Kanye West, .267 batting avg. and 15 homers as left fielder for the Boston Secrets
When you have two starting pitchers, like Plato (25-8) and Pushkin (19-5), each with 5 shutouts, it would be shocking if you didn’t run away with the title. This is what Ben Franklin’s Boston Secrets did, winning the Society Division (some call it the Secret Society Division) by 14 games over the second place Connecticut Animals, owned by P.T. Barnum.
The poor Animals. Amy Lowell finished with a 22-5 record, and 4 shutouts, and Ovid added 19 wins and 5 shut outs—surely this team should have at least made the playoffs! The Animals third-best pitcher, Jules Verne, won 15, and Poe, third-best pitcher for the Secrets, won 14. But the Animals had a low team batting average, didn’t have a very good bullpen (AA Milne became their go-to guy when he joined the club in July,) not a lot of team speed, had lapses on defense, and Animals starter Herman Melville lost 21 games. The Secrets ran well, fielded well, hit a little better, and their “Founding Father” bullpen was solid.
The Secrets also had great team chemistry. Kanye West: “I love my teammates…Plato is the most amazing guy. Poe is hard to talk to. I love Eddie, though. He’s real quiet, but you can tell he’s thinking all the time. Paul Simon made me feel at home, in his quiet way. Pushkin. Pushkin doesn’t sit still. He’s like me. He shares what he knows about poetry. Everyone talks poetry after the game. I don’t know if I belong on this team. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I hit home runs. Pushkin told me, ‘You only have to know it right now—even as you forget it, so don’t worry about what you know. Ever.’ I said, man, I want to write that down, after he said that. Maybe it doesn’t make sense. It made sense to me. I borrowed a piece of paper from Moliere. Bobby [Robert Frost] gave me a pen. Pushkin laughed. ‘You writing this down?’ Emily [Dickinson] gave me a pencil. Bobby’s pen didn’t work. We all made fun of Bobby because his pen didn’t work. I pretended to be in agony, because the damn pen didn’t work. (laughing) Emily was so glad she had a pencil for me. This team is the best.”
The Secrets are the first seed, so they will play the wild card team, the Florence Banners, in round one of the playoffs.
Secrets 95 59 Winner Owner Ben Franklin, Manager George Washington, Team Leaders: Frost 31 homers, Cole Porter .297, Hawthorne 35 SB, Plato 25-8, Plato 2.21 ERA
Animals 81 73 Owner, PT Barnum, Manager Walt Disney, Edward Lear 25, Seamus Heaney .322, Jack Spicer 16 SB, Amy Lowell 22-5, Amy Lowell 2.79
War 78 76 Owner JP Morgan, Manager Niccolo Machiavelli, Philip Sidney 24, Rupert Brooke .352, Rupert Brooke 37 SB, Remarque 18-12, Walter Scott 3.01
Strangers 67 87 Owner David Lynch, Manager Bram Stoker, Rimbaud 33, Mary Shelley .318, Mary Shelley 24 SB, Pope 15-12, Nietzsche 3.89
Actors 66 88 Owner Harvey Weinstein, Manager Johnny Depp, Hafiz 28, Hafiz .297, Skelton 25 SB, Chaucer 15-11, Chaucer 3.36