1900 Western League

After the 1899 failure, league president Thomas Hickey made a brilliant move and brought the western league back to its western roots. Hickey left Illinois and Ohio and settled in western Iowa: Des Moines and Sioux City; the eastern Nebraska town of Omaha; and back to St. Joseph, Missouri. Teams then had to travel the expanse of Nebraska and Kansas to visit two Colorado mining towns: Denver and Pueblo. One suspects that Hickey intended there to be four Colorado teams for a good balance (Lincoln and Topeka?).

In fact, Hickey's failure to create a "balanced eight" league probably forced him in 1901 to "think out of the box" and expand into rich territories of other failed late 1890's leagues. In 1902 the American Association was born.

This pennant race looks like a hover win for Denver, although vapors could describe the actions of several teams. Omaha's 24-11 start and subsequent nose-dive and Pueblo's 9-26 slide after a good start. It should be noted that vapors pennant races predominate when baseball changes.

This means, for example, that vapors exist often alongside the emergence of new strategies such as the bunt in 1884 or the homerun in 1920. Teams that resist adopting a "proven" new strategy often suffer sudden down-turns. The greatest cause of vapors comes in the 1880's as pitching rotations evolve from one-man staffs to four man staffs. Two man staffs seem to perish in 1888 yet each team has to suffer a long losing streak before learning its lesson. Hall-of-Fame caliber managers generally win pennant races which exhibit vapors.

Looking at the Western League graph for 1900, the chutes-and-ladders effect shown by the graph intimates that perhaps some evolving strategy was either being experimented with, or misunderstood by all the teams. I haven't a clue as to what that might be.