The history of the Negro leagues is both a reminder of a dark period in American history and a celebration of baseball’s enormous popularity during the first half of the 20th century. Baseball fans know well the many players who are part of Negro league lore: Satchel Paige. Josh Gibson. Cool Papa Bell. Roy Campanella and, of course, Jackie Robinson.
"Out of the Park Baseball 18" seeks to explore this area of baseball history in ways never seen before by adding the most prominent Negro leagues to its historical simulation feature, enabling fans to not only replay that era but also engage in intriguing scenarios such as ending the color barrier sooner.
Last year the series introduced historical minor leagues with more than 100,000 real players, meaning the likes of Michael Jordan, John Elway, Russell Wilson, Kurt Russell, and other famous names could be found. Also added was a Historical Exhibition Mode allowing for any two teams in the game to face off in a series. The Negro Leagues will further expand on the extensive inclusion of the sport's past when the PC sim-management game is released in March.
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The following leagues and seasons will be included when "OOTP 18" ships, and more will be added later in free updates:
— Negro American League: 1937 through 1950
— Negro National League: 1920 through 1948 (except 1932)
— Negro East-West League: 1932
“The Negro Leagues were home to some of the most talented players in baseball history,” said OOTP creator Markus Heinsohn. “It’s great to finally have them in the game.”
Matt Arnold, a programmer who works on the game with Heinsohn, said, “I hope everyone will be able to have fun either playing them as they existed, or creating 'What if?' scenarios. What if integration happened sooner, so that all the great Negro League stars could show their skills facing the best MLB stars of old?”
Filling in OOTP’s Historical Mode
"Out of the Park Baseball" has long been known as an incredibly deep baseball strategy game, allowing game players to jump into the GM chair of any team in any era throughout the entire history of the sport. The Negro Leagues were added to "OOTP" thanks to an agreement with Seamheads.com.
“Our historical database team spent a lot of time collecting and researching the Negro League data when they researched historical leagues in general, but since some of the data was hard to come by and modeling the leagues would require some substantial code changes, we decided against including them last year.” Heinsohn said. “Recently we entered into an agreement with our friends at Seamheads.com and they were able to fill in some of the gaps, so now the data is pretty much complete and can be used by the historical minor league feature in 'OOTP 18.'”
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Chuck Hauser, a member of the roster team and a database engineer by trade, helped Heinsohn integrate the Negro Leagues into OOTP 18.
“The data collection challenge was due to many versions of the information existing in many formats and on many internet sites. No two of these formats had data that matched. Each had its own set of missing information as well,” Hauser said. “By assuming all these formats were correct, at least as far as the author knew, and by using each site’s data to inform the whole, a fairly full database was created that is completely historically incorrect from an encyclopedia point of view but will allow players to appear in the OOTP universe as fairly correct facsimiles of themselves.”
In other words, guys such as Paige will post numbers pretty similar to the ones they compiled in real life.
Tweaking OOTP’s functionality
"Out of the Park Baseball" features a complex artificial intelligence that drives its players, managers, GMs and owners to make their own decisions based on what’s happening in the game at any given moment. Adding the Negro Leagues required tweaking in that department, as Heinsohn noted:
“We needed to adjust the A.I. in certain places to make the relationship between the leagues somewhat realistic. Usually the major league team A.I. constantly scans the independent minor leagues for talent, but because of the color barrier, we need to force the A.I. to skip the Negro Leagues until the barrier is broken.”
Asked about options to change how history actually unfolded, Heinsohn responded: “The user can toggle the color barrier option at any time in historical simulations prior to 1946. After 1946, is it automatically disabled and cannot be overridden.”
The possibilities are virtually endless. Whether you want to rewrite history and explore the impact of minority players getting their shot in the major leagues earlier than 1947, pit some of the great All-Star teams of the past against each other in seasons or tournaments, or even match some of the historically great players against those from today — or any other era — "Out of the Park Baseball 18" gives you all the tools you need.
Information for this piece was provided by developer Out of the Park Developments. "OOTP 18," the follow-up to Metacritic’s 2016 PC Game of the Year, is available for pre-order with a 20 percent limited-time discount.
Bryan Wiedey posts sports gaming news and analysis daily at Pastapadre.com, is co-founder of the sports gaming site HitThePass.com, hosts the "Press Row Podcast" and be reached on Twitter @Pastapadre.