As those of you who follow along with my various OOTP enterprises may have gathered by now from their tone and premise, I am eternally fascinated by baseball's lesser lights. It all started with the Footnote League, and is central to this league as well. I love highlighting the unheralded, the underappreciated, the underdog - something OOTP gives me endless opportunities to do. It's all well and good being a highly-paid superstar, but for whatever reason the way in which the journeyman guys from the majors right down to the nether regions of the minors to go out there day after day and give baseball their all for little by way of reward resounds with me in a most visceral way.
(Kind of perverse, then, that the only two modern players I have any interest whatsoever in are Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. Go figure...)
Someone posted on the boards a while back canvassing people's thoughts on the best size for a league. I guess it all comes down to what you want from it. My AtHoL save, for example, with 36 teams and - eventually - four levels is all-encompassing, which allows a greater coverage of the number of players involved at the expense of being able to see them quite so well on an individual basis, or at least requires more time for you to do so. This save, with just 20 teams and two levels, affords me the ability to gain a more intimate knowledge of the players participating. Less of them, as a result, slip through the cracks. The hand-curation involved takes this to the next level again.
The improvements to the treatment of the NeLers in v23 has allowed me to relax my process somewhat for handling these players. I still use my own stats for the players included in
Eric Chalek's MLE analysis, but now I just edit them on import and then let the imprint do its thing. For those I call the "lesser" NeL players - in other words, those for whom no MLEs are available - I give them free rein. It's kind of like a
de facto TCR, the way I see it. Were I playing a truly historical save, this would be unacceptable to me. But the EL isn't that sort of save - it is a celebration of the great history of black baseball and nothing more. So if some of these guys import with off the charts ratings, so be it. Godspeed and good luck to them.
Which brings me to the subject of this feature, southpaw pitcher
Gene Collins.
For a guy who was a true footnote in the NeL annals, playing just two seasons in the murky environment of the Jackie Robinson era before heading to Mexico via a quick stint in the minors, Jim Riley gives Gene a nice chunk of column inches. From this we learn he was originally a pitcher who later moved into the outfield as an everyday position player. Seamheads - which covers only his 1947-48 seasons - gives him a lifetime 5-5 record and 81 ERA+ over 84 IP for the Monarchs, and if those stats are anything to go by it is clear he had some fantastic stuff but was as wild as Mitch Williams (91 K v 95 BB).
As you can see from the screenshot below, those figures are well-replicated by the OOTP engine and, after being drafted in 1971 by the Motown Stars (Round 3, 44th overall), his rookie season last year was true to type: 8.1 K/9 offset by 5.4 BB/9. That said, he did OK for a pretty poor MoStars outfit, going 11-19 with an ERA of 3.83 and picking up 2.6 pWAR.
1973 has been a different story entirely, as he currently sits at a staggering 12-1 with an ERA of 2.02 or 188 adjusted. He's been a bit lucky, as his 217 BABIP clearly shows, but a reduction in the number of free passes to a more tolerable 4 per 9 while still fanning a bunch has also had plenty to do with it, as has the drop in his FIP- from 106 to 77. The improved performance of his team has also undoubtedly played a part.
We'll keep an eye on Gene's performance from here to see if he can keep up with his development and perhaps even become a force in this league.