What if Eduardo Nunez was the greatest player alive?: Part six

Using the video game Out of the Park Baseball 21, we’ve been trying to create the greatest player in baseball history. To make matters funnier, we’re using Eduardo Nunez to try and accomplish this task. If you would like to catch up ahead of this, our final edition, you can read parts one through five at the following links: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

After delivering the Yankees a World Series championship and a superhuman Eduardo Nunez in 2020, I resigned from the general manager job and rode off into the sunset.

In that offseason, Brian Cashman decided that Gary Sanchez was expendable, trading him to the Angels and inserting Nunez as the starting catcher on days he was not pitching. He also signed Marcell Ozuna to a four-year contract and traded Giancarlo Stanton to the Dodgers.

Meanwhile, MLB expanded by two teams with the Yankees getting a new division mate in the Charlotte Red Storm, with the Oklahoma City Bluebirds joining the NL Central. (Also the Tigers moved to Columbus and became the “Seminoles” for some reason.)

It turns out my GMing may have been holding the team back, as the Yankees proceeded to go 130-32 in 2021, breaking their own record from 2020 for most wins in a season. They won the World Series in six games over the Dodgers. Nunez put up another 40 WAR season. The team reduced his playing time as a position player to just 89 games, but he managed to hit 35 home runs and put up a .469/.622/.973 triple slash line. As a pitcher, he recorded 844 strikeouts in 289 innings. Unsurprisingly, he won the MVP awards of the regular season, ALDS, ALCS and World Series, plus a Cy Young.

In 2022, Nunez showed signs of decline as he only put up a 39 WAR season. Other than that, it was a similar story as the Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series again, with Nunez wining every conceivable award again.

The 2023 season saw Nunez reach both the career 200 home run mark and his 100th pitching win. Only Babe Ruth has come remotely close to doing that, finishing with 94 wins. He put up a 38 WAR season as the Yankees again won the title, beating the Cardinals this time.

The Yankees were pushed the furthest in years in 2024, needing to go the distance in all three playoff rounds. However, they still came away as champions after Nunez threw a perfect game in Game Seven of the World Series. If this happened in real life, it would go probably go down as the biggest moment in baseball history. However, virtual Nunez is a superhuman so it was about par for him. Meanwhile, Jasson Dominguez and Anthony Seigler are now regulars in the big leagues.

After another title and a dominant Nunez season in 2025, the Yankees signed Noah Syndergaard. In what had to be a kick in the teeth for the Mets, he put up a 174 ERA+ and was still a distant second among the best pitchers in the Yankees’ rotation, and might’ve been third had Gerrit Cole not gotten hurt. The team won an insane 135 games in the regular season. The Red Sox got a Wild Card spot yet still finished 44 games back in the AL East. They lost just two playoff games on the road to the 2026 championship.

On a personal level, Nunez became the all-time leader in pitching WAR in 2026. Upon his ascendance to the greatest pitcher of all time, I stopped re-upping his pitching attributes every year. You can see the dip, as his ERA falls to a career worst 0.17 in 2027. However, that was good enough to lead the team to another championship.

In 2028, Nunez quite literally put up a batting average of .500 in a full season. Unsurprisingly, the season ended in a title, as did obviously 2029.

The 2030 season was the final of Nunez’s contract, and it saw the Yankees take an obvious step back. They won “only” 112 games in the regular season but were then swept by the Astros in the ALCS in a massive upset. Despite that, they had won ten-straight World Series titles prior, so it’s hard to get too upset.

At the conclusion of that contract, I decided to stop boosting Nunez’s hitting ratings and let the remainder of his career play out. He signed a two-year, $52.8 million deal with the Yankees despite being nearly 44. In the second of that deal, he moved past Ty Cobb into first on the position player’s all-time WAR leaderboard.

As mentioned, he had long ago moved into first on the pitcher’s side and at this point, he had officially become the greatest baseball player in history on both sides of the ball.

The Yankees won neither World Series over that two-year deal (one was won by 2021 expansion team, the Bluebirds). After that, he and the Yankees continued to agree to several short term contracts to finish out his career, during which they pulled out another championship in 2037. By that point, a 50-year old Nunez was still on the roster and a good hitter, but very much a part time player, and hadn’t thrown more than 20 innings in four years.

He finally retired at the end of the 2041 season at the age of 54, with over 30 years of MLB service time under his belt. In total, Nunez finished his career with 11 World Series rings, 14 MVPs, 12 Cy Youngs, 17 Gold Gloves, and 20 All-Star Games.

I’ll leave you with this: on a player’s page on OOTP, next to their picture, it has little icons for all the awards they won over their career. Here is Gleyber Torres’, who had a Hall of Fame career of his own (he signed with the Oklahoma City Bluebirds in 2034 in case you’re wondering about the hat/logo):

Here’s Nunez:

Pretty good.