THE BEST 26-MAN ROSTER IN MLB HISTORY
Whenever Major League Baseball’s teams take the field for the first time following the disruption of coronavirus, they will do so with a few new rules in place, including an increase in the size of the active roster from 25 players to 26. Clubs will also have to designate each person as either a pitcher or a position player, and they can carry a maximum of 13 pitchers at a time.
In the meantime, wouldn’t it be fun to come up with an all-time 26-man roster of major-leaguers throughout baseball history?
We utilized metrics rather than opinion to construct this team. We considered both career and peak (best seven years of a player’s MLB career, not necessarily seven years in a row), performance via wins above replacement, as well as context neutral championship win probability added because it calculates the impact of each play on the team’s probability of winning the World Series without padding stats for players just because they happened to find themselves in situations when the game was on the line more often.
The player’s reputation was also factored in via MVP and Cy Young shares, a summation of that player’s yearly voting score for the MVP or Cy Young Award. After all, players nominated for these awards are typically thought of as being the best of the best. For example, Barry Bonds won the MVP award seven out of the 15 times he appeared on the ballot. He garnered an average of 62 per cent of the vote each time, giving him a major league leading 9.3 MVP shares.
Here is the all-time best 26-man lineup with a batting order, starting rotation and bullpen optimized for modern baseball.