[asrivkin]

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.