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I know some of you are old enough to remember baseball in the 70's -

The Big Red Machine - With Rose, Bench and Morgan, The swinging A's who dominated the AL in 71,72, 73, 74 with Bando, Campenaris, Rudi and REGGIE. How about the Orioles who went back to back World Series apperances in 69 and 70 with Robinson Brooks and Frank) an Boog Powell

How about Nolan Ryan and his no-hitters. The Pirates with Stargell, Clemente, Sanguillen and the Giants with Mays, McCovey, Marichal and Bobby Bonds

Now some of you are younger and may not have seen these guys play but it was one of the greatest periods in baseball history (IMHO)

The sad thing about running a "historic" league is that you already know what the player has done IRL and the aggravation grows when you run these leagues and players do not perform as they did in real life. This is where RBL comes in. I have no desire to try and be "historically accurate" I am proposing a "What If" -

We can throw records and facts out the window and play with a new sense of "Historic" remaking. Who says that Pete Rose has to get 3000+ hits - Maybe he has a terrible career and Minnie Miniso actually ends up being a hall of famer. That is the fun part I am trying to propose to interested parties....

You manage these stars (draft the future) and you decide what happens - Sound interesting - Sign up.

Go to the Retro Baseball League Forums

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In February of 2012, NOBA had one of the most fascinating inaugural seasons in OOTP 12.  NOBA offered a fast paced five sim a week league that is realistic, competitively balanced, and immersed in transactions and activity.  NOBA experienced simulation experiences that captivated GMs in and outside of the league.  The wait list was long, the competition was fierce, the fingernails were chewed.

In 2013, the NOBA commissioner unexpectedly left the league leaving it to run without any direction or supervision.  After lengthy conversations and requests for a capable commissioner, NOBA suffered the first ever OOTP online league lockout.  GMs put their heads together in an attempt to rediscover the lore and greatness of NOBA and to find “that guy” to take it to the next level of online leagues.  Insert Joe Colosimo.

Joe, an original NOBA GM, took over a once highly regarded league and reinvented NOBA, introducing OOTP online leaguers to NOBA 2.0.  Along with Tony Cepparulo, Joe and the other managers recaptured the original NOBA greatness and then blazed a trail to uncharted territory in online leagues.  With a diligent application process, a steady eye on transactions and activity, a constantly yammering group chat on AIM, and constant communication NOBA 2.0 has once again reached the upper echelon of OOTP online leagues.

Our general managers are a colorful mix of sarcasm, savvy, dazzling wit, creative trading, and constant out of the box thinking.  This blend of gentleman is what keeps NOBA on the forefront of OOTP. They appreciate the thrill of savoring every moment of the league. Need assistance regarding the game?  Fire off your question and wait for multiple answers from all angles.  When Joe declares “sim time” on the group chat page on AIM you can almost hear the GM’s bounce with giddy anticipation.  They respect the agony of going 2-5 and relish their victories with each sim. In NOBA, you earn the right to gleefully mock those you beat, and eat multiple slices of humble pie when your “The Trade of all Trades” goes awry.  NOBA is all knowing.

Currently we are in the midst of the 2016 season where the standings reflect that only a few are out of the running.  To give you an idea about the competitive balance in the league, the past four World Series Champions have been the San Diego Padres, Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, and Los Angeles Angels.  We are in the final phase of having a brand new glistening web site where the functions are limitless.  Want to post a column about how your team is flat out awesome?  The forum is there for you to post away...and be replied to. NOBA is bowing up and the time to get in is now.  There are a few open spots that will be filled shortly and the teams available are the defensive minded Tampa Bay Rays, prospect loaded Houston Astros, prospect loaded Toronto Blue Jays, and the rebuilding Oakland A’s.

It takes more than just a rapid simulation schedule though to thrive. What makes NOBA so special? Take a look for yourself

•           Brand new website with chat room capabilities
•           AIM Chat room where GM’s talk trade and trash
•           Steady communication about what’s going on and coming up within NOBA
•           All-Star and HOF voting
•           A commissioner who is available, active, and adapts to what the league needs
•           Complete GM Freedom. Flourish by YOUR abilities, struggle by YOUR mistakes.
•           GM’s who will help a novice OOTP onliner get accustomed to how the league works.
•           GM’s who will be active and offer assistance
•           90% export rate for each sim...that equates to constant activity
 

NOBA is the league for those who want to go head on into a challenge with a smile on their face.  It’s fun when you’re in first place.  It’s frustrating when your small market owner wont open up his wallet in January.  It’s hair-pullingly infuriating when teams over pay for a player “because they can”.  It’s painfully glorious when you come out of nowhere to earn the Wild Card in September, only to lose in the LCS.  NOBA has everything for every GM.  I’d tell you more but I have to get back to my team..the Yankees just outbid me on a 38 year old watermelon tossing free agent pitcher because they knew I needed one for my playoff push..damn you Evil Empire.

GM testimonials:

“National Online Baseball Association (NOBA) is a league that delivers fast results. At five sims per week, each progressing seven days, you’ll quickly discover how well or adverse your decisions have fared. Commissioner Joe Colosimo regularly communicates important in-game events, he is always available to listen to GMs’ concerns, and is continuously looking toward improving the league.  In all of the leagues that I’ve been a part of, I highly recommend joining NOBA.”
Kuruna (Padres GM)

"NOBA was the first online league I joined. All the GM's were very accepting and patient with my being a novice at this.  Joe, the commissioner, was patient and very helpful in getting me up to speed.  Now that I have a full season under my belt, I could not imagine being in a better or more enjoyable league.  The GM's are entertaining, helpful, energetic, and most importantly quite active.The sims are fast paced, timely, and the commissioner does a great job of communicating all things NOBA to the league.  No way I'm giving up my chair at this round table anytime soon."
JJ Parker
OOTP online league rookie.  

Go to the National Online Baseball Association league Forums

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Lords of the Realm Series CONSTITUTION:
The Lords of the Realm Series was established to create a challenging and fun baseball league experience for using the OOTP 13 baseball simulation game. The fundamental premise behind this series is that to be successful the player (acting as the GM) must operate his/her franchise as a successful business (e.g. consistently turn a profit) while at the same time producing winning results on the field. The Lords of the Realm Series will be a severe test by creating strict limits financially under which a successful GM must field and maintain a highly competitive squad. The competition will be from other equally talented GMs. Each league in the Lords of the Realm Series may operate under slightly different baseball worlds, but the requirement to bring success to the field while maintaining a viable business will be constant.

OVERVIEW:
The Baseball Association League is built off the historical start to professional baseball. In the latter part of the 19th century, the National Association, National League, and American Association all started operations. The premise here is that the 16 teams that started out (no more than 1 team per city) and became professional baseball.

The Baseball Association League is the first of the Lords of the realm series and is set up to be a challenging and fun league at the GM level. While you can manage yourself, the league is set up to compete at the GM level. The league will have 16 teams, 8 teams will make the playoffs each season. No expansion is planned. Each GM will control what type of scout you want, hire the manager to get the most out of his team, hire coaches, determine scouting and player development strategies for the organization, and make player moves. The league will use the historical/fictional managers developed by Robert McGraw. These managers have the strategy settings pre-set. Thus you will want to hire a manager that fits the style of player you envision for the franchise. Individual managing/overriding the manager settings is allowed but not recommended. Squad, lineup and pitching settings are still done by the GM. The financial parameters each GM will have to manage will be very tight. To consistently succeed you must be better than your peers at both on and off field performance (e.g. win titles and make profits).

The league uses historical teams at the start of baseball, with fictional players and a set of historical players. The historical players used had to be in the majors for at least 4 years (no cup of coffee guys). Historical players will always start at 18 years of age (e.g. using the Spritze HS database). The historical players will come in at a rate of about 25% to the fictional players. Historical players arrive randomly.

Go to the Baseball Association League Forums

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February 17, 2013 -  GM Games, a simulation game review website founded in 2011 dedicated to quality reporting and reviews of the simulation genre, is branching out in its second phase of the website's growth; the hosting only the best simulation leagues running today. In this pursuit, GM Games is thrilled to announce a new partnership with what we believe is the best baseball, if not the best simulation league in operation - MLB Pro.

MLB Pro is a baseball simulation league that runs on the Out of the Park engine and will serve as our flagship league in the pursuit of expanding our stable of cutting edge leagues, as well as raise the bar for new leagues being formed in the entire sports simulation community. Most notable is the ESPN style website created to handle journalistic content from all General Managers.

MLB Pro was created in June of 2012 with a single overarching mission: create the most immersive simulation league and through that, come as close to replicating the real general manager experience short of earning a paycheck. It does this in many ways but the most of all is it is the only league to sim one day, every single day, replicating the MLB schedule and the MLB pace. General managers live and die by every day instead of blazing through the season in a few months and only caring about the result of the season.

MLB Pro is so much more than a unique sim schedule and that is the reason why we are so proud to have it as our flagship league. MLB Pro also has the most supplementary material of any league. Twitter is used extensively, from a league account to a trade rumors feed, not to mention most of the teams operating their own Twitter accounts. MLB Pro Radio is the umbrella of radio shows about the league, from 'The John Comey Show' who keeps you up to date on news of the league, to the 'Jabs' Game of the Week' with play-by-play by Justin Jabs. MLB Pro also has beat writers for every division and a league for of GM who write articles about their teams. The league also watches all of the games live through OOTP's real-time sim feature.

MLB Pro has also incorporated the Nippon Japanese Baseball League. General Managers on the waiting list are given a team in Nippon and they compete against the rest of the waiting list, fighting to have the best record when the next team in the MLB opens up. While they do this, they spend the time getting comfortable with the league and its members, writing articles, and joining in the festivities like any other general manager. Nippon is no second-tier system here.

"The staff at MLB Pro and it's General Managers provided the perfect playground to make a cutting edge website to best simulate a SportsCenter ESPN themed website. We feel this next level of league management adds a dimension and fun factor that is unparalled in the baseball simulation community. More importantly we bring a great group of managers to our community and forums that will help continue to make GM Games the destination to read about and talk sports simulation.", said Chris Valius, Web Admin and Founder of General Manager Games.
 

Commissioner Andrew Sowders of MLB Pro says "MLB Pro is a labor of love and anyone who shows the same passion and aspiration is going to have my attention. Chris not only has that passion for GM Games but shares the same vision for MLB Pro and sees the franchise it is and can be. Chris understands what makes a good simulation league, the potential they possess, and I couldn't imagine a more perfect home for MLB Pro or any other league."

MLB Pro is the finest league going and a magnificant ambassador for OOTP is and what it can be. GM Games could not be happier about our partnership. We have no doubt it will be a beneficial one for all parties.

Discuss "MLB Pro joins GM Games as Flagship League" in Forums

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February 12, 2013 - Adding to our previous article about the feature set for Out of the Park Baseball 14 we have acquired the initial set of screenshots. 

For a full list of OOTP 14 features, Click Here.

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• Official Download - OOTP Baseball Version 14

  Operating Systems:

  

   

   

OOTP 14 Screenshots

Entry Screen

Graphical Depth

International Free Agents

League Options

Team Home Screen

Trade Log

graphical_d...

trade_log

entry_scree...

internation...

league_opti...

team_home

GM Games will continue to following the release of OOTP14. Brandon Warne, our lead Baseball writer is eager to bring you his official review.

Official Download (Pre-Order) - OOTP Baseball Version 14

Operating Systems:

Discuss Out of the Park Baseball 14 in Forums

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January 25, 2013 - Out of the Park Developments has announced that Out of the Park Baseball 14 will be released in early April, and can be pre-ordered now. A pre-order before February 15th will save $5. Starting February 16th the price becomes the regular $39.99, but you still get the game 3 days early on a pre-order.

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• Official Download - OOTP Baseball Version 14

  Operating Systems:

  

   

   

OOTP 14 Features

2013 Opening Day Major League Rosters

2013 roster set, which features up-to-date Opening Day rosters for all major league teams but also thousands of individually-rated players for all minor leagues and hundreds of players from the 2013 first-year player draft class. Major league player ratings are officially based on Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projection system.

Completely Recoded Player Origin System

Completely recoded player origin to make your league's development much more realistic. There are now 5 different ways new players enter the league, and each one can be customized for the number of created players and their nationalities:

1. The First-Year Player Draft: By default, players in the draft pool are now from the USA, Canada or Puerto Rico. However, the nationality can be tweaked in great detail and can also include a set percentage of random nationalities. That also applies to the following optional player entry methods.
2. International Amateur Top Prospects (optional): These players are typically 16-to-17-years-old who have a reputation of being top talents. They appear as free agents in a new special international section of the league transaction screen and most likely will demand contracts with high signing bonuses (another new feature). You can customize the number of these players who will be created each year.
3. Established International Free Agents (optional): These players are typically from Japan, South Korea, Cuba, Taiwan and Mexico and are between 22 and 32 years old. They typically have slightly below average major league talent, but there will be the occasional star player, like Yu Darvish, Ichiro, or Aroldis Chapman.
4. International Scouting Discoveries (optional): Your team's scouts constantly evaluate the international leagues as they seek young, raw, and unknown talent. The success of your head scout is determined by the scouting budget, the quality of your scout, and his assigned regions. When your head scout discovers a player who he feels may have a shot at becoming a pro, that player is automatically assigned to your team's new international complex. Players in the international complex may remain there until their 20th birthdays, after which they will have to be assigned to a minor league team or released.
5. Players from Independent Leagues (optional): You may also have your head scout look for talent in hidden independent leagues. These players are typically from the league home nation, but once in a while an international talent may be discovered here too. Independent league players are typically in their early-to-mid-20s and usually only have an outside shot at becoming borderline major league players. However, there may be the occasional feel-good success story.

Recoded Player Creation Algorithms

Recoded OOTP's complex player creation routines. This ensures more stable long-term simulations and more realistic player careers and stats output.

New Fielding Ratings Development System

In real life, young players usually start out playing positions that demand a certain grade of athleticism. However, as players mature, they often grow out of these so-called skill positions (such as shortstop, catcher, or center field) and have to shift to the right side of the defensive spectrum. This is now properly modeled in the OOTP player development engine. For example, if you draft that talented 18-year-old 6'3" 175 lb shortstop, you may end up with a below-average 230 lb corner outfielder eventually.

Recoded Scouting System

Recoded the way OOTP evaluates players, both for the OOTP Scouting Agency ("OSA") and your head scout. For example, players with several years of pro experience are now better scouted than in previous versions, and the OSA is more accurate overall, providing a valid second opinion on players. There are also players who are vastly overrated or underrated by almost all scouts, resulting in more late-round surprises.

Better Player Development Tracking

OOTP now properly tracks the development of your players and offers several ways to analyze the data. You receive monthly player development updates from your head scout (or the OSA, if scouts are disabled), who highlights the most important changes, such as when a pitcher in the lower minor leagues learns a new pitch and improves his prospect status.

Expanded Real-Time Simulation Experience

Adding an expanded view on a single game that is currently in progress. This new view shows you the most important facts of the selected game, like the current batter-pitcher matchup, past plays, basic box scores, win probability, and so forth.

Improved Trading

Added a screen that keeps track of all the trades in the history of the league, with a detailed look at the involved players' salaries, overall ratings, prospect rankings, and so forth. OOTP 14 also adds a "Not interested in Player X" function that prevents the AI from repeatedly offering a certain player to you.

Miscellaneous Features

On top of these headline features, we are tweaking and improving other areas of the game too, such as:

• - Improved interface
• - Better player evaluation AI
• - Roster AI recoding, resulting in better managing of minor leagues and the 40-man roster
• - Better contract negotiation AI
• - Improved depth charts and pitching staff control, i.e. list your preferred pinch-hitters, pinch-runners and "LOOGY"-Pitcher.
• - New graphical depth chart screen
• -Improved league strategy settings; i.e., define the number of starting pitchers, relief pitchers, and position players carried by the AI teams, split by DH and non-DH sub-leagues.
• - Smarter in-game AI
• - Improved in-game control, including "Pitch to Contact" option and better stealing control in one-pitch mode
• - Much more storylines
• - Improved play-by-play commentary
• - One-click joining of online leagues
• - New playoff series analysis screen

GM Games will be following the release of OOTP14 very closely. Brandon Warne, our lead Baseball writer is eager to bring you his take.

Official Download (Pre-Order) - OOTP Baseball Version 14

Operating Systems:

Discuss Out of the Park Baseball 14 in Forums

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December 25, 2012 - The first set of screenshots from Franchise Hockey Manager 2013 has been released to the public. Here they finally are!

new signing

roster page

draft log

league dash...

game summar...

league dash...

career play...

player card

player card

roster page

khl

GM Games will be following the release of FHM very closely. Matthew Stewart, our lead Hockey writer is eager to bring you his take, and what the game could use in their future versions.

Discuss Franchise Hockey Manager in Forums

December 19, 2012 - The first feature list from Franchise Hockey Manager 2013 has been released. It's a high-level view of what OOTP developments plans to deliver to us sim fans in the new year.

Here is the list they came up with:

1. Windows and Mac support
2. Two game modes: Modern and Historical
3. 2012-13 game start with these playable leagues: NHL, AHL, ECHL, QMJHL, WHL, OHL, KHL, DEL, Elitserien and EIHL
4. Over 1,000 teams, comprising nearly 100 leagues, that are non-playable but are stocked with real players
5. Start any NHL season from 1947-48 through today, with players appearing on their actual teams or in a draft
6. Real stats, finances, and rules
7. Detailed player model with over 30 skills in 5 main categories
8. Trades, player transfers, RFA/UFA signings, and more
9. Set lines and tactics and make changes on the fly during games that feature a huge, editable play-by-play database
10. News engine featuring a database packed with thousands of articles
11. Stat keeping, including CORSI and Fenwick
12. Almost everything is editable, from logos and colors to data to league rules and more

GM Games will be following the release of FHM very closely. Matthew Stewart, our lead Hockey writer is eager to bring you his take, and what the game could use in their future versions.

Discuss Franchise Hockey Manager in Forums

Sept 28, 2012 - The first Development Diary is a writeup on Historical Play in FHM from one of the researchers.

Overview

First, by way of introduction, my name is Jeff Riddolls. I've been working on Franchise Hockey Manager since shorly after the game was first announced; before that I spent several years working as researcher (among other things) on the NHL Eastside Hockey Manager team, and I've been playing various computer and board hockey games going back 30+ years. I've been doing a variety of different things for FHM, but my pet project is the historical game. I've been playing OOTP Baseball's historical mode for many years, and, like a lot of you, I've always wanted a hockey version. And now here's our chance.

I realize that there are a number of different ways OOTP's historical game can be played - using fictional teams or players, modifiying league structures, and so on. But this preview will just focus on FHM's basic, vanilla version - historical leagues with historical players. I don't know at this point how many other options will be available; that's probably dependent on time and available ease of coding, so that will likely be addressed by Sebastian in more detail at some later point.

That said, let's start with the basics: the game will let you pick a season and play from there - if you want to start in 1955, you get the teams and rosters that actually existed then. Every year, the new rookies will be added, and depending on your preferences, you can have them either show up on their historical teams or be available for drafting and signing. Hate that your team traded away a future Hall of Famer for a guy that broke down a couple of years later? Now you can avoid the mistake. Were they ruined by year after year of incompetent drafting? Well, do it yourself and see if you can make better picks. Been waiting four-plus decades for a cup? Go win one yourself.

The Player Ratings

Obviously, the nature of baseball statistics makes it easier to create an accurate picture of players just using the numbers. Hitters will hit precisely the right number of homers, pitchers will walk the right number of guys, fielders will make the right amount of errors. With hockey, we're not so lucky - often all that's available, particularly for older seasons, is a handful of basic counting stats like goals and assists. There's really no way to make workable player ratings from those, and you're left with the immense task of manually rating each player. Not an attractive option for a small, volunteer research team, and it gets vastly more daunting if it has to be done for every season a player was active. What to do, then?

We came up with a couple of answers. First, to ease the task of entering all the ratings manually, there's the template system: break down players into various types (for example, offense-oriented wingers who tend to shoot more than they pass and don't take a lot of penalties, tough stay-at-home defencemen, and so on - we came up with about 50 different ones) and then build a fully-rated database entry - the template - for an "average NHLer" of each type. Then, every real player gets assigned one of those templates and four simple "target" ratings - offensive, defensive, mental, and physical. If the target is above-average, for example, the ratings the player gets in that group are raised from the average level in the template; below-average and they go down. (Additionally, any specific attribute ratings that are entered for a player override the template numbers.) So by selecting a template and entering four numbers, I get a reasonably accurate depiction of a player without having to enter 30-40 individual attributes.

The second answer deals with the need to enter ratings for a player's whole career. It was inspired by a similar system in OOTP's boxing game, Title Bout Championship Boxing (check them out just a couple of forums down from us on this board.) Every player gets five career dates entered - start, pre-prime, prime, post-prime, and end. Those dates are used to further tune the ratings in the templates, so if a player starts the game in a season right before his prime, his ratings will be lowered a little to reflect that.

Now, will these systems give you the kind of statistical results that OOTP does, where the numbers can match real life almost perfectly? No, there's just too much abstraction involved, and there are some things that just can't be handled accurately like major mid-career changes in a guy's playing style. But I think this will get us very close, certainly enough to give you an accurate picture of what a player was like and how he fit into the context of his team and league. We've given the template system a test run by using it to help calibrate the ratings guidelines for the current leagues (it can be used for active players as well), and if I showed you the ratings it was producing, you'd have difficulty telling that they hadn't all been entered manually.

And, as I mentioned before, the templates can be overridden by entering specific ratings. That'll be an ongoing process that makes the historical database more and more accurate as time goes by. To make an analogy, think of a player's ratings in this first version as a simple pencil-sketch portrait of the player, something that over the years will get refined and coloured so it ultimately becomes a nearly photo-realistic rendition.

Starting Point

The earliest year available will be 1947-48. I know a lot of people were hoping to be able to start a lot earlier, but with the major rule changes the game was undergoing up until the mid-forties, it just poses too much of a challenge to adapt the game engine to them in the first version of FHM. Next time around, we'll work on getting the game able to handle things like forward passes being illegal, minor penalty shots, and so on, and we can go back further. 1947 is actually a few years past the point where the rules had settled into a recognizably modern form, but starting there also gets us clear of the odd effects wartime replacement players would have on the database.

The Database

Unlike OOTP, the historical database will not be in a physically separate file. Everything is in one database. That complicates things slightly with currently active players, but we've figured out some ways to make that work. I don't want to get into too much detail about the nuts and bolts of how the database works, but it makes some interesting things possible for the historical game - a few months ago, I would've laughed at the possibility of incorporating non-major leagues, but the way the database handles league structures and rules, that just might be possible in the far future, coding complications and research material permitting.

Right now, the bare bones (all players and their career records) are in place, and I'm in the process of doing the ratings. Another major difference from OOTP: players will not have "missing" seasons. If a guy's career consisted of a single game in the 1955 playoffs and then 15 more seasons as a journeyman minor leaguer, when you start a game in 1965 he'll still show up as property of the team he belonged to then. That will avoid the typical OOTP problem of a lack of players in early seasons of the historical game; you should always start with at least half a farm team or so of surplus players. Time permitting, I'll also try to include significant players who never made it to the show (although I'm not going to do totally ahistorical things like making Soviet players available in the pre-Gorbachev years. If someone wants to edit them in, they can.)

The WHA

The existence of the WHA presents a bit of a complication for us. If you've ever tried to make the Federal League's two seasons work in OOTP, you know the game struggles with handling a league that suddenly appears mid-game and then shuts down a few seasons later. And the fact that the WHA had teams fold, sometimes in mid-season, makes for even more problems. So, our plans are a bit tentative at this point. Ideally, we'd like to have it work just as it did in real life, but if that proves impossible, there's a backup plan that will have the league's presence in the 70's abstracted in a way that will affect the pool of players available to the NHL.

Minor Leagues

I've never been a fan of the way minor leagues worked in OOTP's historical mode. Rather than try to make them work here, the minors will just be abstracted as a "reserve list" where teams can place a limited number of players not on their active roster. In a later version, maybe we can make this a little more realistic, but this is how it'll work for now.

Stats in Different Eras

One of the nice things about the game engine is its adaptability to different levels of scoring and penalties. So the 1980's can look like the real 1980's in the game, with 100-point seasons being commonplace and a sub-3.00 GAA outstanding.

Summary

Well, that's the basics of it. Nothing vastly complex, but it should give us the essence of what we want: a hockey game with a real history-based mode. If anyone has questions, we'll answer them as best we can. I know that, in the interests of keeping this short and accessible to everyone, I've glossed over a bunch of specific issues OOTP historical players will be wondering about. And, of course, please keep in mind that the game is still a work in progress and very much subject to change, so anything I've described here might turn out a bit differently in the final version.

Discuss Franchise Hockey Manager 2013 in Forums

April 9th, 2012 - 

2012 Major League Rosters

You'll love our latest roster set, which features not only up-to-date Opening Day rosters for all major league teams but also thousands of individually-rated players for all minor leagues. Can Yu Darvish propel Texas to the top of their division, or will Albert Pujols give Los Angeles the pop they need to win that race in the AL West?

And that's not all. We're also current with the rule changes introduced by the new major league labor agreement, including:

• New rules for free agency, draft pick compensation, salary arbitration, and the amateur (Rule 4) draft
• Houston's move to the AL West at the beginning of the 2013 season, with the corresponding schedule adjustment
• A second wild card team in each major league, starting with the 2013 playoffs

Real-Time Simulation Mode

Here's a great way to feel like a big league general manager: turn on the new Real-Time Simulation Mode. While you browse stats, plan roster moves, look for available free agents, and so forth, OOTP simulates the current day in the background at the speed you choose, complete with a scores and highlights ticker at the bottom of the screen.

The league scores screen lets you follow all the games in progress, so if something exciting is happening, you can jump in and watch or take the reins of your team (or any team, if you're in commissioner mode). The game's stats update in real-time too, so if one of your pitchers just threw a no-hitter, you'll see that reflected in his profile, and the news screen will highlight his accomplishment. League standings and statistical leader rankings also automatically update as games conclude.

After the day's games finish, you can advance to the next day, or you can tell OOTP to play out all the contests in real-time for a preset number of days.

Interactive Storylines

OOTP 13 takes the storylines introduced by OOTP 12 to the next level with a layer of interactivity that brings you even closer to the general manager's office.

Here's an example: Your team is mired in a bad slump, and your star player takes his grievances to the media. Do you fine him to set an example, with the possibility he could become even more upset and see his morale decline? Do you ignore the incident and risk losing the respect of other team members? Do you take the drastic step of labeling the player a cancer and releasing him or arranging a hasty trade?

The decisions you make influence the way storylines develop. No two are ever alike, and they have wide-ranging effects on injuries, fan interest, team chemistry, player morale, player ratings, player potential, owner attitudes, and much more.

This system is optional, so you can turn it off if you want. We imagine there are many big league managers who would love to do that in real life.

League Associations and Expanded Playoff Modes

The game now supports associations with multiple leagues. Associated leagues may share certain rules, free agents, and/or draft pools. Once all seasons are completed in the associated leagues, the winners may meet in extra playoffs, determining the ultimate champion of your OOTP game.

League playoffs in OOTP 13 also offer more custom options, including, for example, first-round byes. Now you can run your league playoffs any way you want.

Redesigned Interface

We have completely overhauled OOTP's interface, creating the best-looking and easiest to use OOTP experience to date.

OOTP 13 introduces a number of new or completely recoded screens, including:

• A redesigned manager home screen with a new task manager that keeps track of when you last visited certain sections of the game and alerts you to tasks that need your attention.
• A new in-game screen that merges the widget screen with the broadcast screen and automatically utilizes the available screen space in an optimal way.
• Completely new team and league home screens.
• A new minor league system overview screen as part of the team screen.
• A redesigned player profile screen.
• A new global home screen that lists the most important information about each league in your currently loaded game.
• A new league association screen.
• An improved league schedule screen that adds a section which lists the next 7 days of action.
• An improved league standings screen.
• A new centralized online league screen.
• Improved league setup screens.

On top of the new and redesigned screens, we have changed the way HTML reports behave inside the game. In OOTP 13, these reports and pages look like normal game screens and links to teams or players act like normal game buttons, eliminating possible confusion.

The menu system has also been improved, providing a cleaner look at the available options presented by a menu. Among many more small but useful changes, we have moved the toolbar to the right of the screen so it can be hidden or shown with a single click of a button.

Improved Online League Play

Creating, commissioning, and playing an online league is easier than ever before in OOTP 13.

This year we streamlined the OOTP Online League functionality, as well as the entire online league experience in general. We added one central place for online league features - it displays all available options and actions for commissioners and managers alike.

Core Engine Improvements

Each year we improve or expand the game's core functionality, and this year is no exception.

OOTP 13 features the following improvements:

• Recoded trade AI engine, resulting in the most competitive computer GM ever in OOTP
• Improved pitcher creation & development. OOTP 13 creates fewer pure relievers for the draft. More pitchers are generated with the potential to become starters. Not all pitchers will capitalize on their potential, though; failure to develop an off-speed pitch or build stamina may necessitate a move to the pen.
• Improved roster AI in general
• Improved in-game AI
• Improved play-by-play and league news
• Improved simulation speed
• Improved historical simulation accuracy
• Improved ballpark import/export, including background pictures and proper ball coordinates
• Import / Export for drafts in online leagues

Discuss (Out of the Park Baseball 2013 Release) in Forum
Discuss Out of the Park (OOTP) in Forum