Road to Release 4: Making History with OOTP 11

battists · 03-21-2010, 10:44 AM

Road to Release 4: Making history - What you can do with OOTP 11! (by forum member Rasnell)

Today's RTR comes courtesy of Roger Snell, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of "Root for the Cubs: Charlie Root & the 1929 Chicago Cubs". Road to Release articles are viewed by potential new customers as well as veterans, and Roger wanted to talk a bit about what he loves so much about OOTP. So, this RTR focuses on the possibilities of OOTP as a whole, and not so much about features that are new to OOTP 11! (Never fear, more new feature stuff will be coming soon!)

Making -- and writing -- your own history
Here's why I love simming history in OOTP. In real life, we always start spring training full of hope for our team. But the season becomes more like endurance or long suffering (especially if you're a Reds or Cub fan); every fan thinks they could do better. OOTP lets you prove it. I grew up with the Big Red Machine, spoiled into thinking Cincinnati would always stay near the top of the baseball world as the oldest franchise in history. Fans of similar small-market teams like the Orioles, Royals, and Pirates probably wonder what happened to them since the 1960s and 1970s. Two months after the Reds won the 1975 World Series, MLB arbitrator Pete Seitz ruled that Andy Messersmith was a free agent, rejecting the reserve clause for the first time in baseball history. As the Reds began their pursuit of their second World Series title in 1976, a court upheld free agency. The real world provides historic examples of the challenges of running a successful baseball franchise, and OOTP lets you tackle these challenges.

After the free agency decision, baseball payrolls and small-market team finances would never be the same. Trades now were not for talent alone; small team owners had to dump salaries and give up on popular veterans even when they were hitting their peak performance, simply because they could not afford them. Older fans of the Orioles, Pirates, Reds and Royals remember how great their franchises were before this landmark decision. Small-market teams have spent decades trying to deal with the new rules of free agency. Even teams with large amounts of cash like the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers cannot dominate year after year because of all the variables and complexities of modern baseball. If they don't sign the best and highest-paid player, someone else will. Even if you have deep pockets, a single lengthy injury can change the course of a season.

All of this is in OOTP. It's possible that your Cal Ripken will suffer a career-ending injury. The same variables could mean that Lou Gehrig and Ray Chapman live out long careers and you see exactly what Ted Williams could have done without military service interruptions for World War II and Korea.

I like to start my own historic sims with the 1977 Reds. I graduated from high school that year; it was the end of childhood and of my beloved Big Red Machine. They were dominating the decade of the 1970s and had just won consecutive World Series titles in 1975 and 1976. Free agency made it impossible to hold the team together. Pete Rose, George Foster, Tony Perez, and Don Gullett would individually turn other teams into victors for the next five seasons because small-market Cincinnati could not afford them. And how do you finally let go of Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, and Johnny Bench as they age? For the next 33 years and counting, the Reds would only have one more dominant season. OOTP gives me the chance to see if I could do better.

My other great love is the 1929 Chicago Cubs. I feel like I know the players personally, having spent years of research and hundreds of hours interviewing Della Root Arnold, the 91-year-old daughter of Charlie Root, for my current book, "Root for the Cubs: Charlie Root and the 1929 Chicago Cubs." (And Babe Ruth does not call his shot in 1932 -- in real life or in OOTP).

My favorite new feature in OOTP 11 is the notes feature that was mentioned in an earlier RTR. But did you know that you can also add notes to players just by right-clicking on their name? You write the headline and story and the link to the player is automatically created! Even better, the headline and story also automatically appear and are tracked on the new Manager Notes page. You can also enter team notes directly on this new manager page. Markus intended this new feature to allow you to create reminders that pop up on key dates in the game. But you can also use it to write your own history of the team and your players.

Can you do better with your favorite team?
So, can you knock off big-market teams like the Red Sox and Yankees with your stingy owner's budget? (The owner has a name, personality, and goals that could lead to your firing -- all new in OOTP 11.) Will you bring the Cubs a championship no fan has tasted since 1908? Do you have the best scouts? How accurate are their reports about the high school kid entering the draft? Even if you win the bonus baby in the draft, can you afford to sign him, or will he reject anything you offer? OOTP 11 surpasses anything else on the market because of its depth and comprehensiveness. No other game comes close to modeling the front office complexities of waivers, the Rule 5 draft, bonus babies, having to dump payroll, and being saddled with an aging Hall of Famer who doesn't know his career is done.

Best of all, you do not have to spend hundreds of dollars for season disks. The entire history of every player in baseball is in the game.

Most depth of any baseball sim on the market
Like many of us, I've owned all of the competition -- Strat-O-Matic, Diamond Mind Baseball, Action PC Baseball, Microleague on an old Atari 800 XL, Earl Weaver, Tony LaRussa, PureSim. Each has its own strengths. No baseball sim on the market today has the depth, sim speed, or challenge of career play that can follow the entire history of baseball like OOTP. OOTP offers the depth and rewarding learning curve of chess. But it can be customized to make it as quick and simple as checkers, too. The global settings and rules also are redesigned in new tabs that make it easier to decide just how "real" you want your baseball empire to be.

.

You can turn off arbitration, the Rule 5 draft, coaches, scouts, injuries, or player development variables and just play a good, old-fashioned game of baseball. You can even set the draft so your favorite players are drafted to your favorite team just like history and turn off trades so you're playing with the actual rosters that you grew up with.

It's a numbers game
The historical sim is the deepest, most comprehensive on the market. And so are the stats. Unlike other baseball text sims, you don't need to leave the main game screens to switch to a database or text report. It's accessible directly from the player, team, or league views, often just a click away. There are several new features that add to the statistical depth and detail: Real vs. sim stat comparisons so that you can see how closely league averages matched history in several categories in each season of your sim. A built-in historic recalculator will continually try to pull these averages into line with history, but you even have the option to customize the settings yourself, using this new stat report as the basis for your changes.

Opening Day is Approaching; Preorder OOTP 11 Today!
Out of the Park Baseball 11 will arrive close to the same time your favorite team starts Opening Day 2010. You'll even have the real 2010 rosters (including the minors, top prospects and real contracts) without paying an extra penny. See if you can run your front office any better in the deepest, most comprehensive baseball history sim on the market. Out of the Park Baseball 11 - The Grand Slam of Baseball Simulation Games! Preorder your copy before the official release!

Preorder now for Windows/Mac or for Linux!

Previous Road to Release Articles
If you missed one of the previous RTR articles, here are some quick links for you:

bubba22plus · 03-21-2010, 10:56 AM

Looking good....

Also, First!

Syd Thrift · 03-21-2010, 01:43 PM

I am liking the alternate usage of the managerial notes. I tried to use the player histories to add in some history of my own (particularly since I tend to run in God mode and as such don't like to spend the several days that it takes to sign a free agent (generally a scrub with no minor league affiliation anyway)), but that screen has always been a little laggy and too annoying to write in. Perhaps that's something that can be looked at?

Anyway, enough RTR plz give me the completed, bug-free game in an hour.

Jeffy25 · 03-21-2010, 03:35 PM

very cool! and thank you

bosunmate · 03-21-2010, 10:23 PM

Being mainly a Historical month to month simmer, I am pumped.

RamMan12 · 03-22-2010, 07:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Anyway, enough RTR plz give me the completed, bug-free game in an hour.

lol I second that.

Malleus Dei · 03-22-2010, 01:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by battists

You can even set the draft so your favorite players are drafted to your favorite team just like history and turn off trades so you're playing with the actual rosters that you grew up with.

Except for the fact that some of those rosters were built by trades, and few of them were devoid of traded players...

JackRules1 · 03-23-2010, 01:34 PM

Thanks for a very nice write-up from a true fan of the game (actually, both games).

03-21-2010, 10:44 AM	#1 (permalink)
battists OOTP Developments Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 17,189 Blog Entries: 7 Thanks: 31 Thanked 776x in 220 posts	Road to Release 4: Making History with OOTP 11 Road to Release 4: Making history - What you can do with OOTP 11! (by forum member Rasnell) Today's RTR comes courtesy of Roger Snell, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of "Root for the Cubs: Charlie Root & the 1929 Chicago Cubs". Road to Release articles are viewed by potential new customers as well as veterans, and Roger wanted to talk a bit about what he loves so much about OOTP. So, this RTR focuses on the possibilities of OOTP as a whole, and not so much about features that are new to OOTP 11! (Never fear, more new feature stuff will be coming soon!) Making -- and writing -- your own history Here's why I love simming history in OOTP. In real life, we always start spring training full of hope for our team. But the season becomes more like endurance or long suffering (especially if you're a Reds or Cub fan); every fan thinks they could do better. OOTP lets you prove it. I grew up with the Big Red Machine, spoiled into thinking Cincinnati would always stay near the top of the baseball world as the oldest franchise in history. Fans of similar small-market teams like the Orioles, Royals, and Pirates probably wonder what happened to them since the 1960s and 1970s. Two months after the Reds won the 1975 World Series, MLB arbitrator Pete Seitz ruled that Andy Messersmith was a free agent, rejecting the reserve clause for the first time in baseball history. As the Reds began their pursuit of their second World Series title in 1976, a court upheld free agency. The real world provides historic examples of the challenges of running a successful baseball franchise, and OOTP lets you tackle these challenges. After the free agency decision, baseball payrolls and small-market team finances would never be the same. Trades now were not for talent alone; small team owners had to dump salaries and give up on popular veterans even when they were hitting their peak performance, simply because they could not afford them. Older fans of the Orioles, Pirates, Reds and Royals remember how great their franchises were before this landmark decision. Small-market teams have spent decades trying to deal with the new rules of free agency. Even teams with large amounts of cash like the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers cannot dominate year after year because of all the variables and complexities of modern baseball. If they don't sign the best and highest-paid player, someone else will. Even if you have deep pockets, a single lengthy injury can change the course of a season. All of this is in OOTP. It's possible that your Cal Ripken will suffer a career-ending injury. The same variables could mean that Lou Gehrig and Ray Chapman live out long careers and you see exactly what Ted Williams could have done without military service interruptions for World War II and Korea. I like to start my own historic sims with the 1977 Reds. I graduated from high school that year; it was the end of childhood and of my beloved Big Red Machine. They were dominating the decade of the 1970s and had just won consecutive World Series titles in 1975 and 1976. Free agency made it impossible to hold the team together. Pete Rose, George Foster, Tony Perez, and Don Gullett would individually turn other teams into victors for the next five seasons because small-market Cincinnati could not afford them. And how do you finally let go of Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, and Johnny Bench as they age? For the next 33 years and counting, the Reds would only have one more dominant season. OOTP gives me the chance to see if I could do better. My other great love is the 1929 Chicago Cubs. I feel like I know the players personally, having spent years of research and hundreds of hours interviewing Della Root Arnold, the 91-year-old daughter of Charlie Root, for my current book, "Root for the Cubs: Charlie Root and the 1929 Chicago Cubs." (And Babe Ruth does not call his shot in 1932 -- in real life or in OOTP). My favorite new feature in OOTP 11 is the notes feature that was mentioned in an earlier RTR. But did you know that you can also add notes to players just by right-clicking on their name? You write the headline and story and the link to the player is automatically created! Even better, the headline and story also automatically appear and are tracked on the new Manager Notes page. You can also enter team notes directly on this new manager page. Markus intended this new feature to allow you to create reminders that pop up on key dates in the game. But you can also use it to write your own history of the team and your players. Can you do better with your favorite team? So, can you knock off big-market teams like the Red Sox and Yankees with your stingy owner's budget? (The owner has a name, personality, and goals that could lead to your firing -- all new in OOTP 11.) Will you bring the Cubs a championship no fan has tasted since 1908? Do you have the best scouts? How accurate are their reports about the high school kid entering the draft? Even if you win the bonus baby in the draft, can you afford to sign him, or will he reject anything you offer? OOTP 11 surpasses anything else on the market because of its depth and comprehensiveness. No other game comes close to modeling the front office complexities of waivers, the Rule 5 draft, bonus babies, having to dump payroll, and being saddled with an aging Hall of Famer who doesn't know his career is done. Best of all, you do not have to spend hundreds of dollars for season disks. The entire history of every player in baseball is in the game. Most depth of any baseball sim on the market Like many of us, I've owned all of the competition -- Strat-O-Matic, Diamond Mind Baseball, Action PC Baseball, Microleague on an old Atari 800 XL, Earl Weaver, Tony LaRussa, PureSim. Each has its own strengths. No baseball sim on the market today has the depth, sim speed, or challenge of career play that can follow the entire history of baseball like OOTP. OOTP offers the depth and rewarding learning curve of chess. But it can be customized to make it as quick and simple as checkers, too. The global settings and rules also are redesigned in new tabs that make it easier to decide just how "real" you want your baseball empire to be. . You can turn off arbitration, the Rule 5 draft, coaches, scouts, injuries, or player development variables and just play a good, old-fashioned game of baseball. You can even set the draft so your favorite players are drafted to your favorite team just like history and turn off trades so you're playing with the actual rosters that you grew up with. It's a numbers game The historical sim is the deepest, most comprehensive on the market. And so are the stats. Unlike other baseball text sims, you don't need to leave the main game screens to switch to a database or text report. It's accessible directly from the player, team, or league views, often just a click away. There are several new features that add to the statistical depth and detail: Real vs. sim stat comparisons so that you can see how closely league averages matched history in several categories in each season of your sim. A built-in historic recalculator will continually try to pull these averages into line with history, but you even have the option to customize the settings yourself, using this new stat report as the basis for your changes. Opening Day is Approaching; Preorder OOTP 11 Today! Out of the Park Baseball 11 will arrive close to the same time your favorite team starts Opening Day 2010. You'll even have the real 2010 rosters (including the minors, top prospects and real contracts) without paying an extra penny. See if you can run your front office any better in the deepest, most comprehensive baseball history sim on the market. Out of the Park Baseball 11 - The Grand Slam of Baseball Simulation Games! Preorder your copy before the official release! Preorder now for Windows/Mac or for Linux! Previous Road to Release Articles If you missed one of the previous RTR articles, here are some quick links for you: Road to Release 1: The Interface Tutorial Road to Release 2: Player Comparison, Manager Notes, and Single Game Records Road to Release 3: Drafting realism like you've never seen before! __________________ Buy our games! \|\| Follow us on Twitter \|\| Follow us on Facebook! OOTP Knowledge Base \|\| Get Technical Support Note: I am currently on hiatus from my OOTP Developments duties. If you need help, please go through the Support Central link above!

03-21-2010, 10:56 AM	#2 (permalink)
bubba22plus All Star Reserve Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Equestria Posts: 794 Thanks: 43 Thanked 51x in 46 posts	Looking good.... Also, First! __________________ "Keikaku Doori..."

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03-21-2010, 03:35 PM	#4 (permalink)
Jeffy25 Major Leagues Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 448 Thanks: 62 Thanked 23x in 16 posts	very cool! and thank you

03-21-2010, 10:23 PM	#5 (permalink)
bosunmate All Star Starter Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Canada Posts: 1,138 Thanks: 308 Thanked 56x in 28 posts	Being mainly a Historical month to month simmer, I am pumped.

03-23-2010, 01:34 PM	#8 (permalink)
JackRules1 Minors (Double A) Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: New Durham, NH Posts: 190 Thanks: 56 Thanked 23x in 16 posts	Thanks for a very nice write-up from a true fan of the game (actually, both games).