I’ve been playing the game Out of the Park Baseball on my Mac for a few years now. You probably already know what it is if you’re reading this, but if not, it’s a ridiculously comprehensive and accurate baseball front office sim. I enjoy dominating with my favorite team (the Cardinals) or taking the helm on a rebuild in Atlanta, but for the most part, I just like to come up with impossible alternate universe scenarios and see how they play out. From time to time on this blog, I’m going to talk about the results of these experiments. This is a video game after all, so take any results with a grain of salt. It should be really fun, however.

So let’s start with this hypothetical scenario – what if all the position players in professional baseball suddenly and mysteriously vanished on April 1, 2016? I’m not sure what storyline I can come up with to make this sound reasonable at all. Maybe all the position players just went on strike due to the fact that OOTP is notorious for undervaluing them. For instance, it’s easy to just string Bryce Harper along for numerous seasons with one year deal after one year deal. So it’s either that or maybe some kind of weird Space Jam scenario. Or perhaps they all went to join the newly founded Arena Baseball League that I may discuss in a future post. Regardless, they’re all gone, opening day is two days away, and there are only pitchers remaining in professional baseball.

But here’s a minor twist (as if we needed another one) – I decided to let two position players stay in the big leagues. The two position players with the lowest WAR from 2015 get to stay. I guess the Space Jam aliens just didn’t want them. So Pablo Sandoval remains with the Red Sox and Chris Owings remains with the Diamondbacks. I thought it would be interesting to see how their teams would fare. Will Boston dominate having one (debatably) legitimate hitter in the middle of their lineup? Maybe Arizona will do well simply by having a passable middle infielder?

The season somehow begins without a hitch. Teams fill up their rosters with journeymen relievers found in the free agent pool and proceed as if nothing happened. Early in April, a theme that will last for the whole season becomes apparent. Pitchers are absolutely dominating and receiving no run support. Poor Gerrit Cole (who plays shortstop when it’s not his day to start), throws only 110 pitches over 10.2 scoreless innings on April 14 and receives a no-decision. Left fielder Alfredo Simon would eventually hit a walk-off sac fly for the Reds in the bottom of the 24th to give his team a 1-0 victory in a contest that lasted over seven hours. A few days earlier, Jose Fernandez struck out 21 batters and still ended up with a no decision. At season’s end, the Cubs will miss the playoffs with a team ERA of 1.02. The curse is real.

There is perhaps no better example of this than Phillies starter Jerad Eickhoff. At the end of May, Eickhoff leads the majors with a minuscule 0.14 ERA. He has more losses (2) than earned runs (1). In June his ERA balloons to 0.38 while his record falls to 4-4. He eventually tears a ligament in his elbow and misses the entire second half of the season. The game lists his morale as “good” with a smiley face emoticon. I suspect otherwise.

I knew pitchers would dominate in a league with no offense. So it’s much more interesting to see how the pitchers fared at the plate. I had no real idea what to expect here. Obviously there are guys like Madison Bumgarner and Mike Leake (and Bartolo Colon) that can swing it pretty well. But how would they do playing every day?

As it turns out, some of them actually did really well. Arizona’s Zack Greinke won the triple crown in the National League, hitting .326 with 15 home runs and 60 RBI. He missed a couple weeks due to a broken finger, so I can only wonder what he might have done with a few more games under his belt. At the end of the year, Greinke makes history by winning the Silver Slugger Award at pitcher AND shortstop. The most surprising slugger was Chris Young of the Royals. He led all of baseball with 22 homers and 99 RBI. If you’re wondering, Young is a career .150 hitter with only one home run in real life.

Then there were some straight up oddities. Max Scherzer, for instance, doubled 37 times. He only had 68 hits for the season. Throw in his six homers and two triples, and that’s 45 of 68 hits for extra bases. Think about it – would you consider keeping a .133 hitter on your roster if you knew that 66% of their hits were going to go for extra bases?

The other big weirdo at the plate was Phil Hughes. Phil hit .095 for the year. Whatever, he’s an American League pitcher. But upon closer inspection, he struck out 465 times. On the bright side, he did drive in 12 runs. All of this was somehow good enough for a positive WAR value (0.2).

It wasn’t pretty in the field for most of these guys either. Toronto had the worst defense in baseball, committing 411 errors. That’s 2.53 per game. Of course, a lot of those belonged to their shortstop Marcus Stroman, who committed 87. Cleveland was the best defensive team with a measly 297 errors. Gerrit Cole won a gold glove at short in the NL despite his 46 miscues. Bartolo Colon played 193 innings in center field for the Mets and somehow came up with four outfield assists to go with his .782 fielding percentage.

When it was all said and done, the World Series came down to the New York Mets (98-64) and the Tampa Bay Rays (97-65). New York won the series in five. Matt Harvey was the hero, hitting a go-ahead triple in the 11th inning of game five. As far as awards go, Chris Owings and Pablo Sandoval won the MVP in their respective leagues. I presume this is just due to their ridiculously inflated WAR values given that they were the only position players in the entire world playing baseball in 2016. Well, except for a minor issue mid-season where I forgot to disable international free agents and teams were briefly placing 16 year old Dominican shortstops on their big league rosters. ANYWAY – those two guys had good seasons, but definitely not MVP-type numbers.

Pablo Sandoval won a gold glove at third base. I had originally written a slightly snarkier comment about that but a little research revealed he’s been a gold glove finalist before in his career. I know he’s always been more agile than you’d think over there, but I didn’t realize he’d ever been that close to winning one. But this is 2016 we’re talking about now. I think he’s missed his chance in that regard. In the sim, he finished the year with a zone rating of +44.4. For reference, Fangraphs considers a score of 15 or higher to be gold glove caliber. I’m not sure if OOTP and Fangraphs calculate it the same way, but it’s probably pretty close. Naturally, Chris Owings ended up with a gold glove as well. Stephen Strasburg won one at catcher which is pretty neat. In the end, it was such a rough year defensively that MLB decided not to even give out gold gloves for some positions. I’m not sure if this is just because everyone sucked or because guys didn’t qualify somehow or what. It’s pretty funny either way.

All in all, a lot of weird stuff happened and I think I mostly covered the weirdest of it. It was a lot of fun. But a question I have after all of this, which I may explore in the future, is how would Zack Greinke do as a position player? He won the triple crown playing every day in my league. Now these wouldn’t be triple crown numbers normally, but they are still pretty good, and it’s not like he was batting against scrubs. He was batting against regular major league pitchers. So perhaps I can turn him into a passable left fielder in another alternate universe.

If you have any comments or ideas for future sims, let me know. And definitely check out Out of the Park Baseball for yourself if you haven’t. Thanks for reading.