What If Major League Baseball Was Entirely Alphabetical? (Part 3, The Home Stretch)
When last we left our alphabetized heroes, it was the All-Star break. The teams, each made of Major and Minor leaguers reshuffled into new teams based on the first letter of their first names, had been locked in the battle of an MLB season for about 4 months. We’d learned a lot in our OOTP sim, including that Scooter Gennett is not terrible.
We also learned that a team made up of only players whose first names start with the letter O is terrible, but a team made up of guys named Trevor, Tom, Tim, Taylor and the like was pretty good. In fact, the T’s finished the first half with the best record in baseball, as chronicled in the very detailed rundown of the first half that made up part 2 of our 3 part alphabet teams series. (This is part ),
In Part 1, we introduced the teams, all 23 of them, in detail. Part 2 was the first half of our sim, and now Part 3 will be the conclusion of the regular season and the playoffs. Please reference the extremely detailed standings from the end of part 2 for all the info you could ever want on run differential, home and road records, extra innings performance, and basically anything else you could want to know from the first half.
Here are some storylines to keep an eye on as we finish out the season:
- Teams A, B, and C are the class of the AL. Will they all make the playoffs? That’s kind of cool, right?
- Will team XQU win even 20 games? They went 10-65 in the first half so the 20-win season for a team (.123 winning percentage) is certainly not a foregone conclusion. For the record, I don’t think the season is 162 games since I remade the schedule after consolidating the league, but I’m not sure.
- Can Team V hold off XQU? We don’t care about draft pick order in this league, but this is definitely a battle for last between the two least talented teams in baseball history.
- Can Team T keep this up? The remade NL East is silly – all 4 teams have winning percentages of .600 or greater and run differentials of 155 of more. That said, I think T is punching above their weight and will falter down the stretch.
Let’s see how the simulation shook out.
The Trade Deadline
There’s no trading in this league so the Trade Deadline is completely meaningless, but it’s a good point in the second half to take stock.
So XQU has had a bit of a rough go of it since the break. They’ve gone from 10-65 to 13-99, which is…. not good. T has also defied my expectations and is completely running away with things. They’re first in runs scored, first in runs allowed, first in stolen bases and no worse than 4th in any other category. They’re a juggernaut!
This is just silly. Who would have thought that a team with Tommy Joseph batting cleanup would be so good? Who would have thought that Tommy Joseph would be hitting .310 or that Travis d’Arnaud would be hitting .328? This is a good team, no doubt, but it feels a lot like a bunch of ok-to-good players having career years simultaneously. I’m betting that there’s some great clubhouse chemistry on this squad.
One other thing we notice is that, unsurprisingly I guess, there are a lot of haves and have-nots in our league. Teams A, B, C, and D are pretty good, E is garbage (despite my early season optimism). J is very good, but no one else in the AL Central is even as good as 10 games under .500. M, K, L, N are our closet things to mediocre teams, but that could be because they are beating up on each other all the time.
The entire NL East and Y are good – and everyone else in the NL is baaaaaad. I’m betting a lot of the wins for these NL teams are coming because they routinely get turns with V and XQU. (Fun fact, on July 31, Yu Darvish no hit V.)
As we head down the stretch, the only real race in baseball is the AL East. Let’s see what happens…
End of the Regular Season
I‘m genuinely surprised that C didn’t win their division, though they won 102 games. Their rotation was very good, as expected, but it wasn’t great. They finished with the 5th best starter ERA in the AL. They hit 225 homers, which is a lot, but stats are pretty skewed in this version of the MLB, so that’s good for only 4th in the AL. Cody Bellinger led the team with 43, Charlie Blackmon had 39 and Carlos Gonzalez had 31.
Team A won the East behind a league-best offense and 39 homers each from Aaron Judge and Anthony Rizzo. Team J led the AL in both homers and starters ERA. Notables are J.D. Martinez‘s 44 homers and Javier Baez‘ 34.
Though league distinctions are basically meaningless in this reality, Jose Altuve won the AL batting title; Freddie Freeman, JD Martinez, and Eric Thames all hit 44 bombs; and Mike Trout paced the league with 8.1 WAR.
There were, astonishingly, three 100 win teams in the NL East and all 4 teams finished with at least 97 wins. The upstart T’s won 123 games and led the league in just about every category that matters – except home runs, where they were 2nd. Todd Frazier finished with 38 homers, Trea Turner hit .325 and Tanner Roark, Trevor Bauer, and Taijuan Walker all posted sub 3.00 ERAs.
Obviously, the NL was skewed by the presence of Teams V and XQU, who combined to go 58- 264. If there’s a way to get rid of leagues all together to ensure a more balanced schedule, that would probably be a good change for the next incarnation of this experiment. For what it’s worth, Team XQU finished with the worst winning percentage in MLB history, worse than the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys, who finished a real baseball season having won just 23 games.
Not all was doom and gloom with baseball’s worst teams though. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., at just 19, hit .325 with 23 homers, and Xander Boegarts hit .353. On the other hand, there’s this:
Try to image what that must have been like to live through. Imagine being Ulises Perez, dutifully taking the mound in the August heat with an 0-25 record and an an ERA above 14.00. I tip my virtual cap to all the players on this team.
Scooter Gennett won the batting title and Paul Goldschmidt led baseball with 50 homers and 9.7 WAR. Trea Turner had 7.5 WAR and I would say is a good candidate for MVP leading baseball’s best team.
Playoffs
A quick run through Round 1:
- The Yankee logo represents Team C, and they get taken down by the Orioles’ A in 6 games. I’m still surprised and disappointed by C, whose super-rotation continually falls short. In fact, Clayton Kershaw took 2 of the 4 losses in their Round 1 defeat.
- The A’s logo is Team M, who took Team J all the way to 7 games.
- The Braves logo is team P, who took the juggernaut T’s to 7 games.
- The Mets logo is Team R, who fell to the power of Yu Darvish‘s playoff push in Game 6.
The Championship Series:
- In the ALCS, every single game was close, but behind Addison Russell‘s .524 average in the series, A squeaked past J. Both of my preseason favorites are now gone.
- The NLCS went 7 games after Y won both Games 5 and 6 to force Game 7, but then T hit Yoan Lopez with a home run barrage that was too much.
In the World Series, pitching was the difference and T’s offensive firepower was let down by their starters. Aaron Judge was the World Series MVP, and we learned, once and for all, that a team made up only of players whose first names start with the letter A is the best alphabetically created team in baseball.
The moral of the story, I think, is that OOTP baseball is awesome. Yes, this sim took way too long to put together but look at what I was able to do. I know of no other platform that lets you do something this crazy at this level of detail. I spoke on the Ducksnort podcast this week about some of my other OOTP experiments over the years and I encourage you to give it a listen. You can also rad about that time Sean auditioned to be the GM of the Braves using OOTP, that time we tried to fix the 2016 Red Sox, and that time we restarted baseball in 1871 just to see what happened.
-Max Frankel
