Week 1 Summary (04/14/1941 - 04/20/1941)

The 1941 BBW replay is now underway and Week One is in the books. The big story so far is, right out of the chute, the red-hot Yankees are off to a 7-0 start and have scored 65 runs already. These games were all against lowly Philadelphia and Washington, but these wins count like any other. Charlie Keller has hit four doubles, six homeruns, and has seventeen RBI's to power the New York offense, while rookie lead-off hitter Phil Rizzuto is one of seven Yankees hitting over .400 (two of who are pitchers) and has safely crossed the plate seventeen times already. If Joe DiMaggio (.276) ever starts to get hot this team could really be doing well. The Yankees' team ERA is 4.71, so don't worry, Yankees fans still have something to complain about.

Brooklyn Manager
Leo Durocher
In the NL it looks like the Dodgers and the Cardinals are going to be neck-and-neck this season. Cincinnati won the NL pennant last season and look to challenge this season as well, but Brooklyn and St. Louis are both loaded, and both are eager to claim the pennant. Neither team is off to a strong start offensively, although Brooklyn first baseman Dolph Camilli did have a three-homerun game in their season opener, but both teams have strong pitching with both of their teams' ERA's being ~1.5 runs per game better that the third-place Cubs.
 

Having just completed a 1911 replay, yes, 1941 is very much a different season. The rosters are all well stocked, all teams use plenty of pinch-hitters and relievers (although certainly not at current-day levels), so substitutions are much more prevalent. Stolen bases and sacrifices are down, but they are still in use, so I am still learning how to moderate their usage in this new environment. I always struggle with intentional walks (I would just as soon not use them at all), but it is a part of the game, so I am forcing myself to ensure they are used appropriately and sufficiently.

 

All the stats I just mentioned are things that I as the manager control, so it is just a matter of calibrating my usage to ensure they are used within the bounds of normal for the 1941 season. It is all part of the learning process, so I expect these things will take a few weeks of adjustment to get them aligned properly.

 

1941 Brooklyn Dodgers
I do use ATMgr to auto-load my lineups and to make daily roster changes, and while it works well, it only works as well as the data provided to it. So far, the 1941 lineups provided by ATMgr have proven to be spotty. Nothing major, nothing that would render them unusable, but trivial things: the wrong catcher, batters switched in the batting order, etc., again, nothing that can't be easily fixed on the fly before the game starts.

I have two monitors on my desk, with APBA BBW on one and the Baseball-Reference.com (BBR) box score for the current game on the other, so it is easy to scan through the lineups for a particular game and make the necessary corrections. In previous replays, I have always documented these discrepancies in my weekly blog entries, but they were few and far between, so it wasn't a hardship. This time I will not be doing that - it just happens too much.

 

Having said all that, they are still correct 90% of the time, and it is only the first week of the season. These lineups were pulled together by volunteers many decades ago, and a lot of serious baseball work has been done at sites like BBR since then, so I am using BBR as the tiebreaker when differences are found. Since BBR has this information and updates it when its own researchers find corrections, it would be nice if it had a macro to dump a whole season's worth of lineups in the correct format into a CSV file that we could all use, but that is beyond my ken.

 

As in previous replays, I am not in a particular hurry to get this done. I plan to take my time and work my way through it, plus I have several vacation periods in the upcoming family calendar as well. I would expect that this will be completed by early fall, meaning that I can spend my winter months planning out my next replay.


Ebbets Field 1941 Digital Art by Gary Grigsby | Pixels




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