Out of the Park Baseball 24 continues a legacy of reimagining league history and being so accurate even MLB teams want their own custom OOTP build.
While the biggest baseball video game in the landscape is MLB The Show, the game professional Major League Baseball teams keep coming back to is actually Out of the Park Baseball. For more than two decades, it has set the standard for baseball strategy gaming. In that push toward innovation, Out of the Park Developments has built a game that is both beloved and influenced by key aspects of the real-world counterpart it’s simulating.
Meanwhile, that drive for accuracy and innovation has influenced the Historic League mode in a way that allows players to ask important questions about just how different the history of this sport could’ve been. We had the chance to speak to Rich Grisham, director of business development at Com2uS, about exactly how Out of the Park Baseball 24 is continuing a legacy this franchise has built over nearly a quarter of a century.
In this interview you will learn:
- Why even MLB teams use Out of the Park Baseball
- How custom builds requested by the MLB have influenced new features
- What could’ve happened if baseball history had been different
- How gaming continues to illuminate the history of the Negro Leauges
OOTP 24 is literally what the MLB pros play
One of the slogans for OOTP 24, and not one that’s necessarily new this year, is “play what the pros play.” It sounds like great marketing, but there’s more truth to it than most players may realize. OOTP has been going strong for some time, but OOTP Developments only attached official MLB partnership and licensing in 2016.
Since that integration, the game has pushed more and more in recent years for accuracy on every level. While OOTP might not boast the same graphics quality players see in something like MLB The Show 23, this vehicle is more about the engine than the paint job. Real-world MLB teams have used it as an invaluable tool, and Grisham spoke to us about some of the ways different clubs have used it.
“We have relationships with a number of Major League Baseball clubs, and they’re all different, right? Sometimes we have conversations with people in the organizations a few times a year,” Grisham explained. “Sometimes a couple years go by and the only conversation is ‘Hey, when you guys have the update, could you let us know?’
“Teams use the game in different ways for very different things. Some of the teams use the game to almost do a little bit of scouting, right? These teams all have the best scouting information in the world, but what you can do with Out of the Park is you can sort of look ahead and say ‘oh, who’s on this team’s Triple-A and Double-A? If they were playing, what would their numbers look like?’ So, it’s almost like just an easy way to scout and sort of see what a player might look like.”
OOTP 24 once again brings full licensing for both MLB and Minor League Baseball, and having that level of accuracy is crucial. While a simulation is still only an estimate of how things might go and not necessarily a true prediction, the data it provides allows MLB personnel to make better-informed decisions. Anything that teams can do in order to be better prepared could make the difference in a crucial game, and Out of the Park Baseball is one tool teams have found plenty of use for.
“Other teams use it for coaching staff reps. In preparation for a game, they’ll load up a scenario and be like ‘Alright, it’s the seventh inning. It’s a getaway day. We know we ‘ve only got three guys in the bullpen that can throw,” Grisham continued. “Now it’s a seventh inning, first and second, one out. Our starting pitcher is tired. What do we want to do here?’ And they go around and everybody gives their feedback and then they press a couple buttons and see what happens.
“Those are just a couple of examples. We have, it’s an occasional, but it’s a regular feedback loop from different people. Sometimes it’s the manager of a club. Sometimes it’s someone in the front office. Sometimes it’s from the scouting department. We get information back from all these different folks, and we have been able to give modified versions of our game to a couple of different teams based upon what they said would help them do some analysis that they like to do. And ultimately some of those things make their way back into the game. We also have to balance it with [the fact that] it is a video game and it needs to be fun, and if you make something too complex or too difficult, that actually winds up being a negative.”
Negro Leagues integration with Historic League lets players rewrite baseball history
One of the biggest new additions to MLB The Show 23 was the introduction of Storylines focusing on some of the biggest stars from the Negro Leagues era. Sony San Diego’s work has been top notch, and the integrated interviews with Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick are a must-see for every baseball fan. However, they’re only a small snapshot into that era.
While that move is a recent one for MLB The Show, integration of the Negro Leagues has actually been in place for OOTP since the release of OOTP 16, the first game which also included official MLB licensing. Grisham spoke to us about how players can experience and interact with the Negro Leagues in OOTP 24, and ultimately how different baseball might have looked in another (better) world.
“You can just play the Negro Leagues as they were with the players and the teams [of that era], and you’ve been able to do that for years,” he said. “You can also basically say ‘You know what, I’m gonna right the wrong and I’m going to allow all the guys that were on the Negro League teams into the Major Leagues way before Jackie Robinson changed the world in 1947.’ So you can go back and start a season in the 20s and say, ‘I’m gonna remove the color barrier and I’m gonna make all of these guys free agents and just have either myself place them on teams or have the AI draft them.’”
That ability to “right the wrong” is a powerful one, even if it’s only being done in a “what if” situation. While we can’t really go back in time and change the way things went, the absolute least fans can do today is try to understand the history of the sport. Perhaps most importantly, that includes asking questions about what this sport would’ve been without the impacts of racism and segregation.
“I mean, baseball history would be completely different and would be, I don’t even know how to say it other than just saying it would be better, right? Like, it would be better. Hands down,” Grisham said. “I love baseball. One of the things I love about baseball is it’s been around for so long, but I have a hard time really enjoying the aspects of the game before 1947. And I’m not trying to sound like I’m grandstanding. It really just comes down to education.
“The last few years in particular, I’ve read a bunch. I’ve read Hank Aaron’s great autobiography ‘I Had A Hammer,’ which was really enlightening to me. If you don’t read or you don’t research, you might think that when Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey broke the color barrier in 1947, everything got great, right? No. Minority players had a miserable experience for 10,15, 20 years after the fact, if not longer.”
Learning about the challenges African-American players faced before and after the color barrier was broken has altered the way Grisham views baseball history.
“It blows my mind when I’m reading that Henry Aaron and Willie Mays couldn’t stay at the same hotel as the rest of the guys on the team, or that there were quotas. You could only have so many African-American ballplayers on your team,” he said. “I also didn’t realize that the National League was much better about bringing African-American players and minority players into the fold than the American League was for a long time.
“I do have a harder time now than ever sort of looking at [MLB] teams from the 20s and 30s and thinking to myself these were the best teams and the best players, ‘cause they weren’t the best players and they weren’t the best teams. They were just what was on the field at the time.”
OOTP 24 allows fans to see for themselves how differently things could’ve gone. While some of the early age MLB stars might’ve still risen to the top, the reality is that many others wouldn’t have without a thinner league that excluded better players based solely on systemic racism.
How changing the playoff format in OOTP shakes up the early days of baseball
While one of the big things you can do with the Historic League is integrating the Negro Leagues stars into the MLB, another big opportunity to interrogate baseball history comes with the ability to change the playoff rules. The differences between baseball a century ago and today are massive, and Grisham spoke to us about how applying modern rule changes to the past could have massively altered the earliest days of the sport.
“For 80% of the history of baseball, the top three or four teams were the only teams who had any opportunity to win a championship. Now that’s completely different,” he explained. “You can be the Astros of last year and be the number one team in the league and win the pennant, or you can be the Phillies who snuck into the playoffs on the last day of the regular season and won the pennant.”
OOTP allows fans to see how things might have played out in an alternate reality where the rules were different and segregation didn’t exist.
“We’ve gone back and just for fun, we said ‘what if we had the 2023 rules in 1927?’ Well, yeah, the Yankees still won the World Series a lot, but not nearly as often when we run it. Using those things, the history of baseball would be completely different,” Grisham said. “The Yankees would not have won as many World Series. The Cardinals would not have won nearly as many World Series because the opportunities for them to be knocked off would be exponentially higher.
“That’s just another one of the examples of how you can use the game to see interesting things, trends that would or would not have happened. Same thing with bringing in the Negro League players. What would baseball have looked like? It’s not saying here’s what would’ve happened, but it’s saying here’s what could’ve happened. The more times that you would run it, the tendencies go in one direction or another.”
These are just a few of the possibilities that players have at their disposal when they dive into Out of the Park Baseball 24. The longtime baseball strategy sim released their latest installment back on March 24, 2023 for PC, Mac, and Linux. More details about gameplay and this year’s new features can be found in our OOTP 24 review.
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