Devoted to The Game: Reviewing Out of the Park Baseball 22

Have you ever said to yourself, “that person is doing it wrong and I can totally do better?” If you’re a regular visitor and/or commenter on Ordinary Times chances are you are definitely one of those people. Spend 5 minutes on the front page or in the comments and woof. “Someone is wrong on the internet and I must destroy them” is exactly the same as “My [insert favorite baseball team] is owned by and/or run by complete morons and I must destroy them.”

Folks, have I got a game for you. I wanted to do a review of last year’s version of this game, but it dropped as I was converting to remote work and I didn’t have the time to put together what I really wanted to at the time. This is the 22nd year of Out of The Park Baseball (OOTP). I have been playing it since 2009. Since I am  a devotee of this game, I always preorder to get the early access beta, so I have been playing it for a few days before it’s official release. For the purposes of this review, however, I am running the official release version, which came out on March 26.

When I first started playing OOTP, they did not have an MLB or MLBPA license, so every player was Jon Dowd. Many enterprising devotees would painstakingly create the entire MLB player pool and teams and logos as an add-on for that particular release year. By 2016, a license was acquired, so now they’re real-life players, teams, and logos across not just the MLB, but every major league across the world. Yes, even Honkbal Hoofdklasse.

Now, OOTP is basically a juggernaut and THE go-to simulation game for ease of use and accuracy. I am a big fan of sandbox-like games, and the possibilities are pretty much endless here. In a broad sense, you can play classic MLB seasons going back to the 19th century, you can play with today’s rosters, or you have the game generate and populate an entirely fictional league for you to compete in. If you have ever read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., it is like that, but on a computer.

In a narrower sense, you can control team logos, cities, DH, no DH, number of teams, how the playoffs are structured, etc. In this latest version you can design your own ball park, dimensions and all. You can run a baseball team how you want to, right down to ticket prices. Set your own scouting budget, make trades, sign free agents, sign posted international free agents, and so on. It gets a little tedious, but you can even hire, fire, or extend every member of the coaching staff down to the Dominican Summer League affiliate for every club.

I usually opt to play the MLB season a couple of times before creating my conceptually perfect baseball league. I am a glutton for punishment, so I always try the herculean task of running my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Complete with an AI-created Robert Nutting still owning the team and not giving me, as GM and Manager, any money to play with.

Before I get to my run through of the 2021 season, I have a little interlude.

Back in the day, I wrote for a website with a couple of dudes called Tri-State of Mind Baseball. We (attempted) to cover the best of Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio professional baseball. It was mostly Pirates and Indians coverage. There was and still is a podcast, which can be found here.  Unfortunately, the website no longer exists so I can’t link to what was my favorite article that I wrote. During the Pirates particularly awful and record-setting run of 20 straight losing seasons the closest they came to a winning record was in 1997.

I took it upon myself to simulate the 1997 season on OOTP to see if I could get the Pirates “over the hump” as they say. The beauty of OOTP is the ability to “set it and forget it” with a few keystroke or mouse clicks. You can set up a team to autoplay, rather than painstakingly play each game and each at bat, which you CAN also do, right down to bunting (never do this; bunting is dumb and bad), pitching around, shifts, etc. My ground rules for this exercise was to not deal players away in trades and try to faithfully recreate any major transactions from that year. I wasn’t going to go to the microfiche or Baseball Reference and set each and every lineup as the same or anything like that.

Speaking of trades, the AI was always a bit bonkers, something they improve on each year with the game, in this particular version I was getting some absolutely insane trade offers that I had to pinch myself to not take. I’m talking like the Colorado Rockies offered me 1997 NL MVP Larry Walker on several occasions for basically nothing. If the Pirates had gotten that kind of deal in real life, they would have won the division in 1997. Each year and new version of OOTP, the deals offered get more and more realistic and the AI gets more and more stingy. I like it that way.

I autoplayed the whole season save for the Fransciso Cordova-Ricardo Rincon extra inning combined no hitter on July 12, 1997. I am sorry to say I was unable to replicate their success in-game. I don’t even think Cordova made it through the 5th inning. While I did not compete with the Astros for the division up until the last week of the season like the Pirates did in real life, I ended up finishing third with a losing record. The Cardinals won the division after dealing for, you guessed it, Larry Walker.

So for the 2021 Pirates, I wanted to see how the chips may fall this year, only I made a few semi-realistic deals to try and improve the team a little. I signed SP Danny Salazar to a one-year deal for a cool $5.5 Million, and I traded for Chris Taylor to put a little bit of offense in the lineup. I was able to convince the Dodgers to pay 60% of his salary too. He ended up leading the team in home runs with 16. Yeesh. I also made a late-season deal for veteran arm, Wade Miley. None of the deals I made seriously altered the Pirates’ current “core” if you could call it that.

End of season team “home” screen.

Despite my best efforts, and tinkering with the strategy a bit, the team still finished the season 72-90 in last place in the NL Central. The four teams above them have ownership that gives a damn, so this will be the norm for the near future in real life. I have to say though; the Pirates in real life ain’t winning 72 games this year, so I consider myself an MLB-caliber executive.

The playoffs got real interesting. You can keep simming until the following season, doing everything that needs to be done like the Rule 5 Draft, Winter Meetings, Salary Arbitration, and Free Agency. Since I am a moderate MLB-caliber executive, not in the pocket of big labor, I always, always low-ball during arbitration. When your owner only cares about his bottom line, it helps to save a few dollars when you need to go to the trash heap to get players during free agency. A couple million here or a few hundred thousand there. As far as extensions, as in real life, the Pirates get priced out the best players very quickly. Occasionally, I am able to lock in a future star player on a team friendly deal. I tried it with Ke’Bryan Hayes here, and he wasn’t having it.

I forgot to mention that you can do a full on draft, which occurs in July. The game has improved so much that they now can predict future draftees before new, fictional, players are created to populate the league. I am happy to say that I drafted Kumar Rocker, which is what the Pirates should and will do in real life come July. Unless we get another Bryan Bullington scenario. Sigh.

I have not played with the new ball park creator feature as of yet. I do think the improved 3D animations are a nice touch, but they could definitely use further defining. They are a bit stodgy and occasionally the animation will stop and glitch until the end of the play. Bear in mind, you don’t have any control over where the sprites go anyway, so it is only window dressing, When they first started with the 3D animations and ballparks, it was very simple and rudimentary. If the ball got hit, a little sprite would float to the general area on the field. Now, you can “follow the ball” and the little paper doll sprites, a la Baldur’s Gate, move to make plays. All of this of course, is very customizable and the game even gives you the option to scale it back to the now old school 2D in game screen.

in game.

Another feature I have not used is the Perfect Team function. It’s a separate cooperative game you can play with people all over the world. Think of it as a real-time fantasy league, but think like early Magic the Gathering. The game gives you “packs” and you can pull players of varying rarities to fill your team to build a “perfect” team. When they first introduced it, I gave it the ‘ol college try, but I just couldn’t put in the time to really do it. Maybe I will pull out my MLB Showdown card collections and d20 or perhaps a Strat-o-Matic league. There’s no substitute for rolling your own dice and writing your own notations.

The game has vastly improved over the years, the 2017 version was and is still the best version I have ever played. Although, the AI improvements and UI improvements that were made the last couple of years have been great for casual and serious players. My 2021 sim ended with the Chicago White Sox besting the Milwaukee Brewers 4-0 in the World Series. This is a very plausible scenario and really underscores how realistic this game can be.

I have since played through 2022, and I am not pleased to announce that I led the Pirates to yet another 72-90 season. I even splurged on  bigger free agent signings in Mark Canha and Robbie Ray, and the “core” guys had yet another year of development. I have been working through replacing a lot of the coaching staff down on the farm to fit my vision for the team. AI Bob Nutting gave me until the year 2024 to make the playoffs, so like Civilization players…one…more…turn.

If you are interested in giving the game a try, I would direct you to the Out of the Park Developments website. The game can also be purchased on Steam and the App Store. It can even be played on Linux! I will be happy to field questions about the game in the comments, I am sure I missed some features and like music, I can talk baseball all day.