1919 AL - Games of Wednesday, 23 April

Nationals 8, Athletics 2: Walter Johnson struck out seven in a complete-game effort, and was backed by timely hits from Howie Shanks and Hal Janvrin in an easy 8-2 Washington victory. Philadelphia wasted a 4-for-4 performance from Whitey Witt. [box]

In the aftermath of War

Major-league baseball was not immune from the global challenges posed by World War I and, as the 1918 season came to a rushed close, it wasn't completely obvious that there would be a 1919 season in the big leagues. A number of minor-league circuits had shut down during the War, but major-league owners had tried their best to portray baseball as a contributing factor to national morale. John B. Foster, the editor of the Spalding Guide, wrote in the Introduction to the 1919 edition of the Guide that there had been a prevailing opinion that "it would be better to have the tonic of good clean sport in front of the public, than to have citizens at home become morbid and misanthropic on the subjects which were demanding international attention".

A Long Pause . . .

In 1986, I began a replay of the 1919 American League season using the APBA Master Game. I got about a month in before I graduated college, and then the start of a career, and a marriage, and life in general conspired to push it to the (far) back burner. And there it sat - even though I played other games, and completed other replay projects, I didn't touch this one again. Part of this was probably that I wasn't playing APBA any longer and that season was not available for the other sims I was playing at the time - a situation which has now changed for the better - but part of it was also that this became sort of a white whale / holy grail project. At some point, I had gotten it into my head that this was going to be something that I saved for retirement, when I had to time to completely immerse myself into it, and get through the 560 games (or 1120 if I also did the NL) in a reasonable time frame.