Out of the Park Baseball 11 picks a winner (and so does PH8)
As you may or may not know, the kind folks at OOTP Developments provided us with a copy of their game to give away to a lucky reader.
That reader was Justyn (or @cyyoung29 on Twitter), and he has hopefully by now installed his game and is off to the races trying to win a World Series with the Cardinals. Congrats Justin!
We also received a review copy of the game, and this weekend we put it through some paces trying to simulate the 2010 season about ten times.
It’s important to note that Out of the Park Baseball is a text simulator, not a replay engine or something along the lines of MLB: The Show. As such, no flashy graphics, and it isn’t always going to generate the results you expect to see.
So with that said, I ran across results ranging from the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series to the Kansas City Royals winning the AL Central to Houston and Pittsburgh duking it out for the NL Central title. It’s not necessarily unrealistic, the simulator just hit on one of those 1-100 odds that time around. In my opinion, it can make the game more fun. It’s also worth noting that this was a straight sim on my part – no lineups were being altered, etc. The AI was in charge of all moves.
Good news – the Cardinals won the division most of the time. Bad news – it wasn’t always easy. Worse news – in one of the simulations they lost to the Cubs in the NLCS (all is still right with the world, the Cubbies lost in the World Series).
I posted the majority of the Cardinals’ stats and minor-league information here:
http://www.pitchershiteighth.com/ootp/html
via the games robust exporting system. I didn’t include player pages or teams other than the Cardinals because it would’ve taken me round-abouts 18 hours to upload everything that the game spit out at me. So, if you get an error page, just hit back to get back to the OOTP pages.
The games have on occasionally been rushed to sale to try and take advantage of the start of the MLB season or other important dates and as with most any game these days, bugs can be found, but the developer is quick to address issues and make his best attempt to squash them – even taking various suggestions from the community for inclusion into the game, some for better some for worse.
That said, I’ve been messing about with OOTP since about version 3 or 4 (save for skipping a version here and there) and have thoroughly enjoyed them all. It is the best text simulator of baseball on the market right now, with a vibrant community that surrounds it. Owners of the game create rosters, logos, fictional game universes, baseball cards, player “faces”, etc for use in the game. The developer is enthusiastic about his product and active in the community.
Please if you have any interest at all, I recommend you check out the OOTP 11 website and take the game for a spin.
Thanks again to the folks at OOTP Dev.
Albert’s Free Swinging
Two days behind, but my latest and greatest is up at Baseball Digest, taking a look at Albert Pujols’ free-swinging ways so far this season.
Take a read and let me know what you think.
Agree? Disagree? Reasons why he’s so wild with the bat this year?
Of course, naturally, as I was writing Sunday, he was in the midst of a three-for-four with a home run.
Baseball Trip of a Lifetime
Finally, a Baseball Bloggers Alliance colleague has taken upon the trip of a baseball fan’s dreams – traveling the MLB map in one season.
Navin Vaswani is attending games all across the country and writing about it at Canada’s The Globe and Mail, in a series called Stealing Home.
Keep tabs on Navin’s trip by reading about his travels at that link above.
I’m jealous…
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Thanks a lot for the link, my good man. I appreciate it. I hope you’re enjoying “Stealing Home.”
Anytime, great stuff. Very jealous.
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