Phillies Tweet Excellent Response to Their Horrible Start in Baseball Reference's Simulated MLB Season

With Major League Baseball on hold for the time being, Baseball Reference, the organization responsible for arguably the deepest and most reliable public baseball statistics database in existence, has taken it upon itself to run a simulation of the 2020 season. That process is now well under way, and for the otherwise talented Philadelphia Phillies, that's meant some embarrassingly poor virtual performances.

The Phillies are currently 5-15 in Baseball Reference's sim. What's worse, their most recent virtual performance ended in a no-hitter for Milwaukee Brewers' pitcher Freddy Peralta. Right on cue, the organization let Baseball Reference know how they felt about the simulation by pumping up number-cruching rivals Fangraphs.

The simulations are being run by Baseball Reference with the support of Out of the Park Baseball 21, a PC baseball simulation game with extensive features to provide as detailed a simulation as possible. The website also took the suggestions of Twitter fans when deciding how to format the league.

Still, the exhaustive efforts to provide as much realism to the fake games as possible has left the Phillies and a few other teams bemused. At least Philadelphia showed that their Twitter game is good even if their simulated game is suffering.