The All-Time MLB Player Draft Part I: Intro

Get ready for a whole lot of text in the coming days...

A few of my friends and I decided, just for the hell of it, to hold a baseball draft where every single player in the history of the game was available. I was personally thinking about how I would rank all-time players against each other and figured I could use some other perspectives and why not get them in a fun way? I was thrilled that my friends got very into the draft and as a result we ended up with six teams.

The rules were simple:

- You were drafting as if you were a real life GM, this was not for fantasy sports. As a result you had to consider everything. Little things like clubhouse chemistry of your team should be considered along with defense and all the other usual offensive categories people are familiar with.

- You had to draft players with MLB careers, no players who spent the majority of their time in the negro league or Japanese leagues.

- You could not draft any players who played the majority of their careers before 1900.

- You are drafting a full 25 man roster, a starting lineup (including DH), 5 bench players (including at least 1C, 1IF and 1OF), 5 starting pitchers, and 6 relievers (one of which must be left-handed).

- You can draft starting pitchers and place them in your bullpen

- You are drafting a player with the assumption that you get them for their entire career, so you should draft players with the thought in mind that career value is the priority

- You could start a position player at any position they played for a reasonable amount of time in the Major Leagues

- This is for fun and should not be taken too seriously but there will be an evaluation at the end to see who ended up with the best team (an in depth explanation of this will follow after the teams are introduced).

- It will be a snake-style draft and the order for the first round was Andy, Anthony, Brian (with help from Mark and Frank), Dennis, Jimmy (me) and Adam.

- Players will be given credit for time missed for reasons beyond their control (being at war, being banned from baseball because of the color of your skin, etc.)


With those rules outlined we spent a week drafting our teams through e-mail and the group of players we ended up with was impressive. I will let the GM of each team introduce their team themselves in the coming entries with a small commentary from me afterward.