(There is a new post updating the list for 2016. Notes on 2015: Wright did not make an MLB appearance, Hawkins planned to retire after the season)

The competition to become the last active Major League Baseball player who appeared in the Nintendo 64 game MLB Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. took a huge leap forward this offseason with the retirement of half the remaining field.

Gone are Derek Jeter, Paul Konerko, Jason Giambi, Raul Ibanez and Bobby Abreu.  That brings the number of retired players in the game to 794 and leaves us with just five.

Still active:
-Alex Rodriguez
-David Ortiz
-Bartolo Colon
-Latroy Hawkins
-Jamey Wright

That’s it.  Really it’s remarkable that any of these guys are still around given the fact that the average season the retired players last appeared in an MLB game was 2003 (2002.994962 to be exact).

ARod has the best contractual chance to be the last man standing since he’s currently signed through 2017.  None of the other guys has a contract past this season, except for the team options Boston has for Ortiz in 2016 and 2017.  Jamey Wright at the moment I write this is in limbo having just been released by the Rangers in the final days of spring training.

Last year I put my money on Ortiz, but somehow I think it would be really fitting if ARod was our final guy.  I’ll secretly root for Colon though, since I’d like to see him pitching — and mainly hitting — until at least 2025.

I have a spreadsheet to keep track of all of this, so I can share some other interesting tidbits from the data set.

Of the five guys remaining, two of them were actually teammates in the video game:

In addition to the final season each guy played in, I also track the last uniform they were wearing at the time.  I added up the total number of what I’m calling “last stop” players for each franchise from 1998-2014.  The teams employing the most guys in their final year in the majors have a lot in common:

You see at the top big market teams that spent a lot of money in free agency as they made the playoffs often, followed by a group that spent money for brief, mild success and a lot of heartache.

You can also pretty well guess the teams that rank at the bottom of this list, employing younger, cheaper guys and not those in their final season:

This group with a few of the lowest spenders in the league has won two World Series titles since 1998.  The top five won the championship eight times (obviously not a causal link, and the three Yankees’ World Series in the first three years of the set really skew it).

The only teams to win the World Series without a single player from the video game are the 2012 Giants and the 2014 Giants.

It will be interesting to see how many guys we lose after this year.  I would predict three, setting up an epic two-man fight to the finish between ARod and Big Papi as they DH their way to glory.

And in case you want to see some of these guys match up, here’s ARod hitting into a fielder’s choice against Hawkins:

BONUS VIDEO: Griffey using the perks of having his own game (and a simple cheat code) to call his shot off Hawkins: