All-Time Teams 2.0

Three years ago I released an All-Time Teams series to celebrate 150 years of professional baseball. If you missed that series, it featured 25-man rosters of the best players by position in each MLB franchise's history. All 32 rosters were entered into a simulated tournament presented by DraftKings (of course) in which the Yankees held off the big Red Machine to win the World Series. 

I'm joking. I had nothing to do with that sim, it was just some fortuitous timing.


There were some basic parameters I put in place to make roster construction more interesting. They are:

• A minimum of four years with a franchise to be eligible for their All-Time Team. That means great players who moved around a lot might have trouble finding a home. It also results in average(or below) players earning spots on longevity alone if no one else qualifies.
   
• Players can only represent one team. This got messy in our initial run, as several all-time greats have near-equal splits with multiple teams. Almost all of the negative comments I received on the series had to do with my assignments related to this rule. I don't care. I ain't changing it.
  
  
• Players will be evaluated based on their contributions to that specific team only. For example, if an All-Time great player is blocked at his primary franchise, he may end up on a team for which he played 4+ years but not the majority of his career. However, if his numbers for that secondary team don't measure up to the other players who played there, he may be left out entirely.

Every team will have a Designated Hitter - which was not the real-life rule at the time but is now standard across MLB. Another thing I'm not changing is the roster size. It's tempting to expand these rosters to 26 players, but it would take a lot of fun out of All-Time Teams 2.0 if personnel decisions were this easy:

There won't be data and description for the holdover players whose rosters spots are secure (I don't need to explain why Tony Gwynn or George Brett made their respective All-Time Teams, lol.) We'll have something new in store for them so it's not a complete copy of the original.

There will be data and description for players who are in danger of losing their spot on an All-Time roster, either due to re-evaulation, re-assignment, or a current star climbing the ranks.

Also, since this remastered series was initially conceived as a way to display the cards in my All-Time Teams binders, I should clarify that every card you see scanned in this series is from my personal collection. That includes the 1957 Topps Dodgers Sluggers single at the top of this post. I might even attempt to post a video of the full album(s) at the conclusion of the series.

For those of you stopping by from TCDB, or if you're just commenting for a chance at free cards (no judgment) this post is the official start of the contest. Once the series ends, I will hold a random drawing for everyone who commented by selecting a random post number (this counts as post #1 for contest/series purposes) and then a random comment number.


Instead of going alphabetically through the entire league, we're going to go by division this time. I hope you'll join me tomorrow for our first All-Time team - the Baltimore Orioles.

Thanks for reading, and play ball!



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