Two Winning Streaks

Two long winning streaks have propelled the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers into first place in the American and National League in my 1947 APBA baseball replay and have given me an indication these could be the teams that face each other in the World Series at season’s end.

The Red Sox won 14 games in a row before dropping the second game of a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox on June 15, 1947. The streak moved the Red Sox from two games behind New York and in second place on June 1 to three games ahead of the Yankees by mid-June.

And the Dodgers won 12 consecutive games before losing to the St. Louis Cardinals on an eighth-inning home run by Marty Marion on June 15. That streak gave Brooklyn a tie with the Cards. They had been four games behind them and 2.5 games behind the surprising Boston Braves at the start of June.


The Dodgers’ game was a classic and one of the reasons why replaying seasons with APBA is enjoyable. The Bums and Cards were scoreless until the top of the 6^th inning when Gene Hermanski belted a two-run home run.  Hermanski platoons with Pete Reiser in the outfield and it seems whenever he plays he does well. He hit three home runs in a game earlier in the season. Manager Burt Shotton may consider using Hermanski more. Later in the inning Charles “Bull” Edwards bulled a triple deep into Sportsman’s Park, scoring Al Gionfriddo, and the Dodgers led, 3-0.


In the bottom of the seventh inning, Stan Musial hit his 14^th home run with Terry Moore and Red Schoendienst on base, tying the game. It was Musial’s 63^rd RBI.


The two teams remained tied until the bottom of the eighth. Shortstop Marty Marion, with one out, clubbed one into the hot St. Louis humid air, clearing the fence and giving the Birds a 4-3 lead. It was Marion’s first home run of the season and it came at the right time.


Harry “The Cat” Breechen shut down Brooklyn in the ninth, striking out Edwards for the last out in his complete game, and giving him a 10-1 record, the best in the majors.


Here were the standings on June 1
St. Louis 30-15
Boston 29-17
Brooklyn 26-19


And here are the standings through June 15
Brooklyn 38-21
St. Louis 39-22
Boston 39-23


Brooklyn has a relatively easy upcoming schedule, traveling to Chicago for four games, Cincinnati for three and Pittsburgh for two before hosting Boston in a three-game series. Brooklyn and St. Louis won’t meet again until a four-game series that begins on July 16.

The Cardinals will host Philadelphia for three games, New York for three, Boston for two and Cincinnati for three games.


In the American League, the Red Sox were led by Ted Williams, of course, who batted .339 during the 15 games, drove in 16 RBIs and hit three home runs. The Yankees’ slugger, Joe DiMaggio had similar stats, hitting .333 with 10 RBIs and three home runs of his own, but only won nine of 16 games during the stretch, to Boston’s 13 of 14 games.


Here were the standings on June 1
New York 31-16
Boston 28-17
Detroit 29-18


And here they are through June 15
Boston 41-18
New York 40-23
Detroit 37-24


Both teams have decent schedules ahead. Boston has a home stand with the St. Louis Brows, Cleveland and Detroit before heading to Washington and Philadelphia before facing New York. The Yankees host the White Sox, Detroit and Cleveland before traveling to Philadelphia and Washington before going to Boston.


It’s still early in the season. I’m not even half way through, but if it keeps going like this with hotly contested pennant races, 1947 will be an amazing year to replay.

The Silence of No Sports

The arenas and stadiums are all quiet today and the spring training parks are silent. The NCAA tournament brackets are empty and blank on what would have been the selection Sunday.

It’s so serene out there that when you step outside, no matter where you live, you can’t hear Dick Vitale howling about diaper dandies and  dipsy-doo dunks.

In a time when the world has gone crazy with fear of an unseen Covid-19 coronavirus, the silence is deafening in the world of sports.

It makes for the clack of the APBA dice to be all the more noticeable. No games on television or in the stadiums? There are still sports going on at my house, albeit it the 1947 baseball replay. On Thursday, a day in Arkansas when everyone rushed the stores and bought cleaner and handy wipes and toilet paper and it made the fall of Saigon look like a summer picnic, I returned from my local store, frazzled. I calmed down, rolling a handful of games that included the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 12^th win in a row to put them in first, half a game ahead of St. Louis.

Therein lies one of the attractions of this game we’ve played since we were kids. There is insulation to it all. The bad of the world doesn’t affect the good of the game. Games cancelled due to virus? Not in our replays. There are no strikes, no stoppage of play. APBA players can play the 1994 baseball season to its fullest and even have a World Series if they choose, foregoing the real life stoppage of play and the cancellation of the fall classic. In my own replay of 1981, I ignored the mid-season strike and played a full season to see what happened.  When I do the 1972 replay, I won’t acknowledge the strike that began that actual campaign.

There are no major injuries if we don’t want our players hurt. When I did the 1925 season, Babe Ruth was healthy, unlike in real life when he played only 98 games that year due to his medical "ailment" of anything from kidney stones to syphilis, depending upon who was asking. I figured I paid for the season, I’ll use all the cards if I want.

We don’t have to have goofy commissioners, no bench clearing brawls, no steroids. It may sound like a Pollyanna type atmosphere, but we have the chance to keep a season pristine and clean with APBA. I’m tired of all the bad; APBA showcases the good.

Yesterday and today, at my weekend job at an assisted living facility, I had to screen all visitors and take their temperatures to ensure we weren’t letting any viruses inside. It became depressing. I brought my APBA notebook to work and during breaks set my daily schedules and even jotted down starting lineups for a week of upcoming games. By Sunday evening, after I had scanned the temperatures of more than 140 people, the depression of what’s going on was setting in. I look forward to escaping later tonight with a few games.  I have the New York Giants up soon; it’ll be fun to see the big bats of Mize, Marshall, Thompson and Cooper come alive.

Tomorrow, I'll head to my job with the local prosecutor. Courts are closed, I was told; a murder trial set for Tuesday has been postponed. I don't know if I'll be working or at home next week. The uncertainty is alarming at a time when rumors are rampant and truth is one of the first casualties, as they say.

So, we have to trudge through all this weirdness and confusion of our times. It’s all we can do. But in the silence that’s created by the vacuum of no sports, roll more APBA games. Use that yellow, plastic dice roller to make the ivory dice sound louder. It may be an irresponsible escape, but it’s a welcome one.

Babe Ruth in Hot Springs, Ark

One reason why I've slowed down on writing blogs is that I'm also writing for an Arkansas monthly magazine. Here's a story I did for the March issue of About You on Babe Ruth's massive home run during spring training in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1918. The blast changed the perception that Ruth should play as a pitcher every four or five days to that of an every-day batter.

Click on the link below:

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Slow

Question: What’s slower than the 5 p.m. traffic on the Tri-State Tollway near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport?

Answer:  Nearly 40 percent of the players in the 1947 baseball season.

I’m finding there are not a lot of stolen bases in my APBA replay of the season and there’s more than the average number of outfielder-to-catcher double plays because of slow runners. It’s a far cry from the previous replay of the 1991 season I finished last summer where players like Marquis Grissom of the Expos and Rickey Henderson of the As blazed the base paths.

Of the 400 players carded by APBA for the 1947 season, 157, or 39 percent, have been given the dreaded “S,” meaning they are rated as slow runners. Slow as in turtle slow, molasses slow, New York Giants slow!

Only 21 percent of the players who were carded for the 1947 season received “F” for “fast” on their cards.

APBA, for those who don’t know the game, creates cards for players in various seasons. Gamers toss dice and match the results with numbers printed on the players’ cards. The game company uses a formula to replicate a player’s actual performance for the season. A player with many home runs, for instance Ralph Kiner in the 1947 season, have more 1s and 5s on his card indicative of more home run chances.

The game also reflects if a player strikes out a lot and, as in the case of my 1947 season replay, if he’s pretty slow.

I’ve tallied the number of stolen bases and players caught stealing through 400 games of this season. So far, players have combined for only 160 stolen bases and have been caught 108 times for a success rate of 59.7 percent. In 1991, the National League successfully stole bases 67.1 percent of the time and the American League swiped bases 65.9 percent of the time.

Projecting the 1947 season to the end (based on me having played about 33 percent of the replay so far), it looks like teams will take a total of 480 bases. In the actual 1991 season, Montreal alone stole 221 bases.

So, the players in 1947 are generally slow. Of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 25 carded players, 13 are rated as “slow,” including nine of its pitchers.  I may be wrong, but I think it was Mickey Lolich, the portly Detroit Tigers pitcher, in Jim Bouton’s classic “Ball Four” who talked about being slow. “You don’t run the ball over the plate, you throw it,” he said.

The New York Giants have eight slow players, including the heart of its line up with sluggers Johnny Mize, Willard Marshall and Walker Cooper. On a few occasions, the “slow” player rankings have caught the Giants twice in the same inning. Mize will get a single. Marshall’s roll will result in an “8,” or a single and should move Mize to third. But because Mize is a slow runner, he’s nailed at second. Then, Cooper bloops a single and, again because Marshall is rated as slow, Marshall is caught at second.

Of course, the Giants are blasting home runs. Mize has 15 home runs so far and Marshall has 12. You don’t have to zip around the bases at jackrabbit speed following a home run. You just have to be sure to touch all the bases.

Still, the slowness has cut short scoring opportunities for the Giants and may be responsible for their less than stellar 27-29 record so far. The Pirates, with their 13 slowpokes, have crawled their way to the major league worst record of 18-41.

Brooklyn and Philadelphia have the most fast-rated runners in the National League with 10 of their 25 players rated as “F.” Both teams have done well so far, too.

On the inverse, the Washington Senators have nine fast runners to lead the American League. That lead doesn’t translate into wins, though, as the Sens are at the bottom of the league with a 22-36 record.

It’s obvious that 1947 is a different era than 1991 in terms of speed by looking at the statistics. It’s even more evident when playing the season.