How to play — Baseball

Baseball asks for more names than any other board here: a batting order and the arms behind it. It also reaches furthest back — the record opens in 1871, before the mound was where it is now.

The board

12 seats: C · 1B · 2B · 3B · SS · LF · CF · RF · DH · SP1 · SP2 · RP. Nine lineup spots, two starters and a reliever. Every one of them bats or throws across the schedule, so the weakest seat is not a rounding error — a soft bat in the seven-hole gives away games somewhere across the season no matter how loaded the top of the order looks.

The rounds

A spin opens one club in one era, and baseball's eras sit further apart than any other sport's. The deadball years and the modern game barely resemble each other; the same city forty years apart is effectively two different franchises.

The season

162 games — 162–0 for the sweep. A hundred and sixty-two games, every day from April to October, and no playoffs on this board. Baseball's best real teams lose a third of the time — the sport is built so the gap between the best and worst side on any given day is narrow.

• 162–0 — the perfect season.
• 154 wins or more — the top tier.
• 132 or more — a strong finish.
• 120 or more — you made the cut.
• 46 or more — middling.
• the rest — the roast comes with the verdict.

What the record holds

Nothing in American sport is written down further back than this: 1871, with 355 hall-of-fame figures across a century and a half. Baseball also keeps a thicker paper trail than anything else here — weekly honours, wire-service All-Star teams, Gold Gloves — so a card from 1911 can still carry a citation, and the same city appears repeatedly as the genuinely different clubs it has been.

What decides it

Rate stats swing hard with the run environment, which is why the honours carry the comparison: Gold Gloves, All-Star selections and the league-leading finishes were decided inside the season that produced them. How the ratings work · the full rulebook.

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