A Manager's Nightmare

Dissension in the ranks of the 1949 Boston Braves

A Manager’s Nightmare

Those of you well versed in baseball history probably know this story already. However, it’s worth repeating, and is probably something I should have pointed out at the beginning of the season.

The defending National League champion Boston Braves entered 1949 with a lot of internal discord and strife.

You can see it in the Boston newspapers, going back to Spring Training.

No Respect

It seems that the problem was a matter of respect — or, at least that’s how it was initially.

This front page article from the April 8, 1949 issue of The Boston Globe is telling:

From The Boston Daily Globe, April 8, 1949, page 1. Apologies for the unrelated bit on an early attempt to reign in “impure” comic books.

From The Boston Daily Globe, April 8, 1949, page 50.

Now, if you’re good at reading between the lines, you’ll realize pretty quickly that the real problem here was financial. Many of the star players on the Braves were upset about not receiving the sort of contracts they thought they were entitled to in 1949.

That’s made even more clear by these additional comments:

From The Boston Daily Globe, April 8, 1949, page 50

For more information, we can take a look at Southworth’s SABR biography, an excellent article that incorporates many sources that I don’t have access to:

Recreating Team Cohesion

Now, this is one of those pesky things that no baseball simulator is good at recreating. It’s very difficult to accurately recreate these types of cohesion issues. OOTP, the game probably best suited to do this sort of thing, takes a simplistic, almost comical approach.

Some of you might know that I’m a dedicated Football Manager player (I write a Football Manager blog here, in fact). One of the nice things about Football Manager is that you will have players complain to you from time to time about not starting enough games, or about wanting an improved contract. There are even meters to show you squad cohesion — and, yes, it does impact in-game performance (perhaps a bit too much, actually).

Examples of Football Manager cohesion and morale ratings

It might not be the best idea for a baseball simulator, and I know that these invisible things are technically “built into the stats.” However, for the sake of accuracy, it would be interesting to recreate these kinds of major issues that did take place and were problems.

Besides, there’s always the chance that this sort of controversy was created entirely by the media — another fun (yet frustrating) variable to throw into a replay.