The Best Clubs In Baseball's Golden Era!

Recently Dave Koch PC Baseball released a new collection "The Top 20 Negro League Teams". I have always been interested in how those negro league teams would have done if they faced the major league clubs of their day?

So I combined the Negro League teams from Dave's collection with the top 20 Major League teams from 1915 to 1949 based on fivethirtyeight.com's ELO ratings*** list. I now have 40 of the best teams from the Golden Era of baseball (1915 - 1949).

Next I wanted to make sure everyone was on the same playing field so to speak. So I modified the negro league players as if they were facing major league talent. I used the fielding and running ratings from Dave's collection and combined them with the batting and pitching ratings from Eric Chalek's October 25, 2017 article on the Major League Equivalencies for Negro Leaguers*. Now I have 40 teams in one league all rated at a major league level. I then created four divisions two major league and two negro league based on there respective years.

One more thing to do before I can run a replay season. To have clubs from different seasons play against each other getting somewhat realistic results. For this I used a tool built into Dave Koch's PC Baseball game the "League Era" rule. It's a unique rule, using data from 1876 to present, each year is separated statistically based upon league averages from that season. Therefore, teams from different eras are automatically normalized when playing each other. Every big league ball park from 1876 to the present also has its own statistical breakdown for every season that it was in use. See how A-Rod might have hit in 2002 if he played his home games at Coors Field; or see how many home runs “The Babe” might have hit in 1927 had he played at the Polo Grounds instead of Old Yankee Stadium!

Check out the Power Rankings to see how the top 40 clubs did after replaying a 120 game schedule. See my answer to the question. "How those negro league teams would have done if they faced the major league clubs of their day?" At the bottom of the list.

One note about the reports in this website, when using an iphone you will need to flip to landscape to view the whole report.