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1869 TUCKER WHEATON CUP STANDINGS

TEAM			W	L	 R	RA	 RD
ALLEGHANY		7	3	78	66	+12
KNICKERBOCKER*	        6	4	80	58	+22
ST. JOHN’S		6	4	84	68	+16
FLOUR CITY**	        5	5	60	64	 -4
SHAMROCK		5	5	70	80	 -5
KINGS COUNTY	        1	9	70     111	-41
*: KNI 1-1 v STJ, higher RD
**: F.C. 1-1 v SHA, higher RD

MVP: SS Edward Huntley (KNI) – .500 (23/46), 1.249 OPS, 7 2B, 2 3B, 12 R, 9 RBI, 2 BB/1 K, 6 SB/2 CS
2x PotG, 219 WRC+, 249 OPS+, 1.6 WPA, 0.8 WAR over 10 Games

Gameday Ten started with the possibility of a four-team tie and a multiple-game playoff to decide the NBBO champion, but Alleghany won in Boston, St. John’s fell in Manhattan, and the 8x Inland champions won the cup outright.

This was perhaps the strangest cup-winner of the Round Robin era. The team’s pitching & defense were fine – John Henry was 5-1 and came through in important situations – but some of their star players did not perform. Royal Altman’s .380 average & .921 OPS turned into .271 & .732 during the cup, while Samuel Kessler hit just .188 (9/48), a number nearly 180 points lower than his average during the season. To pick up the slack, Gerald Strong hit 60 points higher than he did during the season – .353 v .293 – and Collin Henderson hit at a level just below his .400+ average on the season. This was the first time a Round Robin cup winner saw their two most talented players’ performance fall far short of their established norms.

Knickerbocker looked like the most dominant team in the cup at times, but their failure to win it comes down to the fact that each of their last three losses was by a single run. To make matters worse, the losing runs allowed in those three games came in their opponents’ final time at bat. If their late-inning pitching & defense had been just slightly better Knickerbocker would have been 9-1, and they would have walked away as memorable cup champions.

Once again, St. John’s had the best offense in the competition. The surprise: 3B Leopold Pfeiffer had the team’s highest average (.400) & OPS (.892), while the team’s usual fleet of stars did their best work on the basepaths instead. The difference between St. John’s being in 3rd place at 6-4 and winning the cup at 8-2: late-inning defensive blunders, which directly led to losses at Shamrock on Gameday Three and Knickerbocker on Gameday Ten.

Flour City, the 2nd team in NBBO history to win 55+ games in a season, did not play at the same level during the cup. The reason: offense. F.C. scored 8.9 runs per game during the season, and that figure fell to a competition-low 6.0 during the cup. The team had five batsmen hit .340+ during the season, but just one – Obelix Tsiaris at .457 – did so during the TWC. The historically-great James Goodman was 5-2, but F.C.’s other pitchers could not make up for their sudden lack of scoring.

Shamrock was alone atop the competition at 5-2 after Gameday Seven, and then they fell apart. Three multiple-run losses over the final three games saw Shamrock plummet from first to fifth, as their offense sputtered and their NBBO-best pitching duo of The Two Toms – Ricks & Smith – saw their form go sideways. Still, James Burke – .455, 1.093 OPS, 16 R, 9 RBI, 12 SB, 0.9 WPA, 0.8 WAR – was fantastic and Anthony Mascherino finished with thirteen RBI.

The less said about Kings County, the better. They fought hard to win by a run against eventual champs Alleghany on Gameday Three, but other than that it was nine losses for K.C. and most of them were lopsided. Garfield Koonce (.391, 1.004 OPS) & Edward Johnson (.341, 8 RBI) hit very well, but there was no way their offense could overcome pitching & defense that allowed just over eleven runs per game during the competition.

There were plenty of shouts for the champions’ #1 pitcher, John Henry, to take home the MVP honors after he went 5-1 with a 3.12 ERA over the course of the competition. However, Henry walked more batters than he struck out (52.0 IP, 8 BB, 5 K), and his success was much due to excellent Alleghany defense as it was his pitching.

To put it simply, the work of Edward Huntley could not be ignored and thus the MVP had to go to a player on a runner-up once again. During his previous cup appearance in 1867 Huntley put up a slash line of .444/.490/.756, and improbably he did better than that here, totaling 1.6 WPA and 0.8 WAR over just two weeks’ worth of games.

With the 1869 TWC factored in, here is the career postseason stat line for Huntley:

• 63 G: .413/.451/.601, 1.052 OPS (203 OPS+), 83 R, 116 H, 27 2B, 13 3B, 0 HR, 70 RBI, 17 BB, 8 K, 37 SB, 5.3 WPA, 3.9 WAR
• PER 70: .413/.451/.601, 1.052 OPS, 92 R, 129 H, 30 2B, 14 3B, 0 HR, 78 RBI, 19 BB, 9 K, 41 SB, 5.9 WPA, 4.3 WAR
• PER 162: .413/.451/.601, 1.052 OPS, 213 R, 298 H, 69 2B, 33 3B, 0 HR, 180 RBI, 44 BB, 21 K, 95 SB, 13.6 WPA, 10.0 WAR

Huntley, now the 3x Tucker-Wheaton Cup MVP (1859, 67, 69) has managed to hit even better in late August than he has during the standard season, and that is as a player who has led the New York League in WAR eleven times over thirteen seasons. Huntley’s work in the Tucker-Wheaton Cup playoffs over his career has no peer among NBBO batsmen, active or retired.