Skip to main content

Week 2 Summary

Week 2 is in the books and after the offensive explosion of Week 1, it is fair to say the pitchers started to reassert themselves in Week 2. Both league ERA's dropped by over half a run and the league batting averages dipped as well. This was to be expected of course, but it is always interesting to see how the pull of statistics to normal comes into play.

The usual suspects in the AL have already drifted toward the top of the standings. Boston is scoring just under eight runs a game and hasn't won or lost any games by only one run as of yet. Cleveland has played strong so far as well, and New York has played well also although they ran into to a bit of a buzz saw when facing the Red Sox offense. Philadelphia and Chicago have played like .500 teams - some good, some bad. Detroit's pitching has really suffered so far, but they'll come around. St. Louis lost their first six games but won their next five. Washington is going to have a long season.

Bob Dillinger
In the NL St. Louis got off to a fast start and sit in first place at the moment, but New York and Pittsburgh have played well also and are right on their tails. Boston and Philadelphia have been up and down and their .500 record reflects that. Cincinnati and Chicago are struggling as expected, but what was not expected was to see Brooklyn struggling as they have. They are last in the NL in hitting and next-to-last in Team ERA as they have really just haven’t clicked as a team yet. Of course, they had two series against the red-hot New York Giants and the Phillies were able to take advantage of Brooklyn's temporary malaise as well. I suspect the Brooklynites will turn it around shortly.

Andy Pafko
George Kell (.435), Birdie Tebbetts (.419), Vic Wertz (.404), and Luke Appling (.400) are the only AL regulars hitting over .400 at this point. Kell has a hit in every game so far. Bob Dillinger and Ferris Fain each have 22 hits, and Kell and Phil Rizzuto both have 20. The Red Sox have five players in the top seven of runs scored, with Ted Williams (15), Vern Stephens (15), and Johnny Pesky (14) at the top. Bobby Doerr, with his pair of six RBI games, leads with 18 RBI's, ahead of teammates Williams and Stephens, both with 16. Hank Majeski has eight doubles, and Stephens leads with five homeruns, ahead of three others with four. Ellis Kinder and Eddie Lopat are both off to 3-0 starts in the pitching department.

Harry Brecheen
Phil Cavarretta (.404) and Ralph Kiner (.400) are the last in the NL over .400, and there are several others right behind them. Cavaretta and Richie Ashburn each have 21 hits, just ahead of Granny Hamner and Kiner, both with 20. Red Schoendienst, Sid Gordon and Kiner are tied for the lead with 13 runs scored. Hank Sauer, Eddie Bockman, and Bobby Thomson all have 16 RBI's. Eddie Waitkus has six doubles, with a ton of players right behind him. Andy Pafko, Johnny Mize and Sauer lead the homerun parade with six. Harry Brecheen and Warren Spahn are both off to 3-0 starts.

My homerun totals are still ahead of the curve, albeit less so than last week. Walks are rounding around to normal, although strikeouts are unusually high yet. I need to keep the foot on the pedal with regards to sacrifice hits and steal, and AL saves totals can be brought about with a few good weeks. Overall, I would say so far, so good. Most importantly, Brooklyn will get things going shortly. Many of the teams have started their first rounds of early season cuts, and new players are getting ready to make their debuts coming up. Several teams have trades occurring shortly as well.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

1949 Replay NL Recap

St. Louis (105-49, 96-58, +9) Similar to Boston in the AL, St. Louis got off to a fast start and held on from there. They went 5-0 in Week One, slipped behind Pittsburgh into second place in Week Three, but then led the NL from there through the end of the season. Along the way both New York and Boston made a push to catch them, but with the Cardinals playing a consistent .700 level of ball they could get close but couldn’t quite finish the job and St. Louis ended up winning the league by 11.0 games over Brooklyn. Enos Slaughter While Ralph Kiner would likely get the MVP award, one of the reasons would be that Stan Musial , Enos Slaughter , and Red Schoendienst all would split votes away from each other. At about the 2/3’s point of the season, Slaughter went 14-for-18 in a series against Chicago (including two 5-for-5 games) and his average shot up over .400. Instead of immediately leveling back down, there it stayed until there were about ten days left in the season and ...

Play Has Begun!

Due to the long holiday weekend and me having the on-call duties from work (i.e., meaning I was effectively under house arrest for the duration) I was able to apply all of my finishing touches, got the ATMgr transaction and lineup files loaded and working, and was able to actually begin the replay earlier this evening.  I will be posting weekly recaps like I did during my 1930 replay (link). I do not have some sort of hard-coded schedule though, I will just be working my way through the replay a week at a time, and we will see where it goes. Connie Mack The final decision to be made was that I ended up deciding to not re-grade my pitcher's but instead to stick with the APBA as given pitching grades. It was my observation that the game company broke away from their standard formula for grade assignment with this re-issue set, so let's give it a shot.

1949 Replay Project Plan

Now that I have completed my 1930 replay ( link ) I am ready to move onto my next project - 1949. I did a 1949 replay back in the mid-1980's using the Basic Game, with only the twenty players per team card set (no extra players at all). At the time I had other plans for future replays, but somehow parenthood got in the way and I have only just restarted doing solo replays. Ted Williams For my 1930 replay, I chose to use APBA Baseball for Windows (BBW) instead of cards and dice (C/D) like before. As much as I might prefer actually rolling for each at-bat, the prospect of all the necessary records keeping was overwhelming, so I opted for the computer game instead. I also chose to use the APBA Transaction Manager ( ATMgr ) add-on which maintains and loads the actual lineups as used during that season, again, another huge time saver once it was all set-up. The net of all this was once I did all of my prep work and had everything set-up before I played a game, once I star...