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Breaking My Silence

The newest edition of Out of the Park Baseball’s insanely deep baseball management sim, OOTP 20, has been out for just under a month, and the reviews are, as expected, solid all around. While I’m sure the game is just fine, I don’t see a reason to upgrade. I’m still contemplating and enjoying last year’s edition. As the great Brian Phillips said (of the Football Manager series) you can’t review these games with just a few weeks’ or months’ experience. It's like reviewing Buddhism. Yes, you can do it, but you have to take your time. 

In the spirit of Brian’s Football Manager-simulated Pro Vercelli epic, I’ll be taking over the AA Montgomery Biscuits and (God and algorithms willing) leading them to World Series glory. You might be wondering how that’s possible. But you’d be forgetting that I am the greatest OOTP manager of all time. 

I’ve set up a custom simulation universe in which all 30 major league teams exist with real players and rosters as of opening day 2018 (remember, I’m using last year’s game). All 30 Triple-A teams (International League + Pacific Coast League) have been combined into a single league with randomly generated players. Likewise for all 30 Double-A teams (Eastern, Southern, and Texas Leagues). After each season, the top four teams in each league get promoted up a level and the bottom four get sent down. There’s also a 36-team feeder league with randomly created 18- to 21-year-old players.

Why randomly created players? First, it increases the difficulty level, since I can’t go check Baseball Prospectus for tips on which of my grass-chewing middle infielders to cut and which to keep. But since the AAA and AA leagues were set up as low-prestige “major” leagues in OOTP’s setup wizard, the randomly generated players will be of slightly higher caliber than the real-life farmhands, which should help bring the levels closer to parity, although we don’t want actual parity between the leagues. We want as much chaos as we can get. Double-A San Diego Padres? Major League Hartford Yard Goats? It’s all possible!

If I’ve given myself a slight advantage with the randomly generated players, I’ve tried to make finances a barrier to success. Triple-A teams start with roughly half the budget of big league clubs, with Double-A teams coming in at half again of that - a quarter of an MLB team’s payroll. I’ll be starting at the bottom, taking the Biscuits from the 24th-highest AA budget all the way to the top and beyond - a central Alabama Baseball dynasty. 


Is this the most pointless and self-indulgent thing I’ve done? Possibly! Will we learn anything about real-world baseball from this? Probably not! Will it be fun? Who knows!  
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