About thirty years ago or thereabouts I was playing in a simulation baseball league based on the Diamond Mind Baseball computer game. My team's roster featured quite a number of players whose last names began with the letter "B." This was not a particular trading and drafting strategy, it just sort of happened. I had an early-career Barry Bonds, a late-career George Brett, as well as Ellis Burks, Tom Brunansky, and Jay Bell. There may well have been several others that I'm not remembering. I wondered, for a moment, which letter would have the best team all time. Then I mostly forgot about it, except to noodle around with the idea every now and again.
Pandemic times being excellent for turning pointless noodling into highly productive baseball simulation experiments, in the last year or so I took on the task of actually pulling together rosters, and the "A to Z League" became a computer simulation reality.
The task was made somewhat easier by the fact that Diamond Mind created a couple of volumes of data that included more than 4,500 of the best players of all time, including Negro League and Japanese stars, and these volumes included most of the players who would make the cut in the A to Z League. I leaned toward players with some level of career achievement (career WAR being a basic indicator), not guys who had a couple of good years and then fizzled out. I decided to avoid the dead-ball era and mostly use players who had been active after 1920. I avoided currently active players unless their careers were nearly complete or if they were an obvious choice for the team. For example, the T's will have Mike Trout in centerfield. Apologies to fans of Cesar Tovar and Gorman Thomas, but Trout is the class of the field here.
Not all letters were admitted to the league. There has yet to be a player whose last name begins with "X", and I, Q, U, Y, and Z all would have had trouble getting a team together, much less a competitive one. Thus Q, U, and I banded together to create a team, as did Y and Z, giving us a 22-team league. We've chosen rosters of 40 players for each ballclub and will have active rosters of 26 players. There will be no modern atrocities such as the designated hitter, wild cards, or runners starting on second in extra innings.
Our one deviation from the convention was to sign Ichiro Suzuki to the QUI team. It was hard to envision a lot of playing time for Ichiro on the S club, which includes outfield types such as Tris Speaker, Willie Stargell, Al Simmons, Duke Snider, Turkey Stearnes, Gary Sheffield, and more. The QUI's needing help and Suzuki mostly going by first name, he went to that club instead.
We have a 168-game schedule ahead. It will be fun to see which letter is better!