The season has begun! Ran through the first week of games, April 1 through April 7. I’ve considered going day by day with the interesting things from each game, but I think that would take far, far too long to get through multiple seasons. So I’m going to take it a week at a time and call out the notable things in each session. So to start, here are the standings after the first week.
So, they’re all marked with a “z” because I made the playoff setting to just run a round-robin tourney with all the teams at year end. Essentially, it’ll be similar to what my understanding is of what a lot of soccer leagues do. We’ll have a regular season winner and a tourney winner. The program has some routine “news” stories that it writes for significant events (shutouts, someone hitting the cycle, etc.) and one of them is for a team clinching a playoff spot. So as soon as the first day ended, there was a generic news item for each team talking about how they had finally clinched a playoff berth. This amused me.
So, still pretty close, of course, after seven games. I’m not sure how it decides to rank the teams when they have a tied record. It’s not using run differential, or alphabetizing them; I’ll have to figure that out. But a quick rundown of each team’s week starting with the first-place Lions and running down to the last-place Kruisen.
The Lions started by splitting two on the road at Chelsea to start the season, winning the opener. They went on the road to Amsterdam and swept three from the Kruisen. They came home and won their home opener against l’Aigles (Hans Schumann came in to pinch hit and walked them off with a double), but dropped the second game of the two game series.
In the coming week, they’ll host Lyon for a three-game set and then travel to play CB Paris for another three. And this is a snapshot of the team stats after the first week.
Chelsea split their opening pair at home against Manchester, losing the opener. They took two of three from les Hussards on the road and then split a pair with Brussels in Chelsea. They’ll host Le Coq Rouge for a three-game set before traveling to Amsterdam for another three.
CB Paris lost their first two at home against Nice, then traveled to Brussels and took two before dropping the third in 10 innings. Coming home they swept two from l’Apinistes. In the next week they travel to Chelsea for three against the Roses and then host Manchester BC for another three.
The other Paris team, les Hussards, lost the first and won the second of two at Brussels with CF Brendan Bonnet throwing out two runners at home. They came home and lost two of three to Chelsea before going on the road to Amsterdam and taking both from the Kruisen. They’ll continue the road trip with three games in Nice, then home to host Lyon for three.
L’Alpinistes of Lyon was swept by the Kruisen in the two game home series to start the season. They swept l’Aigles on the road for their three wins and then got swept by CB Paris in Paris. Their road trip continues with three games in Manchester and then three games in Paris versus les Hussards.
Brussels split their opening two home games with Paris, then hosted CB Paris for three winning only 1 (in extras). L’Archange traveled to Chelsea and split the pair there. They’ll host Amsterdam for a three-game series next and then travel to Nice to face l’Aigles in another three games.
L’Aigles d’Or started with a two game road sweep of CB Paris before dropping 4 in a row. They were swept by Lyon at home (despite CF Erico Palhinha’s two triples in game 1) before splitting a two game set at Manchester. Ludivico Rucelli threw the league’s first CG shutout in their win. Next is a 6 game homestand against les Hussards and then l’Archange with three games each.
In last place is Amsterdam. The Kruisen won both games in the opening road series against l’Alpinistes, but are now sporting an active 5 game losing streak since being swept by Manchester in three games and Paris for another two at home. They’ll attempt to change their losing ways when the travel to Brussels for three games and then come home to host the Roses for another three.
I don’t know if I’ll be as detailed going forward, but we’ll see how it goes. Personally, I think I’m fondest of the Chelsea Roses, but I promise I won’t put a thumb on the scale for them.
Neh 