Thanks for those suggestions, DTF. I confess that I haven't done nearly as much with the "counterfactual" history behind Pat's world as I could have. Maybe that's because I'm a high school history teacher, and sometimes constructing a complete historical reality for Pat's world feels a little too much like work.
I did write a post where Hitler was arrested, and in one of Pat's letters I mentioned that the militaristic leaders in Japan had lost their influence. I hadn't really referred too much to the economic situation in the United States, either. Pat's baseball universe has largely existed in a happy little vacuum, I suppose.