The thermometer may disagree, but according the calendar, it’s almost spring. The Red Sox will play their first game at Fenway Park on April 3rd against the Pirates. That means its time to start thinking about baseball, and for many of us, baseball video games. Have you ever wanted to be the GM of a big league club? Are you sure you could do a better job?

Out of the Park Baseball 2018 lets you do just that. It gives you an incredibly detailed level of control. You build your team the way a real Major League Baseaball general manager would. You run the draft. You set the lineups, and run your complete minor league system.

There are several ways you can play the game. You can play as just the General Manager, making personnel moves, drafting players, signing free agents, making trades, hiring mangers, setting budgets, ticket prices, etc. Or you can take the dual role of GM and Manager and pick your lineups, set your pitching rotations, and set strategy.

This year’s version lets you play the Negro Leagues, and the old Federal League. You can start as far back as 1871. Want to rewrite history and build a dynasty around Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky, you can do it. You want to start with Carl Yastrzemski on the 1960 Minneapolis Millers, you can do that too.

My career

To give you a brief feel for the game, I chose to start a 2017 game. You then select which leagues you want to be active.

You can choose to start with any team you’d like, or, for more of a challenge, you can start your career unemployed, and work your way up. With no reputation to work with, you’re not going to get offers from big league clubs. So, I started out a career as GM and Manager of the Puebla Pericos of the Mexican League. The Pericos had the biggest budget in the Mexican League, and a huge fan base. The game is incredibly customizable, so each league has it’s rules set up as their real-life counterparts do. The Mexican League has a limit of 6 foreign born players on the roster, so this would add a bit of a challenge for my Puebla club.

Building a team

Once I started out, I immediately got an email from the owner. He wanted me to play at least .500 ball that season, reach the playoffs within five seasons, acquire a top player and resign Chad Gaudin.

So I started off by offering an extension to Gaudin to keep the boss happy. Then it was time to check my roster, to see where we were starting off. Great starting pitcher, great starting basemen, and left fielder. On my reserve roster, I found lots of former major leaguers. I quickly swapped them in for some of the lower quality foreign-born players on the roster.

I then reset my lineup, and found that aside from Andres Meza, I had very little quality on the pitching staff.

Then it was off to the free agent pool to see what was out there, and would fit my budget. Not a lot of starting talent their either.

For now, I made offer an offer to Leslie Anderson, and Brooks Brown. Then I headed over to my reserve roster and saw what the other clubs would offer me for the now unhappy American players that I’d removed to make room for Tejada, Morgan, Rivera, and Barton. Bam! Right away someone offered me five-star starter Hector Ambriz for reliever Jeff Marquez. Picking up Amrbriz satisfied the owner’s demand to acquire a top player. Done.

Next, I shipped Wily Tavares to the Oaxaca Guerreros for starter Salvador Robles. I made three more trades, and had bolstered my staff to the point where I was ready for the season.

The Season

Our Pericos didn’t get off to a strong start, 5-5 and sitting in 4th place in the LMB Norte through 10 games. Going 9-1 in the next 10 games put us in first. Puebla was 35-13 at the All-Star break, with a one game lead over the Monterrey Sultanes.

To shore up my staff, I pulled off a blockbuster, getting the league’s ERA leader Rolando Vadlez for five players in a trade with the Campeche Piratas. Things looked good, until the injury bug took away Martin, Barton and Robles to season-ending injuries

Getting to the playoffs, we opened up against Oaxaca in the second round of the LMB playoffs. I lost game one of the best-of-three series 6-3, and trailed 3-2 in game two, before a two-run shot from Issmael Salas put me up 4-3. The game was tied at 7 in the 9th, when I loaded the bases, and won on a walk-off sacrifice fly. Game 3 was a 9-2 laugher. The next round was a 2 games to none sweep over my rivals from Monterrey. Then it was on to the finals for a best-of-five against the Campeche Piratas. We dropped the opener, before storming back to win the next three in a row and the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol championship!

The next year, priority one was to upgrade my training staff. Need to keep those good players on the field. Then I replaced my head scout, so that the ratings I’d be seeing for players would be more accurate. Then, again to free agency. Now that I had some cash in the bank from the first season, I could go to the US independent leagues, and start purchasing players.

After rolling to a repeat of the LMB championship, I was offered the job with the Cincinnati Reds, and my major league career began.

Customization

The level of customization in this game is incredible. Each team plays in the proper uniform for its year. Each year, the uniforms change in the game as they did in real life. The 1990 Red Sox have a different road uni than the ’89 club. The game does that. For uniforms and logos that aren’t included in the game, adding them is easy, and other fans of the game have usually taken the liberty of creating them for you.

The same by the way is true for the ballparks in the game, and the players faces. You can import actual photos of players, or use something called “FaceGen” to get a pretty good CGI version of the player.

Discount Deadline

I’ve been playing Out of the Park Baseball for over a decade, and it’s a tremendous amount of fun for the serious baseball fan. If you’re a baseball fan who loves the ins and outs of the game, and loves the idea of building a team, then this is the game for you. If you order before the March 24th, you get a 10% discount.

Are you also a hockey fan?

You can save money buy picking up Out of the Park Baseball 18 and Franchise Hockey Manager 3 in a bundle pack.