Thoughts on 1971 Replay

Mission Accomplished! My goal for every replay is to lead the Detroit Tigers to the World Series Championship and I was successful for this one. I started my 1971 replay last February so it's taken the longest time to complete than any other I've ever done, almost 1 year! The main reason it took so long is because of the 2008 season I played from April to October in 2008. The '71 season got put on hold for the most part.
Every year I take the latest season of Strat-O-Matic baseball cards, make all the trades, and play the current season along with the regular 'real life' baseball season. I manually play all the Detroit Tigers games, and a bunch of other interesting matchups, with the same goal I always have......lead the Tigers to victory!
Anyway, back to my '71 replay: This was a very good season to replay!!! While the Pittsburgh Pirates in the NL East and the Oakland A's in the AL West pretty much ran away with their divisions, the AL East (with Detroit and Baltimore) and NL West (with San Francisco and Los Angeles) division races were very tight and exciting to follow.
One big suprise I had was the season Bill Melton of the Chicago White Sox put up: .297BA, 45HR, 119RBI. Another suprise was Bob Watson of the Houston Astros winning a close NL batting title(.344BA). Other players that had a great season: Hank Aaron, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Joe Torre, Earl Williams, Ralph Garr, Lou Brock in the NL and Reggie Jackson, Norm Cash, and Bobby Murcer in the AL. But what I liked most doing this replay were the numbers the pitchers in both leagues put up.
The AL had 7 20 game winners, the NL had 5. A total of 35 pitchers won 15+ games. The AL had 5 pitchers with 300+ innings pitched, the NL had 3. A total of 40 pitchers had 250+ innings pitched! Mickey Lolich and Tom Seaver had 300+ strikeouts. And the number of complete games pitched during the season was phenominal. The '70's was really the last decade when starting pitchers pitched and '71 was a great year to replay in that regard.
I've been trying to decide for awhile what season to replay next and I've decided that next up will be a 1934 asplayed replay. I'll try to repeat the Detroit Tigers regular season success by winning the AL pennant and change their defeat to a win in the '34 World Series. I really don't know how far I'll get into it though, because its also time to get ready for my 2009 season 'play-along'.