Friday, March 21, 2014

Bracketeering: Historical MLB Players

by Spezzal Teams Playa

Above, you will find a blank bracket that you can use to predict the winners in our eventual coaches' poll. And don't forget that you can vote already for the 'play-in' matchup between George Davis and John Clarkson, to see who gets the final 16-seed in the Infielders Region.

I highly recommend that you DO NOT try "penning" them onto the .jpg using MS-Paint, but maybe some other photoshop program wouldn't take as long. Here is what took me an hour to "handwrite":

[UPDATE: April 2nd]

The first round of polling now complete, we can see that there were many upsets and several places where my own predicted backet was busted. Here are the results:

[UPDATE: April 8th]

After two rounds, we have narrowed things down to the Sweet Sixteen. My own personal bracket (above) is now thoroughly busted, as Babe Ruth was upset by Ted Williams. Here are the rest of the scores:

[UPDATE: April 10th]

After three rounds, we are down to the Elite Eight, with each "region" pitting its two "best" players against each other. Here is the new bracket:

[UPDATE: April 11th]

After four rounds, we have finally reached the Final Four, with no two same seeds having advanced this far. We are down to a single one-seed (Cy Young), and single two-seed (Rogers Hornsby), a single five-seed (Christy Mathewson), and the nominal Cinderella, Ted Williams, the eight-seed from the Outfielders. Here are the deets:

[UPDATE: April 13th]

Just to wrap things up over here on the blog, we ended up voting, 5 to 1, for Cy Young as the top pitcher, and voted 4 to 2 for Ted Williams as the top hitter. We followed that up with Ted Williams besting Cy Young by 4 votes to 2, to capture the title of Best Baller in Baseball History.

Thanks to all for participating in this lengthy, and not always interesting exercise.