Negro League Overview - Catchers

I’ve completed the latest batch of resims but haven’t quite figure out the best way to incorporate them into the fold of ATB V.  There comes a point where too much information is a bad thing, and we may reached that 3 years ago.  Adding another 500 resims sounded good to the little voice in my head, but much more difficult to make use of in practice.  How do I make them readable, do I update the player cards, or analyze each teams defense so all pitchers aren’t assumed to have played in a defensive neutral environment, etc.  Before posting hard data these issues need to be worked through and then put in to practice.  It will be weeks if not more before a full run down of the 500-resims are widely available.

However, I did want to tackle our new Negro League players.  By far the biggest addition to ATB in years, hundreds of negro league players are now available to be drafted.  Months ago I gave a brief rundown, but in the next few days (weeks?) I want to provide more data about this new player set.  One reminder, the negro league set is based upon a summation of two consecutive seasons of each player.  The Negro Major and Independent Leagues, along with the Cuban Leagues, didn’t play often enough to compile more than a few hundred at bats per season.  The solution was to simply add up two consecutive seasons and use that as the real life stats for DMB purposes.

I added the most likely negro leaguers to our ATB Source Database and included them in the 500-resims.  I am sure I missed some; this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of who to draft.

Here are the results.  I’ll post articles on each position.

Click to Enlarge

One of the best and well known Negro Leaguer's of all time was Biz Mackey.  The strong armed backstop played 19 seasons, twice batting over .400, and came within 10 points of doing it a third time. At the time he played, Mackey was regarded by some as better all around player than Josh Gibson.  If not for his Ex arm however, Mackey would likely be a backup catcher in ATB. In the resims, the 25 year old batted .287 / .318 / .359 with 22 doubles and 4 home runs.  There are no great comps from our league, but he's akin to Joe Mauer (with a bit more pop and a bit less walks).  I have Mackey preliminarily rated as the 22nd best catcher overall, but that's likely too harsh.  Someone will draft him before 20 due to his great arm.

I chose the 1923-1924 combination for Mackey (real life .369 / .393 / .388) but he was great in 24/25 and 25/26 as well.  His raw stats are more prolific in the later years - .931 OPS in 25/26 - but the league as whole hit better too.  I believe that relative to his league he was at his best in 1923-1924 but I wouldn’t argue with anyone taking a chance on an alternate season.

The only other catcher selected was Pythias Russ and I suspect this will be the one and only mention on this blog.  The 23-year old looked decent on paper but his stats hardly translated.  He batted .268 / .289 / .338 in a platoon no less.  Similar to Mackey, he had better raw stats as a 24 year old and I wouldn't hold it against an owner to try out his .351 / .383 / .486 season.