Key takeaways
- ERA and WHIP answer different questions about the same pitcher, and disagreement between them is information rather than noise.
- WAR is a summary statistic assembled from other statistics, so it is useful for a first pass and poor for a final decision.
- A projected record is a model's output computed from your roster, not a forecast of any real game or season.
- Clubs stacked in one area project worse than balanced ones because the projection weighs position fit alongside raw quality.
- A ten-pick draft with no rerolls is a different skill from an open draft: you are committing under uncertainty, not searching.
Two pitchers are on the board. The first has the better earned run average. The second has the better WHIP. You have one pick and no rerolls.
Most players take the better ERA, because it is the number they recognise. That is not obviously wrong, but it is a decision made on familiarity rather than on what the two numbers are each measuring — and in a game where the card is all the information you get, knowing what the card means is most of the skill.
The numbers on the card, and what each one is for
Baseball is the most statistically explicit of the drafting sports, which is why a baseball draft simulator can afford to hand you a stat line and let you decide. 162-0 Baseball Draft & GM Team puts pitchers and hitters in front of you with earned run average, WHIP, home runs, on-base ability, fielding, speed and WAR, and asks you to build a club out of it.
Here is what each is actually telling you.
The pitching numbers
Earned run average is earned runs allowed divided by innings pitched, multiplied by nine — that is, roughly how much damage a pitcher gives up over a nine-inning stretch. It is an outcome statistic. It tells you what ended up on the scoreboard.
WHIP is walks plus hits divided by innings pitched: how many baserunners a pitcher allows. It is closer to a process statistic, describing how often the pitcher lets people on in the first place rather than how many of them eventually scored.
The interesting case is when the two disagree, and disagreement is common enough to be worth a rule. A low ERA with a high WHIP describes a pitcher who allows traffic and then escapes it. A higher ERA with a low WHIP describes a pitcher who allows less traffic and gets hurt more when it happens. Which you prefer depends on what the rest of your club looks like, which is exactly the kind of question a draft should be asking you.
The hitting, fielding and running numbers
Home runs are a power measure and the most legible number on the card. They are also the one most likely to distract you, because power is dramatic and a lineup made entirely of it is not a good lineup.
On-base ability measures how often a hitter avoids making an out. It is quieter than power and it compounds — a lineup that gets on base gives its power hitters something to do.
Fielding and speed are the two that inexperienced drafters skip, and skipping them is one of the most reliable ways to produce a disappointing projection in this game, because both feed the season model directly.
WAR, and why it is a starting point rather than an answer
Wins above replacement tries to compress a player's whole contribution into one number: how many additional wins they provide over a freely available replacement-level player. Its own definition acknowledges that it is non-standardised — different formulations disagree about the same player.
That makes it genuinely useful and genuinely limited. Use it to sort a board quickly and to sanity-check a pick you are unsure about. Do not use it as the deciding number between two close options, because the thing that separates them is exactly the detail the summary threw away.
A practical order of operations: sort on WAR, shortlist, then decide on the component numbers that matter for the hole you are filling.
The pick that is not a player
You draft nine players and then you choose a coach, and the coach is a real input — coaching is one of the factors the season simulator weighs, alongside roster quality, position fit, hitting, pitching, speed and defence.
It is easy to treat the last pick as a formality after the effort of building a lineup. It is not. Coming into that decision with a clear sense of what your club actually is — where it is strong, where you compromised, what it will need help with — is the difference between a considered final pick and a shrug.
What a projected record is, and is not
The simulator returns a projected 162-game win-loss record. That number is the model's assessment of the club you assembled, computed from roster quality, position fit, hitting, pitching, speed, defence and coaching.
It is worth being precise about what that means, because "projection" is a word that invites the wrong reading.
It is not a prediction about the real world. The players are fictional and generated inside the game. Nothing in the projection describes, forecasts or relates to any real club, player or season, and it is not usable as an indication of any real event. The game has no live results and no online multiplayer; everything you see is the model evaluating your roster.
It is not a certainty even inside the game. A projection is a summary judgement about a roster, not a guarantee about a sequence of games. Read it the way you would read a score at the end of a puzzle: it tells you how good your solution was, not what will happen next.
It is directly diagnostic, which is the useful part. A projection that came back lower than you expected is pointing at something specific in the roster, and it is usually one of the two failures below.
Why stacking stars projects worse than it looks
The game's design is explicit that balanced clubs post strong totals while stacking one kind of star shows up in the projection. That is not a punishment mechanic; it is what happens when position fit is a weighted input.
Think about what stacking actually does. If you spend your best picks on one category, you have bought excellence you cannot fully use — a lineup can only convert so much of one strength into wins — and you have paid for it with slots that now hold whatever was left. The projection weighs the whole club, so a spectacular strength and a hollow middle net out to something ordinary.
The failure mode has a twin, and it is the one people notice less: the position you talked yourself into ignoring. Fielding and speed are the usual victims, because they are less exciting than power and their contribution is diffuse. They are still inputs. A club with a hole in a weighted category is carrying a fixed cost through all 162 projected games.
The same structural lesson turns up in every sport the studio simulates. It is most brutal in hockey, where the roster is small enough that one weak slot has nowhere to hide — the hockey draft guide works through that maths. It is most forgiving in football, where depth absorbs some of it, as the football draft guide covers.
Ten picks, no rerolls
Alongside Unlimited Draft, the game includes a Limited Refresh Draft: ten picks, no rerolls at all. Also in the mix are payroll-focused drafting, VS Computer, Battle Mode, a Daily Challenge and Baseball IQ.
The limited format changes the skill being tested rather than raising the difficulty of the same one. In an unlimited draft you can search — keep looking until you find the player you want. With no rerolls, searching is not available, and what replaces it is inference. Every card you see tells you something about the quality level of this particular run, and a good limited drafter is constantly updating their sense of what a "good" option looks like here rather than applying a fixed standard from previous games.
The most common limited-draft error is holding out for a player who was never in this pool, and then accepting something genuinely poor late because the clock ran out. Calibrate early, decide quickly, and accept that a solid club drafted decisively beats a lopsided one drafted hopefully.
Payroll drafting adds the other classic constraint: a player now has a price as well as a rating, and the question shifts from who is best to who is worth what they cost. The temptation is the same as in every capped format — one enormous signing and eight compromises. It projects about as well as it sounds.
Franchise GM Mode
Past the draft, Franchise GM Mode hands you the batting order, the rotation, the bullpen, payroll and the front-office decisions.
Each of those is a different kind of problem from drafting:
- The batting order is a sequencing problem. The same nine players in a different order are a different lineup, because who bats in front of whom determines what your best hitters are walking into.
- The rotation and bullpen are a workload problem. You are distributing a fixed amount of pitching across a long season, and concentrating it on your best arms is not automatically right.
- Payroll is drafting with a time dimension attached: what a player is worth, for how long, and what committing to them prevents.
A club that projects well and is then managed carelessly gives back a lot of what the draft earned. Draft day sets the ceiling; the front office decides how close you get.
A method that works
- Sort on WAR to shortlist, decide on components. The summary narrows the field; the detail picks the player.
- Ask what the pitcher's ERA and WHIP disagree about. If they agree, you have a straightforward evaluation. If they do not, you have a decision that depends on the rest of your club.
- Fill fielding and speed deliberately, not accidentally. They are weighted inputs, and they are where careless drafts leak.
- Choose the coach with the club's actual weakness in mind, not as an afterthought.
- Read the projection as a diagnosis. Name the one slot you would redraft, then go and redraft it.
If WAR, ERA and WHIP are carrying more of that method than you are comfortable with, baseball stats explained for beginners sets out what each one measures and what it leaves out.
162-0 Baseball Draft & GM Team is free to download on Google Play, supported by ads, with optional in-app purchases and an Everyone content rating.
Broader drafting principles that apply across every sport are in the basketball draft and GM guide, and the rest of the studio's management titles are listed under sports GM.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ERA and WHIP?
What does WAR actually measure?
How does the simulator produce a projected record?
Is a perfect 162-0 season achievable?
Is there online multiplayer?
Is it connected to a real baseball league?
Sources
- Earned run average (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
- Walks plus hits per inning pitched (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
- Wins above replacement (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
