This ain’t your father’s OOTP.
For the uninitiated, Out of the Park Baseball is a text-based baseball simulator for PC and Mac. It’s been around since 1999, and has progressed from version 1.0 seven years ago through 2005’s version 6.5. The strength of the series has always been the ability to customize the game to realistically simulate almost any league you could conceive of. There has long been a link to the freeware Lahman baseball database that allows importing of any historical season. If that’s not for you, there have always been myriad options for creating your own fictional league. There is also a thriving user community that has developed countless roster sets, add-ons, utilities, logo packs, graphics packs… and on and on. The game has never shipped with real major league rosters because of onerous restrictions and licensing fees MLB and the player’s association levy on developers, but that’s never been a problem since the OOTP community quickly develops excellent third-party major league rosters.
OOTP has always been a simulation that was designed to give you the look and feel of a period of baseball history, real or fictional, as opposed to the exact details of what really happened. You won’t get Frank Robinson hitting 586 homers in his career. He might hit 547, or he might blow out his ACL in AAA and never get a major league at bat. It’s possible BJ Surhoff will get traded at the deadline in 2000, but it’s possible he never even was acquired by the Orioles in the first place. There’s a “fog of war” effect at work, where you know what kind of players and teams you have, but you never quite know how they’ll develop this time around.
In 2005 the Out of the Park series, and its developer Markus Heinsohn, joined forces with London-based Sports Interactive (SI), the creators of the world’s best selling soccer simulation, the Championship Manager series. Heinsohn announced shortly thereafter that the next version of OOTP would involve a complete rewrite of the game engine. He was going to author new, cleaner code, use the wealth of knowledge available to him from SI to make for a better user interface, and add many new features. This was a long process, and the game was finally released on May 31st, 2006.
By far the biggest change from OOTP 6.5 to OOTP 2006 is the scope of the simulation. Prior versions were league simulators. You could run the majors from 1903-2067 if you wanted, and have some affiliated minor league teams. But you couldn’t concurrently run the Federal League of 1914-1915. You couldn’t also sim the Japanese League at the same time. You couldn’t have realistic interaction between your 1950s major league simulation and the then-independent Pacific Coast League.
That’s all changed. OOTP 2006 is a baseball universe simulator. There are no limits, beyond the speed and storage capacities of your computer, to how much of the world you can simulate. It is now possible to be an absolute monarch of the entire baseball world, having free reign over the majors, all of the affiliated minors, the Japanese Leagues, the Cuban League, the Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, and Dominican Leagues, and any and all independent leagues such as the Frontier League and the Northern League. The game includes a database of all cities in the world with over 1000 residents, allowing you to set up teams with realistic markets.
While it’s possible to exist as an iron-fisted ruler of the entire baseball world, it is also possible to run a small simulation where you’re a manager of one team in a six-city independent league. Or you could play as the manager of the Orioles’ Aberdeen affiliate, setting lineups but having transactions and rosters managed by the parent club. Or you could just be the commissioner of the National League. The possibilities are nearly endless. In manager mode you progress through your career with the possibility of being fired.
When I began playing around with the game I ran a simulation of the majors from 1954-2000. The individual player statistics were very accurate, the game automatically adjusting league totals so 1968 is a pitcher’s haven, and the 1990s become more homer-dominated. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone and my ham-fisted attempts at expansion in the 1960s went awry – this can be a complex game. I ended up with the Brooklyn Athletics (don’t ask) winning 17 games one year. A later simulation I ran from 1990-2006 went better. I didn’t mess around with the defaults as much, and I got very accurate results. Brian Roberts developed much like real life, just with a little more power. Cal left in mid-career to go play for the Red Sox ($#%$@#$!!!!), and Wade Boggs hit .340.
Starting the game can be a daunting challenge. When you first begin you must set up your universe, picking from the many league combinations mentioned previously, then setting rules such as whether or not to have the DH, how you want free agency to work (if at all), what financial constraints you want to place on your world, roster sizes, and many other options. You’ll want to take your time; many of the initial settings will have far-reaching effects on your world.
Once you get into the game there are still many choices to make. Do you want to simulate history, only occasionally looking back at how your world plays out? There are options to sim weeks, months, years, or even decades at a time. The game will save stats, boxscores, game logs, league histories, and award winners as it goes along. It’s all arranged into a Baseball Reference.com-style almanac and record book that you can dig into at a later time.
Would you rather play out each game? That’s certainly possible, too. OOTP 2006 has introduced a pitch-by-pitch system so a manager or GM can immerse himself down to the level of each pitch thrown, or step back a level and only get the results of each at bat. There are two different in-game screens to choose from, one offering more statistical details.
Oh, those stats. OOTP tracks what can only be described as an obscene number of stats. You could actually simulate 100 years of baseball history, then go back and check to see how Brooklyn’s left fielder hit with runners on in May of 1925. Everything from the basic (singles, doubles, RBI) to the cutting edge (VORP, RC/27) are tracked. And there are options to select the level of detail tracked in case your computer is unable to handle crunching all those numbers.
While this seems like a fantastic game for the hard-core fan, and in most ways it is, the game is not without its flaws. If you’re used to earlier versions of OOTP the interface is very different. It takes many of its design cues from the Championship Manager series, and takes some getting accustomed to. Lots of things you used to do without thinking are in very different places now. It can be frustrating at times.
Real rosters haven’t been fully developed yet. The game ships with fictional players, and for many this detracts from the experience. Nothing is stopping you from importing the 2005 season from the Lahman database and playing through 2006, but full ’06 rosters with real minor leaguers don’t exist yet. One project that is heading in that direction is discussed here.
There are some things that a lot of gamers loved in OOTP 6.5 that are (at least for now) missing in OOTP 2006. The trading block is gone. Some felt that it was too easy to rip off the computer in past versions, and a new system of interacting with the computer GMs has been implemented. At least from the traffic on the OOTP messageboard the reaction to this has been mixed, to say the least. There have been reports of artificial intelligence issues, such as a team signing a $40 million free agent and trading him the next day. There have also been a few comments about in-game problems, such as poor decision making by the computer managers.
I’ve been playing OOTP since 2000, and have frequented the OOTP messageboards for at least that long. Heinsohn is a very accessible developer, and he and other SI people are frequently monitoring and posting along with customers and fans. I don’t play too many other computer games, but I don’t know of anywhere the development team is more in tune with the problems discovered by the customers. This game has its bugs, but the last six years have taught me that the guy in charge is as devoted as anyone to fixing them. Barely a week after release he’d already issued a patch that fixed hundreds of issues, from tiny grammatical errors to major artificial intelligence bugs. Another patch is scheduled for July.
If you’re worried, if you’ve read that the game isn’t quite up to par yet, you may have some legitimate concerns. But if you’re a baseball fan who wants an almost infinitely customizable simulator, able to re-imagine the whole history of the whole universe of the sport I’d give OOTP 2006 a try, warts and all. There’s a free demo that allows you to play a limited amount of time, so you can try it out without risking $35. Download the manual and the game guide.
This has ended up being a very positive review in most respects, but I don’t want anyone to get the impression I’m just being an OOTP fanboy. There are other good baseball simulations out there. If OOTP isn’t to your liking feel free to Google PureSim Baseball, Diamond Mind, or Baseball Mogul. They’re all good games that fill different niches in the market. You may find them more to your taste.
For me, OOTP 2006 has the potential to be the best baseball simulation on the market. It’s pretty darn good right now. Anyway, I’m off to start building my universe, where the Continental League co-exists as a third major alongside the American and National Leagues, there are six teams in New York breaking up the Yanks’ market, there’s a small semi-pro league in Southern Maryland, and a winter league in Greenland, and an independent league that plays only in high-altitude parks in the Rockies, and…
