bryanfagan wrote:
Good stuff, Mike. Thanks for your imput. My struggles with the '69 Red Sox was expected (right now I am in last place after 40 games) but my struggles with the '69 Cubs I think has a lot to do with me. After 41 games my '69 Cubs are five games under .500. Recently I played the 1927 season. I couldn't resist I had to be the Yankees that year. It didn't take a lot of baseball smarts to win with that team. Now the game is showing me how little I know and how much more I need to learn. Such if life.


Thanks Bryan. I would guess that your managing skills will have much greater impact on the '69 Cubs than the '69 Red Sox. As you know, the Cubs lost the Eastern Division race to the Mets by 8 games in 1969. However, the Cub's pythagorean percentage was .581, slightly better than the Mets .577 (which, in turn, was well under the Mets .617 real life win-loss percentage). This suggests that statistically the Cubs "should have" won the division over the Mets by about a game. Everything went the Mets' way late in the 1969 season. They overcame the Cubs lead and won the division going away. They then beat the Braves 3-0 in the NL playoffs and the Orioles (statistically the best team in MLB) 4-1 in the World Series. I doubt whether any of this really suggests that Gil Hodges was a better manager than Leo Durocher in 1969, but I do remember that the Mets won a lot of close, come-from-behind games late in that season. Good luck the rest of the way. I've never been a Mets fan, so I hope that you will be able to rewrite history in your 1969 replay.