Kings outfielder Jay Bruce
There have been three MLB regular season games played so far, but most teams will get things started Thursday and Friday. Taking a look at the new season, I decided to try something new this year. I had my hands on a relatively fresh copy of 2012 MLB rosters for the baseball simulation game I’ve been playing for years, Out of the Park Baseball. So I decided to put them to good use. I quickly created a DTBL league within OOTP, assigned players to their DTBL teams, then simulated a full 162 game schedule.
Before I get into this too much, I should say up front that this simulation is almost worthless. Just because a team did poorly in this OOTP sim means absolutely nothing about their chances in the upcoming season. The list of reasons why is too long to go through, but here are a few. Since the game is simulating regulation baseball games, only nine batters can be in a team’s lineup at a given time, as opposed to our league which has 14 active batting slots. So depth is far more important in the DTBL. Next, this sim has DTBL players facing nothing but other DTBL players. So there are no weak pitchers for hitters to pad their stats against. Same for pitchers. Finally, IT IS A COMPUTER SIMULATION! As much as I love OOTP and think it is the best baseball sim out there, it can’t possibly perfectly replicate player performance, particularly future performance.
But putting that aside, I just thought this would be a fun thing to do before the season started. I let the AI control all lineup/pitching staff decisions, but turned off all transactions and injuries. So each team consists of 25 players, 14 batters and 11 pitchers. For the most part, I used the Opening Day DTBL rosters, plus a couple of bench pitchers for each team. This meant some injured guys who are going to miss a decent portion of the season didn’t make the cut. Once I had all the rosters set, I immediately simulated the entire season, which took about 5 minutes. Here are the results:
OOTP 2012 DTBL Simulation Standings
It was a close race most of the season, but the Kings prevailed in the end with a 97-65 record, beating the Jackalope by five games. Honestly, I was hoping my team wouldn’t win this thing because it makes the whole thing look like it was rigged, but I assure you that wasn’t the case. I didn’t create the players, nor did I do any of the managing of my team. The Kings won mostly thanks to the league’s best offense, led by Carlos Gonzalez, Jay Bruce and Ryan Zimmerman. Very few Kings had poor seasons in this sim.
A few other things stuck out. First, the top four teams were the same four who finished at the top of the 2011 DTBL standings, though not in the same order. The Gators had a rough go of it, losing 105 games and finishing in last place by 17 games. They finished last in the league in runs scored and runs allowed, not a good combination.
As for the players, Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder backed up their enormous offseason contracts by finishing first and second in the league in home runs. Pujols was also the league MVP. Cliff Lee won the Cy Young Award thanks to his league leading 17 wins. Not that there were many eligible players to begin with, but Yonder Alonso was named the Rookie of the Year.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, feel free to click through all the stats and info you find from those links above. I’m sure you’ll find some ridiculous AI roster management decisions for your team as well as some inexplicably poor performances from certain players.
Now that I got that out of my system, how about some real baseball? Enjoy the two remaining Opening Days!
A 5 game losing streak to end the season? Uh huh…pretty cool though Kevin, I bet the Italian suit maker on my team, aka Giancarlo, averaged around 460 feet per home run. Is there a HR distance feature?
At least I ended with a 1 game winning streak. That and Sabathia won the gold glove.
Bring on the season!
Haha. I hadn’t noticed Sabathia won a Gold Glove. And who said this wasn’t realistic???