heilmann substantially above average in RF. Of the everyday regulars, only Charleston is iffy in the field. 

Met Expectations: I'm going to put the offense here. Even with heightened expectations given last year, the main group have more or less come through (I should probably rest them more, though). I can't tell if there are fewer home runs this year or if it's statistics of small numbers, but while Pipp, Baker, and Charleston aren't dominating the leaderboards like they did last year, they're doing fine. Gilhooley is hanging in there (though new acquisition Cy Williams is biding his time and will likely ease Gilhooley into a 4th outfielder role before too long). Miller has 2 pinch-hit home runs already this year, which is bananas when Baker is leading the league in home runs with 5.  So, solid work there. And the team has more or less been beating the teams they're supposed to. They've dropped a few to Kansas City this year, but there are a lot of teams they're going 6-2 or 6-3 against, which is good.

Has Not Met Expectations: First I'll note that the one baffling thing about the hitting is that we aren't scoring runs like I think we should. Boston is #2 in most offensive categories, but has been consistently scoring more runs than the Yankees have. Now, I don't know if they're overachieving, or if I'm being too conservative in terms of taking extra bases or (gulp) stealing, but it's been a (small) blemish on the offense.

To point fingers at individuals, Pat Collins has really had a terrible, terrible year so far. It took him close to (more than?) 30 at-bats to get his first hit, and he never really improved. after (I think?) 80 or so at-bats of a .100 batting average, I started looking for other options. That led to signing Negro League star Louis Santop (and having Cristobal Torriente become a free agent), and Santop is doing fine. Collins sat on the reserves for a bit, and I'm hoping he'll turn it around.

I'll also point to Jesse Barnes, who I was expecting to be a lights-out closer or great starter. He hasn't really done either and now is also sitting in the reserves. This may be unfair to him, so I'll give him some slack.

Fingers crossed that the Yankees can make up the ground on the Red Sox and bring home their first pennant!

One-third through 1918

 

I feel like I'm flying through the season--I guess that's what happens when you play 3-4 games a day. The Yankees are 1/3 of the way through their schedule, with other teams within 1-2 games of that. Since the last post, the three AL leaders have cooled off a bit, with the 4th-place Browns almost having caught the 3rd-place Spiders. The Yankees are actually in 1st place, with a slim lead over Boston and Cleveland just a bit further back. The Yanks dropped the most recent series they played (against the Spiders), but obviously have been playing well before then. 

The Yankees have been getting it done on offense, but their pitching has also been surprisingly (to me) excellent, with a league-leading ERA. I'm not sure if it's smoke and mirrors, but Pennock and Caldwell in particular are pitching very well. What concerns me right now is injuries--Reuther, Barnes, and Thomas have all spent time on the IL, and Pennock had to pulled from a game due to injury (though he was back the next day). The hitters have continued as in 1917, with Zimmerman serving as a great addition. The infield defense has been great, and the Yankees are averaging more than a double play per game, which is an amazing contrast to 1916 and certainly is much less frustrating. 

The other recent news is the signing of Louis Santop. This was driven by Pat Collins just not hitting at all. He started something like 1-for-30, and after something like 50-60 at-bats still only had maybe 5 hits. I started getting concerned that it might affect his development, but the team only has 3 catchers in the entire organization. So I cast around and realized a few Negro Leaguers weren't in the simulation, so I added them. Santop is a catcher, who I made an offer to (and who signed), and I also added Cristobal Torriente, who's a monster hitter and who I also made an offer to. Torriente knows he's a monster hitter, though, and wants to be the best-paid player in the game. So he's had offers but is still unsigned...

Over in the NL, the Phillies seem to be settling into spending the most time in first place, with a few teams (mostly the Rustlers) giving chase. 

End of April 1918

All right, just a quick note here before work starts. So I'm again going to go without looking at the stats, though I think I have a decent sense of what they say? 

We've gotten to the end of April 1918, teams have played 25-27 games. At the moment, the AL is split into a trio of teams playing roughly .700 ball (the Spiders, Yankees, and Red Sox), a mass of teams within a game or two .500 (presumably they'll differentiate as the season wears on), and the awful, awful Packers. Just a few game days before the end of April they were playing .154 ball, about a 135-loss pace. They've picked it up just a touch since then, but are still playing jaw-droppingly badly. 

The Yankees have been fun to watch/manage so far this year. At this writing they've won 9 in a row and are firing on all cylinders. Wally Pipp just won Player of the Week, Herb Pennock has thrown a couple of shutouts, and the defense has been good. I don't know how much of this can be laid at the feet of Heinie Zimmerman (not the pitching, obviously), but having a great-fielding second baseman who also can hit .300 has certainly helped a lot. There's a lot of the season left to go, and as noted the Yankees aren't running away with anything, but they're playing as well as I could have hoped.

I keep saying I need to pay closer attention to the NL, and that is still true. That league is much more bunched, with the Cardinals at the top at the moment just ahead of the Rustlers, Giants, among others. While the early going in the AL looks like it's setting up for a 3-team race, the NL looks like a total free-for-all. 

Depending on how the season plays out for the Packers (and the other former Feds), I could see it having some repercussions for the worldbuilding around the next round of expansion, too, which I'm still imagining for 1927 or so, which would put it at something like...2025-2026 given my pace of play? I guess I have time to think about it. :) 

Thoughts from 1917 about a third major league

 

Here's another piece that I thought I'd stick here so I don't lose it.  I actually ran across it a while ago while working on making Omaha's Vinton Park. It's a piece from the Omaha Bee from...October 7th? 1917. At least I think that's right--there's no date on the top of the page, and the most recent articles on this page are dated October 6th.

In any case, there's a discussion about the way the war might affect the minor leagues in the coming 1918 season, which is of local interest since Omaha played in the Western League, and it wasn't clear if that league would survive and/or if the Omaha team would move up or down a level. 

What's of most interest to me here is that one of the drivers is what happens to the major leagues. There was some amount of intrigue going on with the American League in general at this point, which isn't mentioned in the article, but they claim in the article that Ban Johnson (president of the American League) thinks a third major league was on the way. The further claim, though not ascribed to Johnson, is that such a league would have teams in Providence, Baltimore, Toronto, Buffalo, Newark, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Louisville. I've already got c. 1917 parks made for many of these cities, and Providence and Toronto were next on my list. So, I suppose I should hit Columbus after that... 

A few more thoughts about a few more team names

 

I figure I'll put this here so I don't forget about it.

I've changed the name of the Baltimore Terrapins to the Orioles (and even added a news story to the league news feed for it!), which has me thinking of other teams. I did run through this once before, including the possibility of renaming the Packers to be the Monarchs, which I'm now leaning more toward.  Perhaps at the time when the real Monarchs were formed in 1920?

I'm also still kicking around what to actually do with the Rustlers, driven for better or worse with what the team uniform situation is. In real life the team used neutral city name and/or "B" on their jerseys in 1915, then 1921-1924 before spending a few years with B on the home jerseys and "Braves" on the road ones. They then went back to full Boston/B from 1936-1944. At the pace I'm going it'll be a while before I need to worry about that, I suppose, but I have been thinking about alternate team names--there is potential for the Bruins, actually, since the founder of the NHL team owned the Braves a few years after founding the Bruins. Bears would be more obvious, except I'm saving that for Newark in case they stay. Bulldogs would be possible, but at another point the owner was the Harvard baseball and football coach, and he might not want the Yale mascot to be the name of the team. I'm also kicking around Shamrocks. But as 3-time World Series winners under the Rustlers name, they may not be changing it any time soon.

One other thing that I'll add here as an update--they could go with the Boston Rabbits as an homage to Rabbit Maranville, their very popular perennial All-Star and MVP candidate, who was the sparkplug of those three-time champions. It'd be consistent with some general practice at the time, even if it might just end up kicking the can down a bit (and I'd need to commission someone to make appropriate uniforms)...

1918: Halfway through Spring Training

 I thought I'd post a bit of an update. Spring Training got off to a little bit of a slow start due to ballpark making (as usual). San Diego continues to be the most glaring omissions from these tours since there's no suitable ballpark, which was also true in real life. They used City/Balboa Stadium for barnstorming tours, which suffers from very short foul lines. So, I'm going to keep putting off visits to San Diego.  I did build Maier Stadium in Vernon, and learned about the bizarre history of that location, though, and brought the Spring Training Tour through there. I also built parks in Dallas and Charlotte, and will have the Yankees end Spring Training in New Haven, another new one.

The Yankees started ST well, but have been scuffling of late. I'm hoping it's because I'm going with a very extended rotation so some pitchers are only now getting a second start after 18 games or so, and the pitchers are still rusty. The offense has also been a bit streaky, which of course has been a bit of a long-term issue anyhow. While the Yankees are at 10-8 along with a lot of other teams, the Red Sox are something like 14-4, which is somewhat ominous. Babe Ruth has been on fire this spring, perhaps presaging a monster season (also ominous). 

A data-free look back and ahead for the alt-Yankees

 

First, congratulations to the 1917 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. They handled the Red Sox in 5 games, without too much trouble. Dutch Leonard was awful in two starts for Boston, to the extent that if it were real life there might be some whispers about whether he threw the games. But no such worries here.

Following the World Series I took the Yankees on a barnstorming tour along with the Pirates. I decided that it would culminate in a 3-game tournament in Hawaii to decide MLB's bronze medal (so to speak). I also scheduled 1-day tournaments to determine city/state championships for Ohio, Baltimore-DC, St. Louis, and Chicago. I only realized after 2 games' worth of the 3-game tourney that these games were counting in the regular season stats. I don't think there's any real problem, just a weird quirk that I'll need to handle differently.

Meanwhile, it was a very tough couple of weeks for the American League and no doubt this universe's Ban Johnson is stewing at home. Bad enough that the favored Red Sox lost easily, but every single city/state series also went to the NL, and after winning 2/3 of the games on the barnstorming tour and game 1 in Honolulu, the Yankees dropped both game 2 in Hilo and game 3 back in Honolulu to let the Pirates claim 3rd place. This also marks the 4th straight year that the NL has won the World Series. Maybe perceptions of the AL get skewed because of the Packers--certainly going 18-0 against them changes perceptions of the Yankees. 

Which may be a good segue into a "what went wrong/what went right/what happens next?" discussion.

Outside the 18-0 record, the Yankees weren't particularly dominant against anyone.  I do think they mostly had winning records (I'm not going to look--the title says "data-free") but they were 10-8 or so. So, as an estimate let's say they were 10-11 games over .500 in 144 games. That's...77-67 or so? An 87-win pace? Not bad, but nothing to write home about. So, it's good they got the job done against the worst team (and part of the reason KC was the worst team was that they were 0-18 against the Yankees), but they definitely will need to step it up against everyone else.

Offensively, basically everything went right. The core of the Yankees lineup (Peckinpaugh, Baker, Charleston, Pipp, Heilmann) was basically healthy all year long. Heilmann was a mild disappointment at the bat, but Peckinpaugh hit about 30 points higher than I could have hoped for. Gilhooley was right around .300, and Baumann and Nunamaker were adequate or better. The Yanks were the top offensive team, and if they weren't that much better than Boston, it's hard to separate from the pack when the pack has prime Tris Speaker and a blooming Babe Ruth. Nevertheless, we can hope for Heilmann (and Charleston for that matter) to continue to develop and for the others to stay at their pace. We've also significantly upgraded 2B by trading for Heine Zimmerman. We sent the Cubs 4 players, but none of them are brand names and I don't think any of them had any realistic shot at making the Yankees lineup--Lou Guisto is maybe our 4th or 5th-best option at 1B after Pipp, Heilmann, Terry, and possibly Moore or even O'Doul at this point. So, with a recent All-Star at 2B, we can hope to give the offense just a bit more of a boost and/or hedge against regression.

Pitching was middle of the pack, and is the most obvious place to improve. This is also something I'm not sure I see a great path to improve. There's not a bunch of great pitching in the draft this year (or IRL MLB players at all), so at the moment I'm looking at the same gang as this year but hoping for a full year of Ruether and Barnes plus some improvement from Vance and a bit more consistency from Redding and the others. Vance is back down in Pensacola again this winter so hopefully he'll come along. I don't particularly want a short bench, but since Redding and Caldwell are great hitters I could use them as pinch hitters (or even in the field?) and have a couple more pitchers around. On the other hand, if I don't have great pitchers it's not clear if that will help. 

Looking a few years out, I think the team is set up to be excellent in the early/mid-20s. On the other hand, there's no reason to think I'll have any of the top historical 1920s Yankees--Ruth, Hoyt and Meusel are already on other teams, and I have a sneaking suspicion Gehrig will go first in that year's draft and go to someone other than me... On the other other hand, it's not clear that Gehrig would even have a place to play with all those first basemen I already mentioned...

OK, this has gotten long enough. Let's see how Pensacola does and how 1918 (free from war!) starts.

The Edge of '17 But from the Other Direction

 

After a few months of real-life excitement (including a pause to follow the MLB home stretch and post-season here in meatspace), I finished off the Alt-1917 regular season. The Yankees closed to 2.5 behind Boston in the last two weeks of the season, but a couple of tough losses to Washington set the stage for a series loss to the Red Sox at Fenway to put things out of reach. In the end, the Yankees finished 4 games behind a Boston team that was just too good (and seriously under-performed to make it even that close). 

The Sox will face the Phillies in the World Series. After leading the NL through most of the season, Pittsburgh faltered a bit in the second half while the Phillies played better than anyone else in MLB after the All Star Game. The Phillies also outperformed their run differential by 5 games while the Pirates underperformed by 4--more than enough to change the results. 

I'll get into individual performances in a later post, but suffice to say for now that the Yankees dominated the offensive leader boards (except for batting average) and were absent from the pitching ones. I confess I didn't pay terribly close attention to the NL leaders, but Alexander and Rixey pitched very well for the Phils, and Cravath and another Phillie who's name is escaping me led the NL in home runs. 

I may play through the World Series before my next post here, so I'll put my prediction in now--Boston in 5. I'm probably biased by watching every AL game and basically no NL games, but the Red Sox seem too good. 

Standings below, click to make it a readable size.

Alt-1917: Start of the Home Stretch!

 We've just started the last quarter of the 1917 season. After a frankly mediocre July that included some awful bullpen meltdowns (and dropping Dick Redding back to the reserve list), the Yankees kicked it back up and have been playing well in August. They've been hanging 3-4 games behind the Red Sox, solidly in 2nd place but unable to get any closer. They do still have 6 games left with Boston, though, with a series at the Polo Grounds imminent!

After Oscar Charleston's incredibly hot start, he hit some serious regression and nearly dropped below .300 before a more recent recovery. During Charleston's horrific slump, the slack was more than taken up by Wally Pipp, Roger Peckinpaugh, and a resurgent Frank Baker. Peckinpaugh is easily the Yankees' leader in WAR, propped up by his defensive play at an important position but he's also doing rather well in traditional batting categories. Pipp has clearly been the best hitter on the Yanks, though, leading the team in all the Triple Crown categories as well as the triple slash categories. The Yankees pitching has been a lot more of a next-man-up kind of situation, especially since Jesse Barnes' season ended with an injury. Mogridge has picked it up and pitched well for several starts in a row, and a spot start by Dazzy Vance ended in a CGSO (against the awful Packers, but still). 

Let's look at the team stats!

UPDATE: I never quite managed to post this, so I'll do it now. We're currently in the first week of September, the Yankees are still 4.5 games back, and the Phillies and Pirates are neck and neck for the NL crown...

Alt-1917: All-Star Break

 It's July 9, 1917. The Yankees followed their 15-12 April and 17-11 May with an 18-10 June!  And followed that up with a 2-5 July so far. It's a 94-win pace for the whole year and nothing to sneeze at, but it leaves them 5 games behind Boston right now, and they had been tied for first relatively recently. So that's a bit frustrating. Plus a few games got away from us including one where Babe Ruth hit a 9th-inning 3-run home run to take the lead (which won it) and another where we couldn't hold a 7-0 first-inning lead. 

Still, we sit at the All-Star Break first in most of the batting categories that matter. Our pitching stats are mediocre, though. And while Dick Redding was Rookie of the Month in June, his last three starts have been disasters and I've sent him back to the reserves at least for now. 

As noted, it's the All-Star break, and we're getting ready for the inaugural game at Philadelphia's Shibe Park in just a couple of game days. Five Yankees made the team, all finishing first in "voting": Pipp, Baker, Peckinpaugh, Charleston, and Pennock. Charleston pulled ahead of Speaker at the last voting update, though to be honest Charleston has been in a pretty bad slide (as has Speaker, actually).  The Browns, Packers, and Peppers lack any representatives on the team. The National League All-Stars include former Yankee Ernie Krueger, who we traded for Chief Bender last year. So it goes. All 10 National League teams are represented on the team. If it goes with the fan vote, it'll be Cooper vs. Leonard as the starters. I'm going to let the AI play it out.

Post-break we go on a 9-game road swing through St. Louis, Chicago, and Newark. We're 13-13 aggregate against those clubs, which are 119-122 otherwise, so we really should hope to do better in these upcoming series. We're 5-5 against the Red Sox, so have plenty of games left to try to regain the lead if it's to be done. 

Alt-1917: Start of June

It is the close of play on 1 June, 1917--I meant to do this a day earlier but got excited. ;)  

The Yankees followed up a 15-12 April with a 17-11 May, and find themselves in second place, 1.5 games behind Boston. Not a bad place to be, though I remember them having a pretty good May in 1916, too... But the top four teams in the AL are all the same and all still within 4 games of one another.

The top NL teams are still the surprising (to me anyhow) Pirates and the Giants, still separated by 1 game. But the Cardinals and (to a lesser degree) Terps have fallen off the pace and the Phillies have stepped up. Don't count out the World Champions either, as the Rustlers followed up a 10-18 April with a 16-10 May. 

But back to the Yankees. As we'll see in a moment, the whole team has been hitting like crazy, but a few players in particular have really been pushing the team.

Oh, you know. Just holding down multiple spots in the top 7 for batting average, home runs (all of the top 3!), RBI (#1 and #2!), OBP, slugging, OPS, WAR (#2, #3, and #5!) etc. etc.  Oscar Charleston won't start the All-Star Game because Tris Speaker has been amazing, but I wouldn't trade him for anyone right now. He's been on a crazy tear, and so has Wally Pipp. Heilmann started slow but hit something like .600 for over a week and is now flirting with .300. Even Baker has been in a zone. Miller doesn't appear on any of these lists, but he's chipped in with big hits. Nunamaker is at .300. Just great stuff. I also picked up Dobie Moore as a free agent, and he's waiting until I get sick of Luke Boone and bring him up. 

The Yankees pitching has been fine, but nothing to write home about. They're getting the job done, letting the hitters mash, and (mostly) not blowing big leads. I also was aggressive about bringing up players who I think will do well and trading some who I haven't liked much--I pulled off a Ray Fisher for Jesse Barnes trade, which I think will help us now and later. I brought up Dick Redding from the reserves, and he was Rookie of the Month for May. Adams and Russell have been fine. Pennock and Reuther have been good out of the pen (Pennock may make the ASG as a reliever), and Bender and Ragan have been good enough out of the pen, mostly.

For completeness, since I still haven't been following the NL much, here are their leaders. As with last year, the AL is more hitting-heavy or at least has better offensive numbers than the NL.

And here are the team stats--I had to cut off the top line to fit the totals at the bottom, but the categories can be seen in the red NL bar and read upward as well as downward...  The Yankees haven't quite caught the Red Sox in OPS but seem likely to, and their pitching is lower-middle of the pack, but closer to the middle than the bottom...

 

Alt-1917: Start of May Status

 I'm one month in to the 1917 season, and things are going better for the Yanks than I had hoped, if not as well as they could be. They remain their streaky selves but put a longer winning streak together than their losing streaks. Let's look at the predictions that the algorithm made just as the season was about to begin:

This assumes no injuries etc., but shows the Yankees as a 90-win team, within striking distance of the top if things break well. It also imagines us as having the best offense in the league by far, with middling pitching. As far as individual performances, it has Pipp leading the league in HR again, with Baker not far behind (and tied with Ruth for possibly the last time before the latter presumably catches fire). It has Babe Adams winning 28 games! It also forecasts the White Sox becoming a mediocre team and the Athletics becoming terrible.

At this point, we're 2.5 games behind the leaders (Cleveland and Boston). The AL player of the month was Oscar Charleston, who's up around .420 right now. Pipp also got off to a hot start, and he and Charleston are 1-2 in a lot of categories and are both in the top 5 of a lot of others. Baker and Heilmann are off to pretty slow starts, though. The pitching has in fact been iffy, and we've blown a few games we probably should have won. Still, at this point it's hard to complain too much. Let's see how the next few weeks go.

For completeness, here's the NL:

In reality, it's the Pirates and Cardinals who are battling for the top spot (with the Giants) while the Cubs are languishing. As usual I'm not paying super-close attention to the NL, at least as of now. But the predictions clearly think the Rustlers' reign is going to end this year, due to a truly anemic offense. I suppose we'll see...

Biggest metro areas: 1920/1930

 

Following up on this post about city populations, I found someone who calculated the populations of metro areas pre-1950 using the 1950 definitions. 

So here are the numbers from that site for the 25 largest US metro areas in 1920 and their Alt-1915 status (so to speak):

1. New York -- 8,490,694  (Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Peppers)
2. Chicago -- 3,521,789 (White Sox, Cubs)
3. Philadelphia -- 2,714,271 (A's, Phillies)
4. Boston -- 2,315,111 (Rustlers, Red Sox)
5. Pittsburgh -- 1,759,989 (Pirates)
6. Detroit -- 1,305,798 (Tigers)
7. St. Louis -- 1,139,877 (Browns, Cardinals)
8. San Francisco -- 1,009,467 
9. Los Angeles -- 997,830
10. Cleveland -- 972,162 (Spiders)
11. Baltimore -- 852,051 (Terrapins)
12. Buffalo -- 753,393 (Blues)
13. Minneapolis -- 704,566 (expansion?)
14. Cincinnati -- 628,999 (Reds)
15. Washington -- 571,882 (Senators)
16. Milwaukee -- 539,449 (expansion?)
17. Providence -- 536,572 
18. Kansas City -- 528,833 (Packers)
19. Worcester -- 455,135
20. New Haven -- 415,214
21. New Orleans -- 413,750
22. Albany -- 408,598
23. Wilkes-Barre -- 390,991
24. Seattle -- 389,273
25. Portland -- 372,777

Montreal and Mexico City would fit between Cincinnati and Washington, Toronto between KC and Worcester, and Havana would be #28 in the USA or #31 in North America.  These will (probably obviously) have a different definition than the US boundaries.

Here's 1930, as in the last post I'll pull out the Alt-1915 teams and stick in the other big North American cities:

• Los Angeles -- 2,327,166
• San Francisco -- 1,347,772
• Mexico City -- roughly 1,000,000
• Minneapolis -- 857,513 (expansion?)
• Montreal -- roughly 819,000
• Havana -- roughly 728,000
• Milwaukee -- 725,263 (expansion?)
• Toronto -- roughly 631,000
• Providence -- 616,495
• New Orleans -- 505,306
• Worcester -- 491,242

Of note, I think, is that Minneapolis sticks out as the most obvious expansion candidate that isn't on the west coast--better than Milwaukee, though Milwaukee is still an obvious candidate and closer to the other teams. Montreal also more than holds its own. Indeed, Montreal vs. Toronto is similar to MSP vs. Milwaukee in a lot of ways--Toronto is better integrated into the region, but Montreal is just plain appreciably bigger. Also, while I'd ben thinking that the Newark team would move as soon as there was an excuse to do so, that's no longer clear to me--the New York metro area is more than twice the size of Chicago, which has had two teams continuously for over a century. I'm now thinking that four teams in the NY metro area could be a stable configuration, at least until radio/TV kicks in. We'll see if the financial model points in some direction or not.

It's also interesting to me to see that many of the largest unserved cities are in the Northeast and are really non-starters for ever having MLB--places like Providence or New Haven. I expect I'll make stadiums for them anyhow, and maybe they'd be suitable for a random weekday game or series for one of the Boston teams just for a change of pace...