Out Of The Park Baseball

Is it welcome in the sim community?

Out Of The Park Baseball

I’m not sure if this topic will be greeted with derision or cheers. Here goes nothing.

If you venture away from the Delphi world of baseball sims, you’ll find that most people don’t play Strat-O-Matic, APBA, Dynasty League Baseball, or anything similar.

Our world is a pretty small and limited one. We tend to know each other well — sometimes on a first name basis.

Jerry Garcia once characterized the Grateful Dead by saying that “we're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” I think the same applies to baseball sims. Most people don’t care much for these games. However, those of us who have bought in wind up so interested and so obsessed with them that we tend to spend significant portions of our lives involved with them.

Now, there’s occasional animosity among our group. Supporters of Strat-O-Matic and APBA have been at loggerheads for over 50 years now (but don’t look too closely; if you do, you’ll realize that the most rabid supporters are fans of both games). People have their own favorite games, and discussions of poor customer service and long shipping times frequently devolve into shouting matches and flame wars.

But there’s one game that really seems to bring out a lot of opposition in people.

That would be Out Of The Park Baseball.

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The Game We Love To Hate

If you head over to Reddit — a forum that is indeed used by millions of people, though I know some of my followers laugh every time I mention it — go over to the /r/baseball sub and search for “simulator.”

What you’ll find there are popular posts like this:

Or this:

There’s also this candidate for Replay Reviews:

And so on.

What won’t you find there?

You won’t find links to carefully written and documented replays on Delphi Forums.

You won’t find any mentions of games like Season Ticket Baseball, Fourth Street Baseball, and the like.

You might find an occasional reference to APBA or Strat-O-Matic, though it will likely be combined with some sort of overture to OOTP.

Now, I’m not convinced that the animosity many traditional sim fans have towards comes merely because the game is popular. I know that many people in the community consider OOTP to be unrealistic.

I’ve got my own experiences with that. If you check out my “secret” 1986 Mets Time Travel save on YouTube, you’ll quickly notice that the Mets are stealing bases at a record setting pace. OOTP 24 apparently has an issue with stolen bases that allows the human manager to steal them at will.

But we do need to get with the times. After all, a baseball game that looks like this:

Is probably more likely to win over the hearts and minds of young people than a game that looks like this:

What do you think?

Comments are open to all on this post.