MLB Game Simulator

Pick any two clubs and play the game 5,000 times, as if it were being played today. Each card opens with that club's real batting order — the nine who have actually been playing, in the spots they have been hitting — and every one of them can be changed. Swap a rested starter out, move a bat up, pick a different arm. Then read it against the Power Index and make your own call.

How it works: one plate appearance at a time. The batter's rates and the pitcher's are set against this season's league to get the odds of a walk, a strikeout, a homer, a triple, a double, a single or an out, and one of them is drawn. Runners move by baseball's own rules with a little luck, bases are stolen, double plays are turned, pitchers tire as they face more batters, the long man and then the set-up man and the closer come in as the innings and the score call for them, and a better bat pinch-hits late when a club is behind. Each club's nine comes from the batting orders MLB publishes, taking the most-used bat at each position and the spot he has usually hit in. A short season gets regressed: a man with forty plate appearances is read mostly as a bench bat rather than as whatever his forty trips happened to say. This is a simulation as of today — lineups, arms and ratings all change. It is separate from the Megasports Power Index and does not change any rating or line on the site; the Index is the price, the sim is what nine innings of these players say.