Week 3 Summary (04/26/1920 - 05/02/1920)

Week Three of the 1920 BBW Replay is in the books, and we continue to be off to a slow start. Boston (NL) has only played nine games, although they did have a twenty-six-inning tie game on Saturday. Boston (AL), St. Louis (NL), and Chicago (NL) have all played fourteen games so far, the net result being that the standings in both leagues are still a jumbled mess.

In the AL, New York finished the week with a four-game winning streak and sits atop the AL standings with a slight two-game lead over both Chicago and Washington. The Yankees have ten wins, seven of them coming via the shutout. The White Sox stumbled out of the gate but have righted their ship recently and are looking to move past the Yankees, while the Senators have both strong hitting and pitching and would love to be in that fight as well. Cleveland is hitting .300 as a team and they expect their early season pitching struggles to even out, and directly behind them sit both St. Louis and Detroit, two teams that feature multiple great hitters that can do a lot of damage, but in both cases their pitching is suspect. Seventh-place Boston still has zero homeruns hit and may already be experiencing the remorse of having traded away Babe Ruth. Philadelphia is in last place and likely not going anywhere as Connie Mack is in the middle of another rebuilding phase, and while ultimately successful, it doesn’t bring much hope for this season.

 

In the NL, no team has really stepped forward to take control of the standings. Cincinnati has spent the most days in first place, but the week ended with a surprising Boston team sitting atop the pile. Actually, the real surprise in the NL so far is the good starts for both Boston and Philadelphia, both coming at the expense of Brooklyn (eighth place) and New York (sixth place). These four teams have one more week of intra-regional play before they start play versus the teams from the Midwest, so we'll see where this goes next.

 

Chicago (NL) Manager
Fred Mitchell

With so few games played, there isn't much to mention with regard to league leaders. Chicago (AL) third baseman Buck Weaver (.444) has gotten a hit in each of the White Sox eleven games plus Weaver, not necessarily known for the homerun ball, leads all of baseball with three longballs. St. Louis first baseman George Sisler (.548) leads the AL in batting average, while Pittsburgh second baseman George Cutshaw (.457) leads the NL.

There were two Grand Slams this past week (Tris Speaker and George Kelly), but the real highlight of this past week was the famous twenty-six inning 1-1 tie game with Brooklyn's Leon Cadore and Boston's Joe Oeschger both pitching complete games (box score). The most amazing thing about this is not the complete games themselves, but that the whole thing was accomplished in three hours and fifty minutes before it was called on account of darkness … 186 total batters in 230 total minutes … no need for a time clock here.

 

https://pixels.com/featured/wrigley-field-1918-gary-grigsby.html

Note: Artist Error: Cubs Park was renamed Wrigley Field at the start of 1927 season