JANUARY 6, 1941
DRAFT DAY APPROACHES
The annual opening phase of the FABL amateur player draft is almost upon us. It is a day scouting directors of each of the 16 clubs have spent an entire year preparing for, and will culminate with every General Manager saying the exact same thing about how happy they are to get the kid they selected. As has been the case for several years now the FABL draft is split into two phases. In the January phase the first three rounds will take place with teams allowed to select from players entering there senior year of high school or either their junior or senior baseball season. Rounds one and two are wide open but in the third round clubs are restricted to selecting only a 'homegrown' player, born in either the state the team plays in or one that immediately borders the ballclub's home state. The two Canadian clubs have their pick of talent from across Canada in round three as well as states that border their respective provinces. Then after those young men lucky enough to be selected complete their prep or AIAA schedule in June they are free to sign a contract with the club that drafted that. In June we also witness the final 22 rounds of the FABL draft as well.
So this draft is like so many others but also in one very obvious way so very different. The situation in Europe is grave and nearly everyone in the country expects it is just a matter of time before we are fully pulled into the conflict as at some point simply supplying Britain with planes, ships and weapons will not be enough. Most of the college players who will be eligible for the FABL draft have already had to register for one conducted by Uncle Sam and with news last week of James Slocum, a minor leaguer in the Brooklyn Kings organization, leaving baseball to enlist it seems just a matter of time before many other ballplayers heed the call to arms. While this FABL draft, like each before it, is a cause for celebration the world around us gives off a very clear reminder that there is a good chance many of the players selected this week may not step on a pro ball field for a long time, and some possibly never but this time for reasons well outside their abilities to hit, throw or catch a baseball.
UPDATED TOP TEN DRAFT LIST ACCORDING TO OSA REPORTS
Somewhat subjective of course but in only reading the OSA scouting reports here is Jiggs McGee's updated top ten in OSA's mind for the upcoming draft. It will change when the remaining players appear* but right now there is not a lot of movement among the top ten with the biggest drop-off being Otto Christian (and not just me trying to get him to fall to the second round) as OSA feels he is "just" a front-runner for an audition at third base. He fell out of the top ten from 5th when I did this during the WCS. I also dropped Hal Renard out of the top ten after his report, while still very good, says "profiles as an everyday left fielder who can make an impact on a top-tier team" Likely could have been a toss-up between Eason, Alvardo and Renard to be in the top ten.
*the pool currently numbers 341 players so the commissioner will be adding an additional 59, mostly college juniors to the class just prior to draft day.
Code:
TR LR NAME POS OSA NOTES
1 1 Hiram Steinberg P has the chance to be an ace
2 2 Tom Buchanan P should rank among best pitching prospects in any organization
3 3 Gordie Perkins SS projected to be an elite starting SS
4 7 Gene Madison P flashed potential to be a top of the rotation starter
5 4 Mel Franklin C potential to unleash his obvious talent both on the field and at the plate
6 9 Bert Cupid P finesse pitcher has talents to pitch as a #2 starter
7 11 Lorenzo Samuels 1B talent to flourish as a first baseman
8 10 Hank Eason LF profiles as an above average player
9 15 Jesse Alvardo LF above average power hitter can be penciled in for lion's share of starts
10 6 Fred Loney SS considerable ceiling and can be a first division starter
THE HISTORY OF THE FABL DRAFT
With the number of views this dynasty write-up is getting it appears there are a good number of people who are not in our online league (you really should sign up for the waiting list) that are following along. So for their benefit as well as some of our newer GM's who might not have been around since the beginning I thought it would be a good idea to trace the history of our league's draft and explain the how's and why's as to changes over the year's.
1876-1910 NO DRAFT
The early days of the pre-play (before human GM's arrived) had no draft. Our commissioner handled everything behind the scenes first with the various leagues competing for players and the hearts of baseball fans and even after things settled down with the formation of the Federally Aligned Baseball Leagues in 1892.
1911-1924 FEEDERS TAKE FLIGHT AND THE BIRTH OF THE DRAFT
The Feeder League system was implemented for the 1910 season and it comprised a 40 team college league as well as a 64 team high school circuit. That league structure would continue unchanged until the conclusion of the 1933 campaign. What did change in the college loop was the names of the schools. Originally popular NCAA schools, that changed in 1928 when all colleges were given fictional names to match Figment Sports idea of fake pro team names and also to prepare for a possible tie-in someday of a Figment College Football or Basketball online league. So instead of the Ohio State Buckeyes or Notre Dame Fighting Irish our world has the Central Ohio Aviators and the St Blane Fighting Saints. It was never set out anywhere but I think it was just assumed that we retroactively used these new names whenever discussing any college team activities that occurred prior to 1928.
As for the draft, back then it was held in December and on December 5, 1911 Mark Robinson became the first ever FABL draft pick. He was a shortstop out of Berkeley (CA) High School who, aside from the honour of being the first pick, had a pretty uneventful career. The Philadelphia Sailors, thanks to an awful 46-108 season in 1911 (which remains the all-time record for losses in a season by a Continental Association club), had that first pick. Robinson was an outstanding defender but only was an everyday player for 4 seasons, finishing with a .269 career batting average in 686 big league games.
1925-1933 HUMAN GENERAL MANAGERS ARRIVE
Following that lengthy pre-play (which originally was supposed to be longer as the initial plan from our commissioner was human GMs would not arrive until roughly 1950) FABL went live as an online league immediately after the conclusion of the 1925 World Championship Series. It was a big moment for the GMs as we really had no idea what our teams would be like since all team assignments were handed out roughly two decades (sim time) prior. Human General Managers, pretty much all of us unfamiliar with playing stats-only and several new to online play entirely, found themselves tossed right into the fire as we had to prepare for the 1925 draft - our first chance to shape our teams.
That 1925 draft would prove to be one for the ages and featured several future superstars and, as it would turn out, we did a decent job as a group drafting those superstars high. Al Wheeler went first. He was a high school player out of Decatur, Illinois with immense power potential back then, but now at the age of 33 has hit 374 homeruns and won 5 Whitney Awards. Bud Jameson, Bill Ashbaugh, Doug Lightbody and Jack Cleaves were all taken in the top ten that year. Of course being stats only there were some bad misses then too such as Pittsburgh selecting Eddie Wilson, who played just 32 career big league games, fifth and ahead of both Lightbody and Cleaves. There were also some late round steals as Moxie Pidgeon was 12th rounder that draft and Hank Jones lasted until the 15th round with each going on to play over 1,200 FABL games. Pitchers too as the 10th round gave the New York Gothams Jim Lonardo, who is still going strong at the age of 36 with 216 wins under his belt. So there were surprises and busts and while the GMs slowly seemed to get better at landing the right guys there were still plenty of moves that eventually proved to be head-scratchers. The draft was unpredictable and fun, which was most important due to multi-levels of minors it needed to be long - 25 rounds to be precise with the human GMs doing the first 10 live and the remainder set to auto or by a list. The great thing is because it was a stats-only league most GMs spent nearly as much attention to deciding on their 10th round pick as they did on their second because the next Jim Lonardo or Moxie Pidgeon was out there - they just knew it.
1934 DEATH OF THE FEEDERS
By around 1930 it became painfully obvious the feeder system, as important as it was to stats-only because it gave us, well...stats, both defensive as well as offensive, but it also gave us something else. A talent overload, especially in the outfield. We used 104 feeder league teams and it became clear that was too many. There was some talk of reducing the number of feeder clubs but the commissioner was very much involved in his still solo but most definitely a part of the FABL/Figment folklore college football and basketball leagues. He wanted more, not less teams, as clearly having only 40 major college programs and 64 high schools across the country is not a realistic number. So the decision to abandon the feeder leagues and go to OOTP game created drafts was implemented. 1933 would be the last of the college and High School feeders but the commissioner diligently worked to ensure all of the top underclassman, including a young HS freshman by the name of Deuce Barrell, were ported over to the game created draft classes so they would still become part of FABL. After all, many of us had already been scouting underclassman all along in preliminary work for future drafts. An interesting note on the depth of the commissioner's involvement in this universe is while the High Schools in FABL are real, our custom schools file also includes over 500 completely fictional college names.
For me personally, it was a disappointment to see them leave as I had grown very attached to the feeders, especially the AIAA and it shows in early writeups on this thread which heavily focused on the college world. This thread was first designed to help out GMs who maybe had less time or inclination to fully scout the feeders as kind of a cheat sheet to give them some information heading into drafts. However, the talent bloat was a real problem so a change was necessary. There was a positive side too, as I agreed having a lot more colleges and high schools represented in the FABL world would be much more realistic.
1934-1936 THE MOCK DRAFT TOOK AWAY OUR FUN
The new draft structure was quickly embraced but nearly as quickly it was noticed there is a big problem. OOTP had expanded it's draft focus which was part of the reason everyone felt comfortable abandoning feeders as we now had multi-years worth of classes to look through and stats (no defensive and many missing advanced stats however) to look at. We also had a mock draft. While old versions of OOTP gave us an email listing the top ten prospects, one that often seemed very wrong in hindsight, the new version provided us with a 5-round mock draft. Great, everyone though as it was one more source of information for GMs would did not dive as deep into scouting reports. In theory yes, but in principle it was a terrible thing for Figment as it was quickly discovered the mock draft was too good - too accurate in that it with very little error gave us a comprehensive list of all the best prospects. The unpredictability we loved about stats-only was splashed in the face by a giant bucket of cold water that gave away too much. Once this was pointed out to the designers they did make changes to the accuracy level of the mock but refused to give us an option to hide it entirely like we could with player stars and ratings. So FABL went and found it's own solution. It took a couple of tries but I think our commissioner really got it right with the second one.
1937-1938 - THE LOTTERY EXPERIMENT
Sal Pestilli was the first choice in 1936, which would be the last of the conventional December drafts. In 1937 it was announced that the draft would shift to June, to better mirror real life and take place right after the high school and college seasons. That was the small change. The big one was we needed a new system because the in game mock draft was robbing FABL drafts of much of their unpredictability and excitement. So the commissioner came up with a new lottery type system in which the top 32 players (two rounds) according to the final mock draft would be placed into groups of 4. Players 1,2,31,32 on the mock draft were pod one, players 3,4,29,30 were pod 2 etc. Each General Manager would then take turns picking, in reverse order of standings, which pod they wanted for their draft picks in round one. It was then repeated for round two until each pod had 4 teams. A random draw would then determine which player each club would end up with out of their pod. Some liked the idea, many did not. It was exciting as the draft reveal was a lot of fun but it also clearly had it's flaws as teams lost a good degree of control over who they could draft.
1939-present - THE TWO-PHASE DRAFT
For the 1939 season a new system was unveiled and by all accounts it is working perfectly. The draft is still set for June in game but we manually draft the first three rounds in January. The idea is the top of the draft is completed well before the mock draft goes live so the mock is once again no longer present in our game (at least for rounds 1-3). This makes for some interesting decisions as players have not yet finished their development in HS/college because their final season has not been played yet. We draft in January but don't see the final results or have the opportunity to sign a player until June.
This has restored some unpredictability to the top of the draft, both because of talent boosts/drops in that final amateur season and the absence of an in-game mock draft to refer to, but also because of signability. When the first three rounds are drafted we do not know how difficult a player will be to sign as that information is not published until much closer to the June phase of the draft. Just last season Washington lost it's second rounder because Johnny Thacker, the player they selected, ended up being impossible to sign and enrolled in a military college (which considering the time frame we are operating in is a great story in itself. Disappointing to the drafting GM, but another challenge we all need to account for and perhaps a small factor in deciding between selecting a college player who traditionally are easier to sign, or a high school guy. There is also a wrinkle added into the third round, inspired by OOTP22's new regional draft feature. In round three teams are only allowed to select a player from their home state or a state that immediately borders it.
The remaining rounds (4-25) take place in June just as the draft had been entirely done previously. The mock draft is a factor then but much less so and this structure has also increased the perceived value of 4th round picks, especially the top 3 or 4 of them. It also frees up Jiggs McGee to provide his mock drafts for the January portion, and before you say 'wait a minute, I thought the whole purpose of all of this was to remove the mock draft from the equation.' Well, yes the game generated mock which is too accurate a predictor was our concern, but Jiggs makes his mock selections based only on OSA scouting reports and stats visible in the game so it is more like it was originally intended to be - simply a guide for GMs with a little less time to invest in scouting, but by no means guaranteed to be accurate.
So in summary the FABL draft process has undergone a number of changes, and who knows it might change again in the future but I believe most in the league agree it's present format keeps some unpredictability, provides some interesting challenges and is unique among online leagues, much like FABL itself.
QUICK HITS
- The need for improved shortstop defense should have the St Louis Pioneers turning to Tommy Wilson, according to Percy Sutherland of the Chicago Herald-Examiner. Sutherland pens "I found this interesting about Wilson. He, of course, was the Premier Defender award winner at third. So we all want to run out and find more Tommy Wilsons, right? Not so fast. OOTP doesn't break out defensive and offensive WAR, but one thing you can do is compare defensive runs saved with offensive runs generated. OOTP doesn't have an explicit run saved metric, but ZR can be used as a rough equivalent. Wilson's ZR at third was 15.4--meaning he "saved" his pitching staff approximately 15 runs compared to the average third baseman. This was by far the top number in the game last season. Hank Koblenz was second at 6.7 (and Ray Cochran last with -17.1). Now what about offensive runs generated? That's where things break down--Wilson was by far the worst offensive contributor at third last season with -19.0 batting runs (which means his net was -4.4 runs). The only other two third baseman with negative runs generated were Walt Pack (-9.5) and Jim Beard (-3.5). The top two were Hank Barnett (47.3) and John Lawson (43.0).
- A Toronto source jokingly says Pack should try wearing a glove this season. To that Sutherland, our resident defensive guru, adds "A ZR of -4.6 is fine IF you are generating runs at the plate. Pack obviously did not last season, but I still think he has the potential to do so. And note that Wilson having a negative run differential (-4.4) but a positive WAR (1.6) is only one of the reasons that I don't really trust OOTP's WAR calculation.
- Speaking of Pack, that Toronto source also indicates the Wolves are rethinking things and may shop Pack instead of prospect Ockie Holliday as there is only room for one at third base and the Wolves have not received much in the way of quality offers for Holliday.
- Even with trading away fan favorite Cliff Moss, baseball excitement is building in Chicago--season ticket sales are up nearly 23% over last season for the Chiefs.
reprinted from the January 6,1941 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
WHAT'S PLAYING THERE, ANYWAY? - Strange news, indeed comes out of bomb-belted Europe. The German radio reports that the Nazi heavyweight boxing champ knocked out an Italian champ in eight rounds "and thus became the outstanding challenger for the European heavyweight title." This happened in Munich. Can it be that German ring promoters are still doing business at the old stand in spite of the R.A.F.? Must be.
Stranger yet is the sports news in the English newspapers. They still carry sports sections which include the entries and results of greyhound racing, Lancashire rugby and horse racing at Kenilworth. They still print soccer news while the world is crashing about their battered ears. In one sports section there seems to be quite a whoop-tee-do over the question of whether or not the air raid wardens and the bobbies should resume their soccer league schedule, temporarily interrupted by the heavy bombings of recent weeks.
The writer of the article seems to be in a bit of a pet over the air raid wardens. He argues that big soccer games shouldn't be held up and the customers dispersed over the first air raid sirens. In insists that the first wails of the sirens means that the invaders are still at least 100 miles in the offing and that no bombs will drop. He implies that the players and spectators shouldn't be asked to walk (not run) to the nearest shelters until the first eggs are laid on the field.
"Suppose the game is at a critical point," he writes "when the first siren is heard. It's hardly fair to either side to interrupt the game then when there is still time before real danger is upon us." We'd dislike having this gentleman fading us in a game of Harlem backgammon on a N.Y. Central crossing with the 20th century only 100 yards off and making up time.
As for any attempt to call off the big soccer games, bosh and tosh. In the Manchester Chronicle a Mr. Ivan Sharpe writes:
"Stop association football! It's unthinkable. Of course, no one would complain if the professional clubs, amid all the discouragements and difficulties, were to call it a day. But they mustn't. Association (soccer) is a game the English gave to the world. It it ceases now the world may draw false conclusions. We mustn't quit. The game has definite propaganda value."
On the same page with Mr. Sharpe's story are the agate results of games played throughout the kingdom - Tottenham vs Arsenal, Cardiff vs Southampton, Birmingham vs Stoke City, etc. etc. And between advertisements of Bobrill and Cephus tea is a reminder on the Unity Pool, a soccer gag the equivalent to our football pools of the Autumnal weekends.
Apparently the sports news of embattled nations is the answer to those who frown on the frivolity of play in those embittered days. It seems there must be a hookup between sports and morale. It seems that, not matter how dark the sky with smoke of battle, no matter how red the horizon with fire of war, sports and sports pages survive -and serve.
The Week That Was
Current events from the week ending 1/06/1941
- Hitler denounced 'the democracies' and their capitalistic workings in a New Years message and promised his fighting forces that 1941 would see them claim victory against all odds. Hitler made no mention of President Roosevelt's recent speech calling for increased war aid from the United States to Britain.
- The Fascist press in Rome described the United States as the enemy of the Axis Powers, predicted a clash with America and called for a united "proletarian" front to destroy the "common enemy." It is suggested it would be Japan that would take the lead against the United States if war came.
- London announces that the British Government has decided to make part time civil defense work compulsory for every Briton
- German planes and pilots have been sent to Italy "to help in the bitter aero-naval fight now developing in the Mediterranean basin." British forces had been enjoying great success against the Italians, capturing another key Italian military base in Libya this week.