I recently bought a baseball simulation game, Out of the Park Baseball 19. It's ridiculous in what you can do, playing as historical teams, running current teams with every possible roster/team move you could think of. Too much to go into, check it out if you're interested.
One of the really cool things you can do is customize a league pretty much however you want, and use any player, from any year, ever. So I got to thinking, what would each of our teams look like if they had the best players they've ever had on them? Then what if we simulated a year in that league? Who would win it all? Who wins Cy Young - prime Lincecum, Halladay, Cliff Lee, Felix?
To make this happen I did a ridiculous amount of research, figuring out the best players on each team by position, according to WAR. Then I took those results, and made the rosters, assigned each team a random manager, and the results can be seen here.
Notes:
- Each player is the version of themselves by best season according to WAR (ESPN, not Fangraphs). So for example, the Crab Cakes have 2009 Tim Lincecum, the Megas have 2011 Miggy Cabrera, etc.
- I only allowed 1 version of each player. So using Lincecum as the example, his best year was 2009, on the Crab Cakes. He is on their roster in this simulation. The 2011 version on the Tommy Johns isn't available, since he was slightly worse in WAR, and to avoid player duplication. For the most part there weren't any big surprises in terms of who was on what team, with a few exceptions here and there.
- I looked up the top 450 single season WAR producers from 2007 to 2017. In the event I couldn't "find" a position on your team, I used made up players. Some teams have none of these, other ones have a good bit. Matt having only been in the league 3 years has a bit of them for example. Made up players are around 0 to 2 WAR in average.
- Each team has a Triple A team with made up players.
- Each team's manager automatically decides on lineups and roster moves.
- Season will be a full 162 games. Both leagues use DH. Standard MLB playoff settings. Injuries are on.
I'll be starting the simulation today, and will update on its results over the next week or so. Good luck to all except Jon.