Detroit Tigers: A simulation of the 2020 season as it would have been

Take a look at a simulation of how the 2020 season would shape up for the Detroit Tigers if the league did not postpone games.

Since there is no Detroit Tigers baseball being played for the foreseeable future with the postponement of all games, I ran a simulation of the 2020 season using Sony Entertainment MLB The Show 20 videogame.

Major League Baseball has announced that its season will be postponed until things cool down with the COVID-19 virus and things start trending upward. The league has also suspended all Spring Training games, leaving the Tigers unable to play, so simulation is the next best thing.

Now, the Tigers were not going to be a good team, another 100-plus loss season was on its way, fans know this, but some improvement would have been nice. General Manager Al Avila made some signings this offseason, maybe not the best, but he did bring in some bats that made the team better in the grand scheme of things.

That being said, I decided to go through and set up a franchise mode with the Tigers, and sim through the 2020 season as it was supposed to be played. Using the standard settings, most updated rosters, and all Artificial Intelligence (AI)-controlled settings, I set things up.

For full disclosure, I did not influence any of the trades that were made; everything was solely based on the moves that the AI made for the betterment of the team and its future years. For example, I ran the simulation once, and the team traded away prospect Riley Greene on the fourth day of the season for Minnesota Twins shortstop Wander Javier.

Admittedly, I thought that it had to be a glitch, so I abandoned that simulation and decided to restart immediately to find out the team would make the same trade a week into the season once again. So some of the deals that were made may be a little questionable, but all-in-all it was a completely AI ran team in which I did not control.

The 2020 First-Year Amateur Player Draft also took place, but since the draft class was not uploaded yet, it was a draft of made-up players. For that reason, the draft results were left out of this simulation, with the players simply being signed and placed in the minor league farm system at various levels.

Since there’s no baseball to watch and this season is likely to be shortened or crammed into four months, take a look at what the 2020 season could have been like for the Tigers.