Happy birthday to three of the better players of my youth: Watson, Lacy, and Griffey. And you can bet Corey Kluber will celebrate his birthday today by having exactly the same facial expression he has all the time.

Birthday Team:
C: Cliff Bolton (4.5 WAR)
1B: Bob Watson (28.2 WAR)
2B: Lee Lacy (20.23 WAR)
3B: Cliff Daringer (0.28 WAR)
SS: Charlie Culberson (-1.21 WAR)
LF: Andre Ethier (22.04 WAR)
CF: Ken Griffey Sr. (34.38 WAR)
RF: Ross Youngs (32.15 WAR)

SP: Frank Lary (30.35 WAR)
SP: Corey Kluber (19.0 WAR)
SP: Roger Wolff (9.92 WAR)
SP: Eric King (9.57 WAR)
SP: Joe Gibbon (9.14 WAR)
RP: Tom Parrott (8.89 WAR)

Rifleman: Chuck Connors
Sell when its WAR reaches 6: Wes Stock (5.26 WAR)

The Reading team was named the Pretzels. 20-year-old Bucky Harris was a Pretzel that year. There were no Reading Pretzels or even a New York State League after 1917.

The Mathewson link is interesting not just for the content, but because it's a Topeka paper rather than Chicago or Kansas City, and it doesn't explain who Rube Foster is.

The NL East is closer than it appears...

Frank Lary--the Yankee killer. in 1958 he was 7-1 with a 1.86 ERA against the (pennant-winning) Yankees and 9-14 against everyone else

Mr Million!

Dunno if it's a record, but birthday boy Wes Stock pitched in 106 games from June 1962 to July 1964 without a loss. His record during those games was 12-0.

It appears Stock held the record until Joe Sambito broke it in 1986. Current record according to Play Index is 240 by Trevor Miller from 2006 to 2009. Miller pitched in all of 150.1 innings during the streak.

Frank Lary is a textbook case of a pitcher really having it till he really didn't. He pitched seven straight star-quality years between 220 and 300 innings and then his arm was gone (apparently as a complication of trying to pitch with a knee injury). One could say they should have paced pitchers better in those days, but how much more can you expect out of any career?

Before he was traded to the White Sox, Wilbur Wood's teams were 5-68 in games he appeared in. They were 1-50 in his first 51 appearances.

I simmed several years in my alternate history OOTP game. I am now in the 20s, and the offensive numbers have leapt up as we knew they would. The game's most fearsome slugger is ... Tino Martinez, the first man to hit 30 HRs in a year. Prior to 1920, nobody had ever hit more than a dozen.

I had the immense good luck to have one particularly bad year at the right time, and got high picks in an unusually stocked draft. With the 4th pick and Mordecai Brown and Roberto Clemente available, I selected ... Al Bumbry, who had the highest contact rating I'd ever seen. Sure enough, he hit about .380/.450/.600, with about 35 triples, and in the years since has been the closest thing the league has ever had to a Ty Cobb. In the same draft I took Bill Gullickson, who's been an elite starter, and Kenny Rogers, a competent #3 starter. It was a bonanza and has pushed my team to new heights, which have only been bolstered by recent draftees Joe Panik, Moose Skowron, Starlin Castro and Jonathon Lucroy, all performing extremely well.

My White Sox have now won the World Series 4 times, between the years of 1903 and 1925. One player has been present for all 4 of them, a 19th century slugger named "Long" Levi Meyerle. In real life the dude hit .350 but only in about 1,500 ABs, in the NA and NL. My Long Levi is 40 years old, and has the all-time record of ~3,250 hits. He had a couple David Ortiz like resurrections, switched from 2B to RF to 1B, and won the WS MVP with a .550 average when he was like 38.

Kenny Rogers, by the way, lost about 14 months to a ULC injury, which suggests to me that Tommy John surgery has already been invented. Sadly, my favorite player, Parisian Bob Caruthers, somehow changed from a 6-7 WAR centerfielder at age 23 into a total washout by age 27.

That's roughly how Parisian Bob's career went in real life, too. He blew out his arm at 27-28 years old and never fully recovered.

One thing I don't like about the OOTP engine is that the phenomenon of 23 year old All-Star who's barely even a bench player by age 28 is extremely commonplace. On the other hand, there aren't enough catastrophic injuries. Perhaps the end result is realistic, it does the appropriate amount of talent adjustment without linking it to a specific cause.

It would be nice if OOTP injuries could be linked to talent loss, especially injury-specific talent loss. For example, player has major leg injury, loses speed and range. Player has big wrist injury, loses power. That kind of thing.

Agreed.

Frank Lary is a textbook case of a pitcher really having it till he really didn't. He pitched seven straight star-quality years between 220 and 300 innings and then his arm was gone (apparently as a complication of trying to pitch with a knee injury). One could say they should have paced pitchers better in those days, but how much more can you expect out of any career?

28-13 vs the Yanks for his career--he's at or below .500 against every other team except the Angels (5-3) and a couple teams against which he was 1-0. He's even below .500 (13-14) against the wretched KC A's

strange

#8 Thanks for the legwork, (fellow) born1951.