Mark McGwire, Albert Belle, and Team vs. MLB Hall of Famers

The SimLeague Baseball career formula accounts for all of these pieces, including longevity and how the player's ratio stats compare both historically and within era, giving every element to this argument (except "did he bet on baseball?") its appropriate weight.

To choose the HVG team, we built rosters from the top 13 position player seasons with the highest cost and the 12 pitchers with the highest cost per inning pitched from throughout history.

Baseball has done an excellent job of identifying starting pitchers for the Hall of Fame. For some positions, like catcher and relief pitcher, we only had to go down a couple of spots in our positional rankings.

The starting pitchers we chose took much longer to find and have a much weaker debate for the Hall than others. Another observation in choosing players is that many of those on the Hall of the Very Good team played immediately preceding a time of expansion. This is typically the time when the talent across the entire league is the greatest, making it more difficult to stand out and post gaudy numbers.

With the Hall of Famers, we literally looked at an alphabetical list of players by position and drew random numbers to select the team. In both cases, we let the simulator optimize batting lineups and pitching staffs. Click on a player's name to view his career stats, including advanced stats like those referenced above and also including defensive evaluations.

Random HOFers

You're currently logged into Facebook

Do you want to share your Bleacher Report activity on Facebook?