1916 BBW Replay - Preparation

I completed my 1938 BBW Replay in December and have spent the winter months getting my 1916 BBW Replay ready to start. Retirement may have issues, but being able to spend my time playing APBA is not one of them.

I had previously purchased the 1916 disk and card set last summer in anticipation of kicking this off. The disk has 400 players included on it, which means I had to add 127 additional players to complete the set. That is a lot of players. Why so many? There are several reasons:

 

1. There is always some level of churn every season with players getting their proverbial "cup of coffee" with the big club, and this season is no different. Many (most) of these players spent the majority of their summer on a minor league team somewhere, but for a few weeks, they got to ride the trains and stay in nicer hotels while at the top of the baseball food chain.

There were various minor leagues, and they had agreements as to what level the leagues were (A-Ball, B-Ball, C-Ball, etc.), but there was not a minor league structure as we know of it today. Owners could buy and sell players as they thought best, so a major league player could not be simply dispatched to a minor club. A major league owner could reach out to a minor club to propose a purchase or the selling of a player, and maybe a trade would result. Sometimes the deal would include some language that would give the major league some claim to the player, more like a right of first refusal. Therefore, in 1916, there was a lot of up and down between MLB and the minors, but nothing was mandated; it all had to be negotiated.

 

2. The Federal League was in operation in 1914 and 1915, but the owners decided to not continue into the 1916 season, meaning there was suddenly a large group of free agents available, many with previous big-league experience. Some of these players stuck with a major league club all season, but among those who were signed, they too got their "cup of coffee," and then they were passed on to a minor league club.

3. 

   Connie Mack

   Because there was not a minor league structure like there is today, the largest set of free agents was college baseball players. The largest signer of college free agents at this time was Connie Mack and the Philadelphia Athletics.  Just a few years previous, the A's had one of the strongest teams of this era, but finances had forced Mack to sell off his best players, and now, at the bottom of the pack, Mack was looking to rebuild his team. The signing of college players had worked previously for Mack, and would do so again in the future, but as for 1916, it was a struggle for Mack and the A's, who finished with a 36-118 record. All in all, a total of 50 players donned an Athletics uniform in 1916, many coming up for just a short time before they were farmed out to get seasoning. 

Now that all the uncarded (undisked?) players were carded (disked?), the next step was to review the player logs for every player. Baseball-reference.com (BBR) has all of this information; it just takes a while to peruse it all. I am looking for a few things:

 

1. If a player is only available for a short time, when is that time? Does he get his three relief appearances in April or in September? Basically, I don’t want to carry a player on the active roster all season if he makes his three appearances at the beginning or end of the season. I want to get him on and off the roster at an appropriate time and not let that extra body clutter the roster. This also helps me account for dates of trades and player movement between teams.
2. This also lets me look for any unusual absences. I used to be really strict about this - if a player missed ten consecutive games, he was benched. I am less strict now, but generally a two-week or longer absence draws my attention. Even if I don’t exactly know why a player isn't playing, the absence is noted and will be accounted for during the replay. On the one hand, this player needs to miss games anyway, plus the backups need to get their games in as well, so it works out pretty well.
3. I also try to fill in missing stats on the player disk as well. There are no IBB and GDP totals in BBR, so they remain unfilled. There are Complete Games totals for pitchers, though, so they have been added. Also, players who played multiple defensive positions have their defensive numbers summed up under their primary defensive position, and these have been split out as well
4. I have used the APBA Transaction Manager (ATMgr) in previous seasons, and it has worked well for me. However, the files for 1916 are not available, so roster changes and lineup will be done manually. Baseball-reference.com has lineups for every game, so I will just follow them.

So now, with all the ball players added, and now with all the absences and comings and goings documented, the opening day rosters are set, but there is one last thing - pitching grades. As you can suspect, there are a lot of highly graded pitchers in this season, so it's gonna be a tough season for the batters in 1916; however, I noticed of the 37 pitchers receiving a Basic Game (BG) grade of B, 23 got a Master Game (MG) grade of 15. I would have thought that these grades would have been spread out a little more instead of being clumped in at the high end. The same high-end clumping appears for both C and A pitchers as well.

 

I am not saying this is right or wrong, but it is definitely a bit curious. This is not a revised set, and I would assume this would have been cleaned up if the set was redone … but what to do now? I don't want to get paralyzed thinking about this - I am just gonna go with it as it is, and we'll see how things go.

 

Sooo …. The rosters are all set for opening day, the blog is set up, and I still want to post a pre-season preview. I expect that will take a few days yet, but I guess that after that, there is only one thing left to do - let's go play!