Interesting premise: 162-0

OK, I read this today, and I have a hard time believing that any baseball team, even the very best ever assembled, could possibly go a full 162 game season and never lose once. But this is the kind of esoteric "what-if" simulation stuff that Strat-O-Matic is supposed to be able to answer. We don't have the 1997 season in the online game referenced in this article, but we do have the 1996 and 1999 seasons if somebody had the desire to simulate a dream team vs a bunch of "normal" teams, it might be possible to see how many games they could win in a simulated season. And of course we have the greatest individual seasons ever in the ATG set, but assembling a league composed of actual rosters for the all-time super team to compete against would be problematic. I think it would be possible to do something like this with the CD-ROM game season sets, right?

In the end, I think the best possible roster would never come close to 150 wins let alone 162 in this sim. It would be undone by injuries, boneheaded managerial moves by the computer manager, black box stuff like home field advantage and normalization, ballpark homers, and the tendency in this game for pitchers sent in to close out the win giving up 4 or 5 runs in the ninth or extra innings.

The author seems to assume WAR is the be-all and end-all for picking the best All-Star team, but I'm sure there would be other metrics such as OPS+ that one of us could use instead. Anyway, it's interesting to read and think about in the context of historical simulations like this. Here's the link to it at the Five Thirty Eight website:

Could an All-Star team go 162-0?

A form of this was done some time ago, I think the team went 159-3. May be old timers remember

It's not that tedious to enter a couple of dozen cards into your game. You could add Ruth, Mantle, Bonds, Williams, Brett, Waagner, Hornsby. Foxx, Gibson, Maddux, Alexander, Walsh, Leonard, etc. in a couple of evenings and see. About 6 years ago, I put one of my good $100 million teams into the NL as the Pirates, and they won 130 games.

@Tony Best

I'm pretty sure I know what you are referencing. I remember reading this from a very old thread a while back but there was a league where the managers decided to go for the worst record. So basically every team had .50's or something close to it. One manager felt this was a waste of a credit and didn't want to this, so he actually built a good team. They did go 159-3 and I believe Roger Clemens went 41-0.

I think Bobby Moretti tried this and went either 162-0 or 161-1.

OK, this appealed to me. So I created cards for:

Josh Gibson
Joe Mauer
Jimmy Foxx
Lou Gehrig
Rogers Hornsby
Martin Dihigo
Honus Wagner
Pop Lloyd
George Brett
Mike Schmidt
Barry Bonds
Ted Williams
Ralph Kiner
Mickey Mantle
Willie Mays
Babe Ruth
Greg Maddux
Pete Alexander
Walter Johnson
Dutch B. Leonard
Christy Mathewson
Pedro Martinez
Dale Murray
Bruce Sutter
Eric Gagne
Dennis Eckersley
Billy Wagner
Norm Charlton

I keyed all the cards to the 2015 season, replaced Cincinnati's entire roster with these 28 guys, and made all the SP's 5-day guys. I used the 5-day Pedro and otherwise the highest $ card for everybody. I had HAL generate a computer manager for the team.

The team had a .354 average (with pitchers hitting!), .443 OBP, and .718 SLG, and scored 1661 runs. The pitching staff had 95 CG's, of which 41 were shutouts, and it had 9 combined shutouts. Overall, it allowed 290 runs, for a team ERA of 1.63. It scored fewer than 4 runs only 7 times all season, and won all 7 of those games. It scored in double digits 82 times. But Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers beat them 9-4 in the 127th game of the season, so they finished 161-1.

Individual highlights:

Bonds .358-81-177
Ruth .391-61-180
Hornsby .385-52-154
Wagner .395-14-52 in 68 G
Gehrig .383-40-103 in 84 G
Mantle .375-57-186
Foxx .373-66-188
Gibson .373-56-160

Alexander 34-0, 1.14
Mathewson 30-0 1.52
Johnson 32-0 1.66
Leonard 25-1, 1.68
Martinez 23-0, 2.36
Eckersley 2-0, 0.19, 27 Sv
Murray 3-0, 2.10 in 30 innings (didn't need a long man very often)

Dutch was clearly the slacker of the staff.

How many home runs did this team hit overall? I count 427 just with the highlights you showed.

Great sim rburgh!!!!

Team hit 557 HR in all, including 3 each by Johnson and Alexander. Tomorrow I will move them to the AL where they can use the DH and let Teddy Ballgame play some. I will also make sure Wagner plays SS full time and Brett gets more AB's at 3B; he only played about 70 games.

I ran the sim a half dozen times this morning, and the super team won from 155-159 games every time. So my initial 161-1 looks like it may be the best possible result. I suppose if I ran it hundreds of times, there would be a 162-0 in there somewhere, but I'm assuming that this is a pretty typical range of results. Most seasons see the super team average over 10 runs/game, and toss more than 50 shutouts and another 50 or so 1-run games. But every now and then Scherzer, or Arrieta, or Kershaw just beats them. And sometimes they lose in extra innings (once even to Atlanta!).