MLB Tournament of Champions Preview

I just can't help myself.

The past four years, I've run some form of Tournament of Champions here on Confessions of a Sportscaster. Three of these four have been of the NBA variety. I need to take a break from doing the NBA though, just because trying to pull one off with 75 teams is just too much, and I need a new one. Fortunately, I have a reason to do a baseball one.

With the Cubs finally getting their long awaited championship this past fall, now seems as good a time as any to see how they stack up historically compared to the champions of the past. But I'm changing this tournament up compared with how I've run tournaments in the past.

There have been over 100 World Series played in history. That's a lot of baseball games to try and simulate through. Of course, I may have just made things harder on myself with my possible solution. In an effort to make sure every franchise is represented, I have gone back in time to try to find among the best representatives from each of the 30 Major League teams to represent their franchise. There are two stipulations: one is that they must be at least somewhat modern (I allowed 1964 to be my arbitrary cutoff point as my dad's birth year, but also because by then integration has happened, we allow for some aspect of globalization, and this way I could still get Sandy Koufax into the Tournament of Champions). The sad part is that this means no Murderers' Row. The second stipulation is that every representative must have attained a championship of some sort, and the representative must represent the highest championship its franchise has attained. This means any teams with a World Series win since 1964 must have a World Series champ take its place in this tournament. Anyone without must have a pennant winner come forward, and franchises without a pennant in that span (read: the Washington Nationals and Seattle Mariners) must have a team that at least made the playoffs (I almost gave the spot to the '94 Expos. Maybe next time).

That was it for qualifications. I did allow for a few instances of teams from the same year out of necessity with this, and having multiple teams from the same year isn't a big deal. To help narrow down my selections, I used FiveThiryEight's Complete History of MLB, which shows the historical ELO of every team. I sought to grab the highest point possible for every team, with the above requirements taken into account. It helped when I was narrowing down franchises with multiple titles. So, after deliberation, here are the 30 teams that will take part in this tournament.

1. 1965 Los Angeles Dodgers
2. 1970 Baltimore Orioles
3. 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates
4. 1975 Cincinnati Reds
5. 1982 Milwaukee Brewers
6. 1984 Detroit Tigers
7. 1986 New York Mets
8. 1989 Oakland Athletics
9. 1991 Minnesota Twins
10. 1993 Toronto Blue Jays
11. 1995 Atlanta Braves
12. 1995 Cleveland Indians
13. 1998 New York Yankees
14. 1998 San Diego Padres
15. 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks
16. 2001 Seattle Mariners
17. 2002 Anaheim Angels
18. 2003 Florida Marlins
19. 2004 Boston Red Sox
20. 2005 Chicago White Sox
21. 2005 Houston Astros
22. 2007 Colorado Rockies
23. 2008 Philadelphia Phillies
24. 2008 Tampa Bay Rays
25. 2010 San Francisco Giants
26. 2011 St. Louis Cardinals
27. 2011 Texas Rangers
28. 2014 Washington Nationals
29. 2015 Kansas City Royals
30. 2016 Chicago Cubs

What I've done for the purpose of this tournament is set up a mini season for these teams to play out. There will be no interleague play, and the "regular season" will consist of 92 games. Each team will play a double round robin of series against every other team with three games apiece at home and on the road against everyone except division foes, against whom every team will play four game sets. The idea here is that divisions matter, so I wanted to make sure more of those games ended up on the schedule (and teams will end up with 32 games within their division, and 30 apiece against the other two).

Every team will be split up into its own division, with two exceptions. I noticed when I was randomly simulating some games that the 1982 Brewers, as an American League team, were going to be forced to play with a DH despite being in the National League now (there's no way my simulator, WhatIfSports, can work around this). But I realized a loophole when I was setting this up: the 2005 Houston Astros were a National League team at the time. The easy solution, therefore, would be to swap the Brewers and Astros so the league rules stay consistent. The Astros thus return to their old home in the NL Central, while the Brewers, just to make alignment simple, become an AL West team, even though they were an AL East team in 1982.

Like in the actual MLB, all division winners will make the playoffs in addition to two Wild Cards per league. The playoffs will then play out as they do in Major League Baseball. As for the rotation of the regular season schedule, I built schedules for the National and American Leagues over at TournamentScheduler, to at least decide the order in which series were being played. I had to manually build out the schedule for all the teams, however, and it wasn't easy. Because of the extended series against division opponents, there are times where I had to build in doubleheaders. Some teams don't have any, but no team has more than two scheduled over the course of the season. Because of the odd number of teams in each league, each team will have two mini byes to rest their guys, in addition to single off days scattered throughout the schedule.

I'm not going through to do stats for all 30 teams, because the amount of work that would require is just too much. I obviously need to track starting pitchers, because the idea with this is that all 30 teams will be using their regular starting rotation, but beyond this, I probably won't do a ton of stat keeping. I do have a standings page set up, and plan to have standings set up on the sidebar of the full web page. Odds are because of the way the simulator works, I'll just end up simulating full series all at once and do results posts twice a week.

This fun new season is set to begin on Monday, April 3rd, and based on the calendar will run through mid-July. From there I will proceed to simulate the playoffs, which will run then through mid-August. I hope this tournament is as much of a success as I've considered the last few tournaments I've run, and I hope you enjoy the ride as well!