All Time Greatest Team Lists

Selection Patterns

All Time Greatest Team Lists

Out of curiosity, I compiled a list of teams commonly featured in “greatest teams” collection.

I gathered these team lists from collections offered by the following games:

• Action PC Baseball

• Diamond Mind Baseball (both the traditional versions and the ELO version)

• Strat-O-Matic Baseball (Diamond Greats)

• Replay Baseball (Diamond Decade)

• Dynasty League Baseball

• On Deck Baseball

• APBA Baseball

• Skeetersoft NPIII (Dynasties)

• Microleague Baseball (yes, the old game)

I also gathered a few teams from other sources as well.

I then compared those team lists to the ones I have from the Domination Index. You can learn more about what the Domination Index is here:

What I found surprised me.

First of all, many of these games did not feature some of the best teams in baseball history. Here’s a look at teams in the top 20 National League Domination Index rankings that were made by at least one company, for example:

I can understand not wanting to feature the 1944 St. Louis Cardinals, because of the crazy things that happened during the war year. However, the 1917 Giants were only featured in the NPIII Dynasties set — surprising for a team that was clearly dominant.

Action PC Baseball is the only game that featured teams as recently as 2016, which is why no other game featured the Cubs. However, it shocks me that no other team featured the 2008 Chicago Cubs, which was arguably the second greatest Cubs team in franchise history.

The following top 20 teams in National League Domination Index were not featured in any of these greatest team lists:

• 2022 Dodgers (ranked 1)

• 2020 Dodgers (ranked 6)

• 2021 Dodgers (ranked 7)

• 2019 Dodgers (ranked 11)

Notice a pattern?

The American League looks like this:

The biggest surprise team on here, of course, is the 1905 Chicago White Sox — a team most don’t think of as one of the greatest teams of all time. The White Sox finished in second place behind the Athletics — but have a good argument to belong to greatest team projects.

And we’re missing the following great teams:

2015 Blue Jays (ranked 7, believe it or not)

2022 Yankees (ranked 11)

2016 Red Sox (ranked 12)

2017 Indians (ranked 16)

The 2015 Blue Jays are easy to forget, as are the 2017 Indians, who lost 3 straight in the ALDS to the Yankees after going up 2-0.

Now, we all know that regular season success is not an indicator of postseason success. However, it’s pretty clear that we tend to completely forget about really good regular season teams that happen to lose in the playoffs.

What do you think about these lists? Does anything surprise you?