When people ask me to name my favorite baseball team, I always tell them it’s the Seattle Mariners. But that’s a lie. For the past 25 years, I’ve harbored a secret love affair with another baseball team: the Maine Lobster, née the Pittsburgh Eagles, the much-beleaguered baseball team I manage in my long-running Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) league.
For most other fandoms, the idea that you have been playing a game continuously for a quarter-century with the same core group of people – watching them grow old, get married, and have children – is a level of dedication that borders on the fanatical. So it says a lot about the Out of the Park Developments community that CEO Rich Grisham doesn’t even bat an eye when I share my personal history with his team’s game.
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“Out of the Park Baseball can absolutely be a lifestyle,” Grisham said. “It absolutely can. And I have had more than a few people tell me, ‘I used to be a member of a country club. Now I spend my time in Out of the Park Baseball.’”
Out of the Park Baseball & Finding Magic in Math
Of course, it might help to explain what, exactly, I’ve spent the past 25 years doing. OOTP is not a game where you select every pitch or manage every at-bat; instead, you take on the role of the General Manager for a current, historical, or fictional baseball team.
You’re tasked with assembling a roster, building out an international scouting department, and doing any one of the thousand things you need to do to be successful in real-life baseball. Think of it as a franchise in Madden NFL where you simulate each game, or, for the oldheads, a digital adaptation of Strat-O-Matic Baseball.
“Our game is just a really, really highly optimized representation of baseball, both the historical what if and the future, what could happen where you get to make your decisions and choices,” Grisham explained. “But it doesn’t depend on your ability to move sticks around quickly or press buttons very quickly.”
Because of baseball’s unique nature – it presents itself as a team sport but is best understood as a series of one-on-one outcomes – baseball has always lent itself well to statistical analysis. Its most recent evolution revolves around Statcast data, baseball’s real-time tracking system that measures the mechanics of baseball outcomes in exact increments, such as hitters’ swing paths and outfielders’ first-step speed.
Whereas fans used to argue about home runs and batting averages, now people can – and do – build their fantasy teams around the promise of bat speed and exit velocity. And all of that translates to OOTP as well. You can choose to evaluate players based on traditional scouting reports or lean heavily into advanced metrics to determine the kind of players you want to build your roster around.
“We are serving the entire spectrum of baseball fans, from the most casual to the most detailed,” Grisham added. “We obviously lean into the highly analytical data, which was where the Statcast stuff came in, but we had to find the right way to make it happen without burdening fans with more than they would want.”
Honoring Baseball’s History
Because of its prowess as a simulation tool, OOTP also gives contemporary fans an opportunity to engage with the game’s history directly. For Grisham, one of the most powerful parts of OOTP is the ability it gives fans to revisit different periods in baseball, starting a new franchise with a specific team and year.
“They love being able to say, man, what if Dwight Gooden had stayed with the Mets for his whole career?” Grisham explained. “Or what if Ted Williams had not had to go fight in two different wars when he was at the height of his powers? Or what if Satchel Paige had been able to pitch his entire career in the major leagues?”
It is this last what-if that hits the hardest. Like any American endeavor, baseball also has a long and storied history – though one checkered by segregation and scandal. Baseball did not break the color barrier until Jackie Robinson’s first game in 1947, but it would still take centuries for the sport to fully recognize the accomplishments of players in the Negro leagues.
In 2021, Baseball-Reference – perhaps the most popular public archive for baseball history – integrated Negro league statistics with early Major League Baseball records, finally uniting baseball’s previously fractured analytics history.
And OOTP wasn’t far behind. “We have invested a significant amount of time and resources in improving our Negro League representation just in the last year or two as a whole lot more data has become available,” Grisham said. In fact, OOTP has a person on their staff dedicated to developing the game’s Negro League history – no small achievement for a small development team.
“That’s one of the things that sets ourselves apart from really any other baseball experience,” Grisham adds. “Not just that we have the history, but it’s a living history, and we do need to improve it every year in terms of the depth of it.”
Looking Ahead to Baseball’s Future
But to hear Grisham say it, some of the best forecasts of OOTP are the ones rooted in pure fantasy. Take, for example, high school athletes. Like other proprietary forecast models, many fans use OOTP to simulate the upcoming season or postseason and get a sense of what the future holds for their team. But because so much scouting information is available about amateur baseball players, Grisham often hears from OOTP subscribers that the players in each year’s rookie draft class have already lived a thousand lifetimes in the game.
“One of my favorite things is whenever the MLB draft happens, there’s always people who immediately jump,” Grisham said. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, that guy’s in my Hall of Fame.’”
And that shared fictional history can be especially potent when it comes in the shape of an online league. OOTP is a popular game to play solo, but online leagues are also common, allowing a group of players to take ownership of different real-world or fictitious franchises and keep baseball’s history rolling forward. In previous iterations of my current league, the commissioner would import baseball’s real-world draft class into the game each season, meaning that every second or third draft class would be populated with real names.
“When you have an online league with your friends, then it takes that, and it becomes a new society, a new community where those 20 people know the names of these guys who might’ve been real players, might not have been real players, might get drafted in 2029,” Grisham adds. “Now some of them are in the Hall of Fame, some of them are massive busts, somebody gave up a walk-off home run to lose the World Series. All of those things happen, and it’s just such a magical thing.”
Getting Started With OOTP 27
No matter where you sit on the spectrum of baseball fans – from developing a full alternative history for the league to just stubbornly resimulating 1995 until the Seattle Mariners finally win the World Series – each new version of the game is designed to provide a soft landing for new players. While the latest edition of OOTP comes with improvements to both solo and online play, OOTP 27 also highlights some of the best game modes for jumping right in.
One of Grisham’s favorite game modes for new players is the World Baseball Classic, built on the World Cup-style national tournament that occurs every four years. Like its real-life counterpart, World Baseball Classic mode lets players focus more on team construction than the ins and outs of, say, stadium management.
“When you’re GM of a team, you have a lot of responsibilities that can sound overwhelming,” he explained. “I think the World Baseball Classic is a really fun, really easy-to-understand way for somebody brand new to experience this year’s Out of the Park Baseball.”
But more than anything, Grisham wants baseball fans to know that OOTP is a game where anyone of any age can have a good experience. No matter how complicated or simple you make the rules of your particular franchise, you will be able to succeed based on your passion for the sport.
“I can’t hang with anybody in Call of Duty or Halo or Fortnite anymore. I just can’t,” he explained. “But I can hang with my friends in my online league in Out of the Park Baseball. I can hang because it’s about my baseball smarts, not my ability to press a button at the right time.”
So if you love baseball and video games, but especially if you love baseball and think video games have passed you by, you might enjoy what you find in the latest version of OOTP. Just don’t be surprised if you wake up 25 years from now and find yourself in the greatest parasocial relationship of your life with a fake baseball team. You’ve been warned.
