Chargers warmup with baseball field dirt overlaid on a football field in Oakland Coliseum

What if MLB played the NFL Schedule?

 October 20, 2023  Posted in Friday Starter 378 Views

10% of the games, 90% of the fun?

The real-life MLB playoffs have been no fun so far this year. Both the games and series have been uncompetitive. The meaning of the regular season was quickly washed away, with three of the four bye-winners all falling to lesser teams. Whether due to format or results, we have neither the awesome force of the mega-team steamrolling everyone nor the unexpected joy of the Cinderella story. It just feels like a bunch of silly extra games in a stupid tournament tacked onto the end of the year.

So what if we just leaned into that? If the regular season doesn’t matter in the end, why play 162 stinking games? What if MLB were more like the NFL, with a weekly schedule and a tournament of one-game knockout rounds at the end?

I grabbed an NFL-style schedule from this thread and added it to a league in Out of the Park Baseball 24 (still works, even though the schedules were made in 2014!). These are 16-game NFL schedules so not exactly how they do it nowadays, but close enough.

I started a new 2023 MLB game and expanded the league to add two teams, realigning into four four-team divisions per league:

The Portland Sea Dogs join the NL West and the Charlotte Knights get added to the new AL South. Apologies to the Braves for having to go back to the old NL West days of sharing a division with three time zones.

I adjusted the league settings so that each team would use a one-man rotation, easily achievable with only one game per week. Here’s how the first season went down:

  • 2023 NFL-style standings
  • 2023 NFL-style playoff results
  • NFL-style season stat leaders – pitching
  • 2023 NFL-style stat leaders – hitting
  • Mike Trout led his league in batting WAR, and here’s what that stat line looked like.
  • DeGrom led the AL in pitching WAR, with this statline.
  • Ohtani led the league in combined WAR of course.
  • Most teams went with just one starter the whole year unless someone got hurt. But the Padres did well while splitting their starts between Snell, Darvish, and Joe Musgrove (not pictured due to IL stint).

A quick fly-by of results from 2024:

  • The Padres impress again with 12 wins. Hitting .400 for a season is now routine.
  • You know the simulation is realistic because the Cardinals take a merely decent team all the way to a championship. Of course.
  • Arenado and Gorman slug their way to a win in the final game.

And now 2025:

  • Freddie Freeman hits .443 for a season. Vlad and Pete Alonso tie for the home run record under the new format with 9. The expansion Charlotte Knights get 12 wins.
  • Here’s a look at that Knights team. Great defense and good hitting without over-the-fence power end up doing enough to win.
  • Showing off the Knights’ roster of hitters. Not impressive talent-wise overall. Their star Loza is a fictional generated Cuban player.
  • The most shocking part of their success has to be the total lack of an ace starter in a format that should reward dominant pitching. They did it all with defense.
  • The Royals defeat the Braves in the final game of the playoffs. 17th-rounder Tyler Tolve has become a five-star catcher/DH for the Braves.
  • Heroic relief work for the Royals won the championship.
  • By the way, Shohei Ohtani is now an Oakland Athletic. And getting paid Dansby Swanson money basically. The league doesn’t seem to have adjusted for the fact that ace starters are now much more important.

2026:

  • 14th-rounder Gage Workman gets the expansion Knights back in the playoffs, leading the AL in WAR.
  • Scrolling down a bit to show the pitching WAR leaders. Carlos Rodon, Spencer Strider, and Bubba Chandler are the three most valuable players in baseball.
  • A stunning six RBIs in the championship game for 17th-round Tyler Tolve. And Rafael Devers is the star man of the playoffs overall, hitting .533.
  • A.J. Smith-Shawver recovered from blowing the previous year’s game to being the winning starter the next year. Spencer Strider started many games during the season but comes in as a multi-inning closer for this one.
  • Tyler Tolve developing into a star catcher let the Braves trade Sean Murphy for Rafael Devers, who’s an incredible luxury DH on a team that still has Riley, Olson, and Acuna.
  • Just including this slide because I enjoyed seeing the Angels are still as stars and scrubs as ever, with new big names. Vlad Jr., Bo Bichette, and an aging Jose Altuve fill out the middle of the lineup with Trout, and the team just managed to go .500.

2027:

  • Vogelbach remains a huge power threat deep into his 30s. Edwin Arroyo is established as a superstar.
  • We haven’t really had a super mediocre team make the championship game yet. The Rangers and Pirates were both really good teams in a league with no amazing teams.
  • Bubba Chandler is a huge star and apparently not at his full potential yet.

2028:

  • The Twins achieve a new high in the NFL-style format with 13 wins, with Buxton and Nick Gordon leading the team. Bubba Chandler is a huge success for Pittsburgh again.
  • But we get our first truly shameful championship game, between the 7-9 White Sox and the 8-8 Nationals. Disgusting.
  • A snapshot of the champion Nationals. The team is mediocre in all aspects of the game, with a just-okay 29-year-old rookie pitcher starting all their games.

2029:

  • Pete Alonso sets the home run record with 11. Walker Jenkins is a menace with a .435 BA and 1.276 OPS.
  • The 9-7 Angels take it all over a Mets team that dominated the regular season.
  • A reasonably balanced-looking Angels roster finally wins a championship over the Mets. Trout gets a ring, though a hit by pitch knocks him out of the final game early.
  • Zac Gallen could do no wrong all postseason, but Ryan Helsley and a few errors doom the Mets.
  • Trout at 38 isn’t really a good player anymore, but he’s had much better health in the NFL-style format and finally has a championship ring.
  • Joey Gallo ends up leading the league in HR and RBI at 35, somehow still in the league after four putrid seasons in a row. Peak Gallo.

Records and top salaries:

  • Here are the AL Award winners for our experiment. Unfortunately the Cy Young ends up going to the most flawless reliever most years instead of the most important starter. I’m not sure why given that the starter WARs are vastly higher than these, so the calculation must really value ERA highly.
  • Now the NL winners. Weirdly the Reliever of the Year and Cy Young are only sometimes the same person despite a closer always winning the Cy Young.
  • The top salaries as of 2029. Unfortunately the league values hitters more highly despite pitchers being clearly more important in the new format.
  • The single season and career hitting records since the format change. Manny Machado had the best position player season with 1.62 WAR. The home run record is a little disappointingly low (given that 12 homers in 10 games has been done recently in real life), but I suppose hitters are always facing ace starters every day.
  • And now the pitching records. Poor Ohtani with the Athletics sets a record for losses. Tink Hence managed to throw more than 7 innings per game with 11 wins in 2029, but still Rodon had the highest WAR in history with 3.18.

Overall, I think this is a fun format, and OOTP handles it decently well. This would absolutely turn starting pitchers into quarterbacks, the most important and iconic player on each team. And the results from the playoffs are every bit as plausible as real life, with maybe one exception in 2028.

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