A Different 1915, and What Could Have Followed

asrivkin · 02-09-2022, 04:35 PM

After about 18 months of real-world time, I think I'm finally ready to post here about the simulation I've been playing with. While it would be fun to do so in-character, I'll just be my omniscient self.

The premise is that the Federal League makes peace with the American and National Leagues just prior to the start of the 1915 season, after the Indianapolis FL club has committed to move to Newark. The peace deal involves dissolving the four FL clubs in direct competition with AL/NL clubs (Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis) with their players becoming free agents, and absorption of the other clubs into the AL (Newark and Kansas City) or NL (Baltimore and Buffalo). I have some world-building reasons why things worked out that way and I’ve second-guessed some specifics, but really I’m retrofitting what I did on a little bit of a whim. While having two 10-team major leagues in 1915 is a reasonably big change and would have to have had some history go somewhat differently, those changes pale compared to the historical changes tied to integrated baseball in 1915, which this simulation also has.

I’m a Yankees fan, so am managing that club. I’m in Commissioner Mode, but have pledged to only use my powers neutrally and sparingly. I’m playing with recalculations on to give results somewhat like our own, because that’s what I’m going to find most fun. I’m allowing myself to be much smarter about the future than the AI, so if my scout suggests picking Ballplayer Shlabotnik in the draft ahead of Henry Aaron I’m going to ignore him no matter what the current ratings might say.

I’ve been making ballparks for this league that I need (all four of the FL expansion teams, and then various other parks for Spring Training and barnstorming) and putting them in a thread in the 3D Mods section. Making the parks has been a lot of fun for me, and has in turn driven some of the choices I’ve made for things like Spring Training and also having a winter developmental league, as anachronistic as it may have been.

I’m playing out and managing every Yankees game, so things are moving at a not-frantic pace. I seem to be playing about 2 seasons per OOTP release. I started the 1918 season about a week or so ago, and have just started May 1918. For those who are curious, I started a blog for my own reference here, and discuss things like what I’m thinking in terms of expansion for this league as well as some overly-broad thoughts about expansion/relocations for baseball in general. If you don’t mind spoilers, you can also find what’s happened 1915-1918 on the blog as well. Otherwise, I’ll step through it in the next few posts…

luckymann · 02-09-2022, 06:15 PM

Nice! I'll be following along eagerly.

thehef · 02-09-2022, 09:00 PM

Did you start your game with the 1915 season? Are you using real minor-leagues & thus minor league players?

asrivkin · 02-10-2022, 12:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehef

Did you start your game with the 1915 season? Are you using real minor-leagues & thus minor league players?

Yes and yes! I haven't had any minor leagues establish themselves yet, but it's only 1918 and my impression they wouldn't show up until 1920? But the MLB active and reserve rosters have Negro League players, former Federal League players, and career minor leaguers right now along with the people who played on AL/NL teams in reality. The most notable of the latter that I can come up with off the top of my head is Del Bemis, who had 120 games over two seasons with Rockford in real life (and a .369 lifetime batting average as a minor leaguer) but has already had 208 major league games, including basically splitting the starting center field duties for Cleveland in 1917.

asrivkin · 02-10-2022, 10:17 PM

As I noted, I’m a Yankees fan. My goal right now is to win a pennant and World Series before the real-life Yankees did (in 1921 and 1923, respectively). I’ve only done two simulations with OOTP, and the other one involved all-time great teams and certainly didn’t involve trades or drafts or anything of the sort. These early years of this simulation, especially 1915, were when I was way down on the learning curve and I might have chosen to do a few things differently if I were starting it again now. In particular, I might have had the dissolved Federal League teams transfer their players to the ones that were continuing rather than making them free agents. In the end, a lot of them ended up on the surviving FL teams anyhow.

Since I was inheriting a mediocre to bad team, we had a lot of room to improve. So, I went after the most capable people among the free agents: Eddie Plank (whose FL team dissolved from under him), Harry Heilmann (who spent the 1915 season in the PCL in our timeline), and Frank Baker (who held out in 1915 but was on the Yankees when he started playing again in 1916). Heilmann had a great year, leading the league in doubles and finishing 3rd in home runs. Plank had an even better year, going 23-10 and finishing 2nd in Cy Young voting. Baker had a tough year, missing over 2 months of the season due to various injuries and finishing with a league average year in OPS+. But the Yankees went 95-67 to finish 3rd in the AL, much better than the 69-83-2 they finished in real life. And in early September I imported a bunch of Negro League players (who I realized weren’t in there) and was able to sign the 18-year-old Oscar Charleston.

In the end, the White Sox won the AL pennant pretty handily, after an all-time great season in which they set the American League record for most wins (helped by the first-ever 162-game season of course) and also highest winning percentage, just edging out the 1912 Red Sox. Many members of that Red Sox team were playing for Boston and not only saw their record eclipsed but saw their own 107-win season (which was the 3rd best in league history to that point) go in vain. In the National League the Boston Rustlers* held off the Giants to win the pennant in a much closer race, followed by a 5-game World Series where the Rustlers defended their “Miracle” crown from the previous year.

The former FL teams sort-of held their own, for reasons I don’t understand and that apparently haven’t particularly held up since. Not that they were competitive or anything, but while Newark was deep in last, they were by far the worst of the expansion teams. Kansas City finished in 7th ahead of the Athletics and Browns (and Peppers), while Buffalo finished in 8th and Baltimore hung around .500 for quite some time before settling into 7th place at a respectable 77-85.

The major awards mostly went to the pennant winners: Maranville and Hughes of the Rustlers were the MVP and CY winners in the NL and Eddie Collins and Joe Benz of the White Sox were the AL MVP and CY winners, with Happy Felsch of Chicago winning Rookie of the Year. Benny Meyer of Baltimore won the NL RoY. I’ve attached screenshots of the league leaders, littered with expected names.

Notable 1915 rookies include Rogers Hornsby, Dave Bancroft, George Sisler, and Sam Rice. Perhaps the most notable of rookies were George Shively of the Brooklyn Robins who on 1 September 1915 became the first undisputed Black National Leaguer, and Bill Pierce of the Rustlers, who became the first Black ballplayer to appear in a World Series, filling in for an injured Rabbit Maranville and fielding the last out of the Series. I don’t remember who I imported, but I haven’t found evidence of the AL integrating until Opening Day of 1916 when Oscar Charleston was a pinch-hitter.

To close a long post, it’s also interesting to me to see what didn’t happen in 1915. First of all, Joe Jackson wasn’t traded to the White Sox. The Philadelphia A's teardown was interrupted and not continued by the AI. The downstream effects of these two facts will be seen in later years....

*I don't like the historical names of the Boston NL or Cleveland franchises, and since it's a tiny anachronism compared to some of the others in this version of reality, I'm going with the Cleveland Spiders and Boston Rustlers. How long that latter name in particular will get used is TBD.

asrivkin · 02-13-2022, 04:38 PM

With the Yankees experiencing more success in 1915 than they had since 1906, I was hopeful that the team wouldn’t need more than a few tweaks to at least hold their own in 1916. I hoped Baker would rebound from his injury-filled 1915, that Heilmann would continue to mature toward an eventual .400-hitting future, and that I could ease Oscar Charleston into becoming an everyday player. I had (and have) no particular reason to expect Babe Ruth to ever wear pinstripes, but I hoped this would do. I didn’t think I had drafted any particularly high-upside players at the end of 1915, only later realizing that the Bill Terry who I drafted in the 13th round as a pitcher was actually the same Bill Terry who hit .400 in 1930. So, that was a nice surprise. Even if we didn’t win in 1916, which I figured was a bit much to ask for, I thought we’d compete.

We did not compete.

I wrote a long blog post about it here and here about a year ago when I had just finished, but I’ll hit the highlights again here. Frank Baker did bounce back nicely, playing 133 games in 1916 vs. the 112 he played in 1915. Everything else was manageable early on—Ray Caldwell ruptured his UCL in Spring Training and was out 9-10 months. But on August 23rd, Paddy Baumann (our regular 2B) was injured and would miss 5 weeks. The next two days found two more injuries to two more players, neither too serious. On 5 September, Heilmann (our regular RF) and Baker (3B) both experienced season-ending injuries. The next day, Birdie Cree (backup 2B and OF) strained his oblique. At this point, 16-year-old Allie Watt made his MLB debut for us out of position at 3B because Peckinpaugh (our regular SS) was tired and Luke Boone, our infield utility guy had to play SS. For good measure, Elmer Miller (our 4th outfielder who was back in the lineup because of Heilmann) was lost for 6 weeks as of mid-September, ending his season. But the Yankees were well out of the chase long before all of these injuries.

At the end of June we were 43-37. Not great, but not terrible. We went 39-43 the rest of the way, with a 16-11 September counteracting (somewhat) a 11-18 August. The overall blame fell to the pitching—after finishing 1st in ERA, tied for 1st in runs allowed, and 2nd in opponents average in 1915, we fell to 6th in ERA, 5th in runs allowed, and 7th in opponents average in 1916. We also slipped in batting, but not nearly as badly. Eddie Plank realized how old he was and regressed to league average (and then retired). Allen Russell developed into a 20-game winner, but Ray Fisher went from a 20-game winner to a below-average pitcher (and then to trade bait). Trades for Frank Allen, Pat Ragan, and and Babe Adams had mixed results. Heilmann had a great year, and Charleston had a solid rookie year, and Pipp led the league in home runs, but they could only do so much. Peckinpaugh had an MVP-level season based on his fielding (so it wasn’t an obvious help).

The pennant races didn’t have a lot of intrigue, either. The 1915 winners returned to the World Series without too much drama. The White Sox ended up with a 7-game lead and the Rustlers a 5-game lead. The Packers absolutely collapsed with a 111-loss season. As a sign of how things were going, the Packers had a 22-game losing streak that began right after they crushed the Yankees 19-2, and the Yankees could only muster a 10-8 season record against them.

The real-life winners, the Red Sox and Robins, finished in 2nd and 8th place—the latter team was missing two of their best IRL pitchers, and was using a third in the bullpen. The Rustlers won the World Series 4 games to 1 yet again, making them the first team to win 3 championships in a row. I’ve again attached some screenshots with leaders. Shoeless Joe, still with Cleveland, won the AL MVP. The Phillies’ Dave Bancroft won it in the NL. The Cy Young winners were Tom Hughes of the Rustlers in the NL and Boston’s Dutch Leonard in the AL. Carson Bigbee of the surprisingly resurgent Athletics won Rookie of the Year in the AL, with Baltimore’s Bert Graham winning it in the NL.

After the season ended I decided to run a developmental fall league in Florida and the Caribbean, if only to use some parks I made. Havana defeated Jacksonville to win that championship, and in a sign of things to come 20-year-old Roger Hornsby won the winter league MVP unanimously.

Pelican · 03-12-2022, 08:23 PM

Very cool stuff. I have started a sim in 1914 with all three leagues, with the Federal League signing a few additional players (using research into MLB players who signed and then reneged, or who engaged in serious negotiations), including one George Herman Ruth, who walked across the street from the minor league Orioles park to the Federal League Terrapins. I have not integrated the leagues yet; but plan to do so as early as 1915, probably starting with the Federal League teams. Now to go access the stadiums you have created.

asrivkin · 03-13-2022, 02:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pelican

Very cool stuff. I have started a sim in 1914 with all three leagues, with the Federal League signing a few additional players (using research into MLB players who signed and then reneged, or who engaged in serious negotiations), including one George Herman Ruth, who walked across the street from the minor league Orioles park to the Federal League Terrapins. I have not integrated the leagues yet; but plan to do so as early as 1915, probably starting with the Federal League teams. Now to go access the stadiums you have created.

Hey, glad to hear it! I've occasionally found out that I overlooked something or did something silly, though I think all the FL parks have been played in by someone other than me by now. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have a question and hopefully I can answer it!

asrivkin · 03-13-2022, 02:31 PM

I figured pitching was my biggest problem after 1916, even after trying to acquire pitchers in-season, but I wasn’t sure what if anything I could actually do about it. A few half-hearted attempts to see what it would take to get a big name fell short but I did sign Dick Redding as a free agent late in 1916, drafted Dutch Reuther (among some other non-pitchers like Lefty O’Doul, Pat Collins, and Sammy Hale), and most notably pried Herb Pennock from the Athletics for Roxy Walters. I hoped those additions plus (hopefully) healthy seasons from the big hitters plus Heilmann and Charleston getting closer to their peak would help matters enough to make a pennant plausible in 1920 or before.

The preseason predictions put us in second place, four games behind the Red Sox, and that is indeed where we ended up. We played well (95-67), without any real rough stretches—Boston just played better. We led most offensive categories, often by quite a lot. Our pitching was middle of the pack, very close to league average. Tris Speaker or Joe Jackson (the latter still with Cleveland) led most categories (AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS/WAR) but Charleston had a real coming-out year and often Pipp was right there with him on the leaderboards. Charleston led in triples and isolated power, and was 4th in SLG and 5th in OPS. Charleston and Pipp were #1 and #2 in RBI and #3 and #4 in total bases. Pipp, Baker, and Charleston were 1-2-3 in home runs. Even Peckinpaugh got into the act, hitting .309, finishing 4th in RBI, and having a crazy 11.9 WAR. But while the Yankees were 1st in most hitting categories and middling in the pitching ones, Boston was 2nd in most hitting categories and 1st in most pitching ones.

The National League crown went to the Phillies, who ended the season with a 6-game cushion over the surprising Pirates. The Phillies were predicted to win the pennant, but the Pirates were forecast to be a 9th place team and only a game out of last place, so that was a shocker. I was expecting the 99-win Red Sox to defeat the 96-win Phillies, but Philadelphia took the series pretty handily in 5 games. With this win, the NL has taken the last 4 World Series in a row, and the last 8 champions back to 1910 were from either Boston or Philadelphia (1910-1914 the historical winners, of course).

After the season ended, I had a set of single-game City/State series in St. Louis, Chicago, Balt/Wash, and Ohio, and a best-two-out-of-three pitting the Pirates vs. the Yankees for 3rd place. The NL team won each series, which in conjunction with the NL’s recent World Series dominance must be causing Ban Johnson some sleepless nights…

Again, I’ve included some screenshots of the leader boards. The MVP/CY/RotY of the NL were Rogers Hornsby/Art Nehf/Whitey Whitt, and for the AL it was Tris Speaker/Walter Johnson/Ross Youngs. The Caribbean Winter League championship went to the Havana Almendares, who defeated the Tampa Smokers in the finals.

Looking ahead to 1918 (already in progress), I’m hoping to take the Yankees the next step, but they were rather unbalanced in 1917 and might not been as good as their record suggests—we were 18-0 vs. the terrible KC Packers, but no better than 10-8 against anyone else other than 11-7 vs. the also-bad Newark Peppers. So, we might have been closer to a 90-win team than 95.

sprague · 03-13-2022, 04:14 PM

Can I ask a question.
How is ootp allowing you to have minor leagues on, yet allowing you have the federal league teams in MLB? In my understanding with historical minors on, any change made to any league will when the new year starts revert back to real life?
Or is something very different in ootp22?

asrivkin · 03-13-2022, 05:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sprague

Can I ask a question.
How is ootp allowing you to have minor leagues on, yet allowing you have the federal league teams in MLB? In my understanding with historical minors on, any change made to any league will when the new year starts revert back to real life?
Or is something very different in ootp22?

Well, the short answer is that I may not know what I'm doing and may be wrong about it (or described it wrong). I thought I set minors when initializing the game, but as I've been playing and understanding more since I started I'm also under the impression that historical minors are incompatible with what I'm doing. There are no minor leagues currently (I set up the winter league manually), but I was under the impression that there were no minors in the game until 1920 anyhow. I also can't find where it will say which settings I have--I've looked under the various tabs in Game Settings and League Settings and don't see a relevant parameter to say how things are set in this league.

asrivkin · 05-28-2022, 01:02 PM

The Yankees (led by Oscar Charleston) will be facing the St. Louis Cardinals (led by Rogers Hornsby) in the 1918 World Series. This is the first pennant for both teams, and the first time since 1909 that the champion won't be from either Philadelphia or Boston.

I've been blogging the season as it went along, rather than write a gigantic post here I'll just link to those blog posts:

End of April 1918

One-third of the way through

Situation at the All-Star Break

And the Home Stretch

I also wrote a two-part World Series Preview:
Part 1

Part 2

Enjoy, and Let's Go Yannkees!

02-10-2022, 10:17 PM	#5
asrivkin Major Leagues Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Maryland Posts: 335	Summary of 1915 As I noted, I’m a Yankees fan. My goal right now is to win a pennant and World Series before the real-life Yankees did (in 1921 and 1923, respectively). I’ve only done two simulations with OOTP, and the other one involved all-time great teams and certainly didn’t involve trades or drafts or anything of the sort. These early years of this simulation, especially 1915, were when I was way down on the learning curve and I might have chosen to do a few things differently if I were starting it again now. In particular, I might have had the dissolved Federal League teams transfer their players to the ones that were continuing rather than making them free agents. In the end, a lot of them ended up on the surviving FL teams anyhow. Since I was inheriting a mediocre to bad team, we had a lot of room to improve. So, I went after the most capable people among the free agents: Eddie Plank (whose FL team dissolved from under him), Harry Heilmann (who spent the 1915 season in the PCL in our timeline), and Frank Baker (who held out in 1915 but was on the Yankees when he started playing again in 1916). Heilmann had a great year, leading the league in doubles and finishing 3rd in home runs. Plank had an even better year, going 23-10 and finishing 2nd in Cy Young voting. Baker had a tough year, missing over 2 months of the season due to various injuries and finishing with a league average year in OPS+. But the Yankees went 95-67 to finish 3rd in the AL, much better than the 69-83-2 they finished in real life. And in early September I imported a bunch of Negro League players (who I realized weren’t in there) and was able to sign the 18-year-old Oscar Charleston. In the end, the White Sox won the AL pennant pretty handily, after an all-time great season in which they set the American League record for most wins (helped by the first-ever 162-game season of course) and also highest winning percentage, just edging out the 1912 Red Sox. Many members of that Red Sox team were playing for Boston and not only saw their record eclipsed but saw their own 107-win season (which was the 3rd best in league history to that point) go in vain. In the National League the Boston Rustlers* held off the Giants to win the pennant in a much closer race, followed by a 5-game World Series where the Rustlers defended their “Miracle” crown from the previous year. The former FL teams sort-of held their own, for reasons I don’t understand and that apparently haven’t particularly held up since. Not that they were competitive or anything, but while Newark was deep in last, they were by far the worst of the expansion teams. Kansas City finished in 7th ahead of the Athletics and Browns (and Peppers), while Buffalo finished in 8th and Baltimore hung around .500 for quite some time before settling into 7th place at a respectable 77-85. The major awards mostly went to the pennant winners: Maranville and Hughes of the Rustlers were the MVP and CY winners in the NL and Eddie Collins and Joe Benz of the White Sox were the AL MVP and CY winners, with Happy Felsch of Chicago winning Rookie of the Year. Benny Meyer of Baltimore won the NL RoY. I’ve attached screenshots of the league leaders, littered with expected names. Notable 1915 rookies include Rogers Hornsby, Dave Bancroft, George Sisler, and Sam Rice. Perhaps the most notable of rookies were George Shively of the Brooklyn Robins who on 1 September 1915 became the first undisputed Black National Leaguer, and Bill Pierce of the Rustlers, who became the first Black ballplayer to appear in a World Series, filling in for an injured Rabbit Maranville and fielding the last out of the Series. I don’t remember who I imported, but I haven’t found evidence of the AL integrating until Opening Day of 1916 when Oscar Charleston was a pinch-hitter. To close a long post, it’s also interesting to me to see what didn’t happen in 1915. First of all, Joe Jackson wasn’t traded to the White Sox. The Philadelphia A's teardown was interrupted and not continued by the AI. The downstream effects of these two facts will be seen in later years.... I don't like the historical names of the Boston NL or Cleveland franchises, and since it's a tiny anachronism compared to some of the others in this version of reality, I'm going with the Cleveland Spiders and Boston Rustlers. How long that latter name in particular will get used is TBD. Attached Images Last edited by asrivkin; 02-10-2022 at 11:20 PM. Reason: fixed a date*

02-13-2022, 04:38 PM	#6
asrivkin Major Leagues Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Maryland Posts: 335	Summary of 1916 With the Yankees experiencing more success in 1915 than they had since 1906, I was hopeful that the team wouldn’t need more than a few tweaks to at least hold their own in 1916. I hoped Baker would rebound from his injury-filled 1915, that Heilmann would continue to mature toward an eventual .400-hitting future, and that I could ease Oscar Charleston into becoming an everyday player. I had (and have) no particular reason to expect Babe Ruth to ever wear pinstripes, but I hoped this would do. I didn’t think I had drafted any particularly high-upside players at the end of 1915, only later realizing that the Bill Terry who I drafted in the 13th round as a pitcher was actually the same Bill Terry who hit .400 in 1930. So, that was a nice surprise. Even if we didn’t win in 1916, which I figured was a bit much to ask for, I thought we’d compete. We did not compete. I wrote a long blog post about it here and here about a year ago when I had just finished, but I’ll hit the highlights again here. Frank Baker did bounce back nicely, playing 133 games in 1916 vs. the 112 he played in 1915. Everything else was manageable early on—Ray Caldwell ruptured his UCL in Spring Training and was out 9-10 months. But on August 23rd, Paddy Baumann (our regular 2B) was injured and would miss 5 weeks. The next two days found two more injuries to two more players, neither too serious. On 5 September, Heilmann (our regular RF) and Baker (3B) both experienced season-ending injuries. The next day, Birdie Cree (backup 2B and OF) strained his oblique. At this point, 16-year-old Allie Watt made his MLB debut for us out of position at 3B because Peckinpaugh (our regular SS) was tired and Luke Boone, our infield utility guy had to play SS. For good measure, Elmer Miller (our 4th outfielder who was back in the lineup because of Heilmann) was lost for 6 weeks as of mid-September, ending his season. But the Yankees were well out of the chase long before all of these injuries. At the end of June we were 43-37. Not great, but not terrible. We went 39-43 the rest of the way, with a 16-11 September counteracting (somewhat) a 11-18 August. The overall blame fell to the pitching—after finishing 1st in ERA, tied for 1st in runs allowed, and 2nd in opponents average in 1915, we fell to 6th in ERA, 5th in runs allowed, and 7th in opponents average in 1916. We also slipped in batting, but not nearly as badly. Eddie Plank realized how old he was and regressed to league average (and then retired). Allen Russell developed into a 20-game winner, but Ray Fisher went from a 20-game winner to a below-average pitcher (and then to trade bait). Trades for Frank Allen, Pat Ragan, and and Babe Adams had mixed results. Heilmann had a great year, and Charleston had a solid rookie year, and Pipp led the league in home runs, but they could only do so much. Peckinpaugh had an MVP-level season based on his fielding (so it wasn’t an obvious help). The pennant races didn’t have a lot of intrigue, either. The 1915 winners returned to the World Series without too much drama. The White Sox ended up with a 7-game lead and the Rustlers a 5-game lead. The Packers absolutely collapsed with a 111-loss season. As a sign of how things were going, the Packers had a 22-game losing streak that began right after they crushed the Yankees 19-2, and the Yankees could only muster a 10-8 season record against them. The real-life winners, the Red Sox and Robins, finished in 2nd and 8th place—the latter team was missing two of their best IRL pitchers, and was using a third in the bullpen. The Rustlers won the World Series 4 games to 1 yet again, making them the first team to win 3 championships in a row. I’ve again attached some screenshots with leaders. Shoeless Joe, still with Cleveland, won the AL MVP. The Phillies’ Dave Bancroft won it in the NL. The Cy Young winners were Tom Hughes of the Rustlers in the NL and Boston’s Dutch Leonard in the AL. Carson Bigbee of the surprisingly resurgent Athletics won Rookie of the Year in the AL, with Baltimore’s Bert Graham winning it in the NL. After the season ended I decided to run a developmental fall league in Florida and the Caribbean, if only to use some parks I made. Havana defeated Jacksonville to win that championship, and in a sign of things to come 20-year-old Roger Hornsby won the winter league MVP unanimously. Attached Images

03-13-2022, 02:31 PM	#9
asrivkin Major Leagues Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Maryland Posts: 335	Summary of 1917 I figured pitching was my biggest problem after 1916, even after trying to acquire pitchers in-season, but I wasn’t sure what if anything I could actually do about it. A few half-hearted attempts to see what it would take to get a big name fell short but I did sign Dick Redding as a free agent late in 1916, drafted Dutch Reuther (among some other non-pitchers like Lefty O’Doul, Pat Collins, and Sammy Hale), and most notably pried Herb Pennock from the Athletics for Roxy Walters. I hoped those additions plus (hopefully) healthy seasons from the big hitters plus Heilmann and Charleston getting closer to their peak would help matters enough to make a pennant plausible in 1920 or before. The preseason predictions put us in second place, four games behind the Red Sox, and that is indeed where we ended up. We played well (95-67), without any real rough stretches—Boston just played better. We led most offensive categories, often by quite a lot. Our pitching was middle of the pack, very close to league average. Tris Speaker or Joe Jackson (the latter still with Cleveland) led most categories (AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS/WAR) but Charleston had a real coming-out year and often Pipp was right there with him on the leaderboards. Charleston led in triples and isolated power, and was 4th in SLG and 5th in OPS. Charleston and Pipp were #1 and #2 in RBI and #3 and #4 in total bases. Pipp, Baker, and Charleston were 1-2-3 in home runs. Even Peckinpaugh got into the act, hitting .309, finishing 4th in RBI, and having a crazy 11.9 WAR. But while the Yankees were 1st in most hitting categories and middling in the pitching ones, Boston was 2nd in most hitting categories and 1st in most pitching ones. The National League crown went to the Phillies, who ended the season with a 6-game cushion over the surprising Pirates. The Phillies were predicted to win the pennant, but the Pirates were forecast to be a 9th place team and only a game out of last place, so that was a shocker. I was expecting the 99-win Red Sox to defeat the 96-win Phillies, but Philadelphia took the series pretty handily in 5 games. With this win, the NL has taken the last 4 World Series in a row, and the last 8 champions back to 1910 were from either Boston or Philadelphia (1910-1914 the historical winners, of course). After the season ended, I had a set of single-game City/State series in St. Louis, Chicago, Balt/Wash, and Ohio, and a best-two-out-of-three pitting the Pirates vs. the Yankees for 3rd place. The NL team won each series, which in conjunction with the NL’s recent World Series dominance must be causing Ban Johnson some sleepless nights… Again, I’ve included some screenshots of the leader boards. The MVP/CY/RotY of the NL were Rogers Hornsby/Art Nehf/Whitey Whitt, and for the AL it was Tris Speaker/Walter Johnson/Ross Youngs. The Caribbean Winter League championship went to the Havana Almendares, who defeated the Tampa Smokers in the finals. Looking ahead to 1918 (already in progress), I’m hoping to take the Yankees the next step, but they were rather unbalanced in 1917 and might not been as good as their record suggests—we were 18-0 vs. the terrible KC Packers, but no better than 10-8 against anyone else other than 11-7 vs. the also-bad Newark Peppers. So, we might have been closer to a 90-win team than 95. Attached Images

05-28-2022, 01:02 PM	#12
asrivkin Major Leagues Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Maryland Posts: 335	1918 World Series Preview The Yankees (led by Oscar Charleston) will be facing the St. Louis Cardinals (led by Rogers Hornsby) in the 1918 World Series. This is the first pennant for both teams, and the first time since 1909 that the champion won't be from either Philadelphia or Boston. I've been blogging the season as it went along, rather than write a gigantic post here I'll just link to those blog posts: End of April 1918 One-third of the way through Situation at the All-Star Break And the Home Stretch I also wrote a two-part World Series Preview: Part 1 Part 2 Enjoy, and Let's Go Yannkees!

02-09-2022, 04:35 PM	#1
asrivkin Major Leagues Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Maryland Posts: 335	A Different 1915, and What Could Have Followed After about 18 months of real-world time, I think I'm finally ready to post here about the simulation I've been playing with. While it would be fun to do so in-character, I'll just be my omniscient self. The premise is that the Federal League makes peace with the American and National Leagues just prior to the start of the 1915 season, after the Indianapolis FL club has committed to move to Newark. The peace deal involves dissolving the four FL clubs in direct competition with AL/NL clubs (Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis) with their players becoming free agents, and absorption of the other clubs into the AL (Newark and Kansas City) or NL (Baltimore and Buffalo). I have some world-building reasons why things worked out that way and I’ve second-guessed some specifics, but really I’m retrofitting what I did on a little bit of a whim. While having two 10-team major leagues in 1915 is a reasonably big change and would have to have had some history go somewhat differently, those changes pale compared to the historical changes tied to integrated baseball in 1915, which this simulation also has. I’m a Yankees fan, so am managing that club. I’m in Commissioner Mode, but have pledged to only use my powers neutrally and sparingly. I’m playing with recalculations on to give results somewhat like our own, because that’s what I’m going to find most fun. I’m allowing myself to be much smarter about the future than the AI, so if my scout suggests picking Ballplayer Shlabotnik in the draft ahead of Henry Aaron I’m going to ignore him no matter what the current ratings might say. I’ve been making ballparks for this league that I need (all four of the FL expansion teams, and then various other parks for Spring Training and barnstorming) and putting them in a thread in the 3D Mods section. Making the parks has been a lot of fun for me, and has in turn driven some of the choices I’ve made for things like Spring Training and also having a winter developmental league, as anachronistic as it may have been. I’m playing out and managing every Yankees game, so things are moving at a not-frantic pace. I seem to be playing about 2 seasons per OOTP release. I started the 1918 season about a week or so ago, and have just started May 1918. For those who are curious, I started a blog for my own reference here, and discuss things like what I’m thinking in terms of expansion for this league as well as some overly-broad thoughts about expansion/relocations for baseball in general. If you don’t mind spoilers, you can also find what’s happened 1915-1918 on the blog as well. Otherwise, I’ll step through it in the next few posts…

02-09-2022, 06:15 PM	#2
luckymann Hall Of Famer Join Date: Nov 2019 Posts: 13,503	Nice! I'll be following along eagerly. __________________ HISTORICAL DO-OVERS A'S RED SOX DODGERS CUSTOM SAVES ECLIPSE LEAGUE MOON SHOT LEAGUE EVERYMAN LEAGUE GULF LEAGUE USBA

02-09-2022, 09:00 PM	#3
thehef Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 5,345	Did you start your game with the 1915 season? Are you using real minor-leagues & thus minor league players?

03-12-2022, 08:23 PM	#7
Pelican Hall Of Famer Join Date: Mar 2021 Location: Wilmington, Delaware Posts: 2,983	Very cool stuff. I have started a sim in 1914 with all three leagues, with the Federal League signing a few additional players (using research into MLB players who signed and then reneged, or who engaged in serious negotiations), including one George Herman Ruth, who walked across the street from the minor league Orioles park to the Federal League Terrapins. I have not integrated the leagues yet; but plan to do so as early as 1915, probably starting with the Federal League teams. Now to go access the stadiums you have created.

03-13-2022, 04:14 PM	#10
sprague All Star Starter Join Date: Aug 2011 Posts: 1,947	Can I ask a question. How is ootp allowing you to have minor leagues on, yet allowing you have the federal league teams in MLB? In my understanding with historical minors on, any change made to any league will when the new year starts revert back to real life? Or is something very different in ootp22?