All-Star Prospect Team vs KC Royals

A FanPost at the Beyond The Boxscore a few weeks ago got me thinking about how well a team pieced together from the minor leagues best prospects would do playing against major league teams. What a perfect exercise to use my simulator for. What I did is took the ZIPS projections of the best minor leaguers and used them as input into my baseball simulator and played this imaginary team against a real MLB team. I filtered these minor leaguers to only use players under the age of 25 with little or no MLB experience. There are still a handful of teams that ZIPS does not have projections for at this time, so players from those teams are not eligible yet.

After building my minor league All-Star team, the first team I decided to have them face was the Kansas City Royals, who are likely the American Leagues worst team. In this exercise I had each #1 starting pitcher face each other, both away and home. I then did the same thing for the #2 thru #5 pitchers, thus having a 10 game series. Each of the 10 games was simulated/played 100K times with the simulator spitting out a win probability for each game. I decided to use the same bullpens for each team (the Royals bullpen) and give all of the minor league players a league average defensive rating.

Here are the rosters of the two teams that I used.

Lineups
AAA All-Stars			Kansas City Royals
Pos	Name	Org	Name	Pos
CF	Charles Blackmon	COL	CF	Melky Cabrera
C	Devin Mesoraco	CIN	2B	Chris Getz
1B	Brandon Belt	SF	LF	Alex Gordon
3B	Mike Moustakas	KC	DH	Billy Butler
DH	Freddie Freeman	ATL	RF	Jeff Francoeur
LF	Jerry Sands	LAN	1B	Kaile Kaaihue
RF	J.D. Martinez	HOU	3B	Mike Aviles
2B	Daniel Descalso	STL	C	Jason Kendall
SS	Grant Green	OAK	SS	Alcides Escobar

Now let's take a look at the starting rotations.

AAA All-Stars			Kansas City Royals
	Name	Organization		Name
#1	Michael Pineda	SEA	vs	Luke Hochevar
#2	Julian Teheran	ATL	vs	Kyle Davies
#3	Jake McGee	TB	vs	Bruce Chen
#4	Christian Freidrich	COL	vs	Vinny Mazzaro
#5	Mike Montgomery	KC	vs	Jeff Francis

Now let's take a look at the game results...

Results
Away	Away SP	Home	Home SP	Favorite	Win Prob
Royals	Luke Hochever	AAA All-Stars	Michael Pineda	AAA All-Stars	56.57%
AAA All-Stars	Michael Pineda	Royals	Luke Hochever	Royals	52.55%
Royals	Kyle Davies	AAA All-Stars	Julian Teheran	AAA All-Stars	55.24%
AAA All-Stars	Julian Teheran	Royals	Kyle Davies	Royals	53.69%
Royals	Bruce Chen	AAA All-Stars	Jake McGee	AAA All-Stars	59.77%
AAA All-Stars	Jake McGee	Royals	Bruce Chen	AAA All-Stars	50.03%
Royals	Vinny Mazzaro	AAA All-Stars	Christian Freidrich	AAA All-Stars	55.71%
AAA All-Stars	Christian Freidrich	Royals	Vinny Mazzaro	Royals	53.04%
Royals	Jeff Francis	AAA All-Stars	Mike Montgomery	AAA All-Stars	53.99%
AAA All-Stars	Mike Montgomery	Royals	Jeff Francis	Royals	54.80%

Mean win percentage for the AAA All-Stars is 51.722%. So using the ZIPS projections as input for the AAA All-Star team and my proprietary set of projections for the Kansas City Royals, the AAA All-Star team is slightly stronger. Up next, I will attempt to run this same exercise with a National League team - probably a good one. I am thinking about doing it for the Phillies.


Simulator Notes: My simulator takes into account (among other things) park factors, home field advantage, defense, splits, base running and uses a proprietary set of hitter and pitcher projections for MLB players.