One of the things I’ve always liked in OOTP is oddball historical simulations – cobbling together different teams from history and pitting them against one another.
For me, historical simulations are a window into baseball history. By using different kinds of criteria to filter the list of the nearly 3,000 individual seasons that have been played from 1871 to 2019, one can find a lot of really interesting history to explore - from the biggest, most famous moments to the obscure - that you wouldn’t necessarily learn about otherwise.
I’ve been doing sims like this for quite a while, and occasionally post some of the results on the OOTP Discord server. As much as I’d like to write up something a bit more detailed, I’m just going to have to pass, because I simply don’t have time, unless some deadly plague spreads around the globe and shuts down civilization and I find myself sitting at home for weeks on end. Right, like that would ever…
…what? You mean there’s a… OK! Well, in that case…
For my first Oddball Historical Sim writeup, I’m going for the Best Thirty Teams Showdown. So, first things first, I need to figure out who the Best Thirty Teams are. It sounds simple enough, but it can be surprisingly involved trying to figure out who to include to make both the most accurate, and most entertaining list.
The first question is, how does one define “best”? For this sim, I’m going off of regular season success. That will naturally lead to a lot of World Series champions, but many notable World Series teams won’t be anywhere close to the list. Teams can excel in the playoffs without lighting the world on fire during the season – missing this list is no knock on them at all. There's just something to be said for the teams that dominated the entire regular season, and there are other sims I have in mind for World Series champions in general! So, to find the best regular season teams, I start by sorting through my master list, pulling the top 30 teams by win percentage, using their Pythagorean win percentage as a tiebreaker if needed.
Here we encounter another issue: the top 16 teams, and 24 of the top 30, are all from 1871-1909, with the best being the 1875 Boston Red Stockings – the franchise that will eventually become the Atlanta Braves. They had a record of 71-8, an .899 winning percentage. That’s an incredible number, of course, and a winning percentage like that has only been matched in modern North American sports by a few NBA teams, like
Michael Jordan’s Bulls or the
2015-16 Golden State Warriors. This checks the box of being one of the Best Thirty Teams, but the problem that makes things difficult is that teams of that era were just built differently. Throughout the season, the Red Stockings used a total of 13 players on their roster. Not 13 pitchers, not 13 players at once… 13 total players throughout the entire season. It’s most evident with their pitching staff:
Yes, a total of five players, four of which were position players, took the mound for the Red Stockings in 1875. These days, you’d be lucky to get through seven innings with five pitchers. Hall-of-Famer
Al Spalding (yes, Spalding as in
Spalding… he is credited with popularizing the use of baseball gloves when he started using them in 1877) was more like a starting quarterback than a member of a pitching rotation – starting 62 of 79 games, and relieving in another 10. That’s the modern-day equivalent of a pitcher starting 127 games and making another 21 relief appearances – this would result in something like 1,172 innings pitched! On top of that, he played over 100 innings between first base and the outfield.
Jack Manning mostly played outfield, and
McVey,
Wright, and
Heifer were all position players. As interesting as it might be to see how that would play against other eras, it’s just hard to take a team with that kind of roster construction and player usage, and put it up against more modern teams over the course of a long season. Exploring this era of baseball could be quite interesting, and I’ve got some ideas on leveling the playing field against other eras. For this particular sim, though, I’m going to keep it a bit more modern.
Roster construction issues like this persist all the way through the deadball era, so I filtered 1920 and earlier out of the list. That presents a different problem – there are only 12 franchises involved, and 17 of the top 30 are from three franchises. Predictably, ten of the top 30 are Yankees teams. Three are the 1929-31 Philadelphia Athletics, and four are St. Louis Cardinals, including the 1942-44 teams. That’s all well and good, but I find that these kinds of projects are a lot more fun if there are more franchises and a wider range of years involved. In order to achieve that, we somehow need to cull some of the teams out of the list.
To keep the list open while still recognizing great teams, if a team has entries within five years of one another, rather than having each team in the sim, I’m going to pick one, usually either the winningest team, or the championship winner. For example, the 1969-1971 Orioles mathematically would have three entries, but I’ll take the champion 1970 Orioles as the representative of that three-year run. This will allow a lot more teams into the fold.
Ultimately, compiling a list like this isn’t easy, as you can “what about” yourself into cardiac arrest trying to decide which teams to add or drop. I mostly let the data do the talking and stick with as many of the highest win percentage teams as possible, but I had to make a few judgment calls to keep the list interesting. I’ll spare the rest of the gory details of how exactly I arrived here, and show you my final list:
Most of the best “dynasties” are represented in one way or another here, but there’s just no way to compile a list like this without leaving some very deserving teams out. However, I think it strikes a good balance between being the best teams, and getting as much representation of different eras and franchises as possible.
One last little thing regarding the setup – I’m using 1973 as a neutral era. Since there’s a 92-year spread here, I thought it was fair to pick the midpoint between 1927 and 2019. In other games I might use the average number, but that landed at 1982 and I felt that was a little too far towards the end of the spectrum. I also opted for the DH in this sim, despite the fact that there were more non-DH teams than DH teams. After looking through each roster, I figured it helped more than hurt overall.
So, with that... it's time to go about setting up the league! I'm setting up these 30 teams into the modern MLB structure - two conferences with three divisions each. To divide the teams up, I established a rule that a team cannot be in the same division with a past or future incarnation of themselves. The guy running the time machine is working from home due to COVID-19, but I was FaceTiming with him and he mumbled about destroying the very fabric of time and space, so I'll just separate them. Here's the divisional alignments I came up with:
I went NHL/NBA-style and expanded the playoffs significantly, as well. The division winners and the top 5 runners-up in each conference will make the playoffs, making for 16 total playoff teams. They'll face each other in 7-game series all the way through to the World Series. I figure this will make for some fun to cap off the season. I mixed it up a little bit - the conference quarterfinal and semifinal rounds will have the NHL/NBA HH-AA-H-A-H format. For the Conference Championship and World Series, it will revert to the classic HH-AAA-HH format.
Up Next: We'll start meeting the teams in the sim in a bit more detail, and we'll get the season going! I'm not entirely sure how I'll format the posts going forward, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.