This is the opening screen of Inside the Park Baseball (ITP), where you may create a new character and start your career, continue the active career or load a different career.

One of the most important parts in ITP is character creation. The way you set up your character will greatly influence your career path. Step one in creating your character requires you to enter your personal data, select your desired player type (hitter or pitcher) along with a difficulty level and determine at which point you wish to start your career (college or high school player). You will need to spend a certain amount of role-playing points and skill points to shape your on-screen persona, the actual amount determined by your other choices.

The next step is to allocate skill points to your character. Skill points are determined by your choice of the difficulty level at which you choose to play. When you chose 'Easy' difficulty, you'll be allotted 110 points to spend; at a 'Normal' setting, 90 points are available for distribution; and at a 'Hard' difficulty setting, you'll have just 70 points with which to play. The categories in which you spend those skill points will differ, depending upon whether you're working on a hitter or pitcher.

Once you have allocated your skill points, the next step is to equip your character with useful baseball items. ITP features over 300 different items, including bats, batting gloves, gloves, shoes and instructional books. All items with the exception of books immediately boost your skills when used. Some items have disadvantages though: for example bats that increase your power but take away from your ability to make contact. It will be up to you to determine the give and take value of each item prior to making your choices.

The final step is to set up the league in which you will be playing. You may use the default league, or simply import your favorite OOTP 5 league!

Once you have created your character, he will enter the first year player draft. The stud shortstop we created, for example, was selected in the 1st round as the fifth overall pick. And, best of all, he (rather "I") got a nice signing bonus!

This is the main screen of ITP, your virtual baseball town. You will find the following useful places there: your home, the Ballpark, the Sports Store, Larry's Workout Palace, the team Front Office, the Internet Cafe and the Fiddlers Sports bar!

Before we actually take the field for a game, we should schedule our workout program. You may schedule up to four exercises per day. However, be careful not to overdo it; too many push-ups and you may be too exhausted to play!

Welcome to the Sports Store. Spend your hard-earned money here! The sports store gets weekly stock updates, and you can find everything here that a professional baseball player needs. ITP features hundreds of baseball items, but don't expect the famous Wonderboy Bat to be in stock all the time! You may also sell your own equipment here, if you want to replace it.

This is where the money talk takes place and you negotiate your contracts with team officials here. The Front Office is also the place where you can find loads of information about your current organization, like the current roster, projected lineups, statistics and more. In this instance, we check the lineups of the Texas organization: looks like we're hitting 8th in the Double-A lineup.

The internet cafe features the best of the internet, the ITPNET. Here you can visit the online auction house BBay, where you may bid on baseball items or sell your own. Also, the league website is available via the terminals in the café; the league website provides you with every bit of information that you can imagine about the league in which you are playing.

Frustrated about a "0 for 5" night? Stop in at The Fiddlers for some much needed rest and relaxation and improve your mood with a few drinks. But beware; if you lack self-control and drink too much, you will probably have the next 0-fer the coming day. The Fiddlers is the perfect place to meet members of the opposite sex! If you are more concerned about baseball than the ladies, you can also get useful tips from your manager or teammates or ask the team owner for more money because they frequent The Fiddlers, too. One more word of warning: occasionally players from an opposing team show up at the bar. More than one fight has broken out between players at The Fiddlers. Be careful that you don't end up with a broken nose - a high strength rating could help to avoid this!

Welcome home! Here you can get info on everything that is related to your character. Your stats, ratings, awards, equipment - it's all here. Also, this is the place where you can read baseball-related books, an especially important task for pitchers. Also, once you made it to The Show, home is where you can track the price of your rookie card, watching as its value increases or decreases, based upon your performance in the Big Leagues.

Well, now it's time to play some baseball. You have several options when you're at the plate. With a lot of skill and a bit of luck, let's hope our choices result in a 4-4 day! Then again, we were in Fiddlers earlier and had too many beers: maybe we should just hope we get the bat on the ball. Well, now it's time to play some baseball. You have several options when you're at the plate. With a lot of skill and a bit of luck, let's hope our choices result in a 4-4 day! Then again, we were in Fiddlers earlier and had too many beers: maybe we should just hope we get the bat on the ball.

The game is over, and we it appears that we could not even see the pitches. This will teach us to not to unwind too much the night before a game!

During the season, you may find yourself getting important phone calls. This time it is very important: we got traded to Kansas City.

Five years goes by quickly and we've established ourselves as a solid major league ballplayer. Maybe it's time to negotiate a contract extension. But it looks like the owner doesn't want to pay us the money we deserve!

We did not sign the extension, and therefore we find ourselves a free agent here in the off-season. Our player can gather offers from teams that are interested in his services, or he may simply call the GM of other teams to ask for a contract offer! In this case, we decide to return to Texas, our original team.

Time marches on and it's hard to believe that we are approaching the age of 30... time to check our career stats. If we continue this way, the Hall of Fame is a lock! But keep in mind, this career was started in Easy mode. If you have such a career in one of the harder settings, you are really an ITP professional!

This is our trophy case, already filled with some nice hardware. Will we earn an Outstanding Hitter award? Will we get our rookie card value above $1,000 (which is the magical line)? To get the answers to those questions, you'll have to play Inside the Park Baseball!