Ein sehr komplexes, aber dennoch brilliantes Spiel. Von der Qualität zeugen auch die vielen positiven Reviews auf Steam. Wenn jemand in der Football-Manager Manier einen neuen Sport managen möchte ist hier absolut richtig.
Da bereits der 2016-Teil herausgekommen ist, weiß ich nicht recht was ich empfehlen sollte. Ich habe den neuen Teil nämlich noch nicht angespielt.
Wenn man aber mit der vergangenen Saison auch zurechtkommt ist es absolut einen Versuch wert.

Out of the Park Baseball 15:

User requirments:

-Ahnung von Baseball (!)
-Liebe zu Exceltabellen
-Zeit

Wer diese Bedingungen erfüllt, bekommt eines der wohl tiefgreifendstens Managerspiele. Die Einarbeitungszeit ist imens, die Bedienung unhandlich und die Präsentation bider. Das macht aber nichts, denn die Faszination des Sportes Baseball (ich spiele selbst) wird perfekt eingefangen. Wer Baseball liebt, und Managerspiele liebt, ist bei diesem Spiel mehr als richtig.

A review for FM/CM players (I've read a few Football Manager players ask questions about the game so thought I'd write a suitable review! If you're not a FM player you should probably read another review!).

I've been a long time Football Manager/Championship Manager addict (owning every version since they arrived on the Amiga, and I continue to buy it each year) and bought this on a whim, despite not really knowing anything about baseball at all. It is simply great, I can't stop playing it!

As anyone who's watched (or read) Moneyball will know, baseball is a game that lends itself well to stats. It is all about the numbers. Before you know it you'll be swimming in stats and sabermetrics; RBI, BABIP, ERA, ERA+, WHIP, WAR. Page after page after page of accroynms and numbers to pour over (and, at first; stare at blankly!). It is a revelation when it starts to all make sense!

There is no doubt that this is a deep sports simulator (with complete teams and drafts going all the way back to 1871, and you can jump in at any point you want and play out all of the "what if..." scenarios your mind can conjure up), but hiding away underneath all that is a complex mathematical puzzle. If you like maths, you'll love sabermetrics, and you'll love this game even more because it gives you the chance to act out Moneyball (in any league, in any era, anywhere in the world! Select a country, how many teams/divisions you want and the game will fill it with cities from your country. I've found playing classic MLB is the most fun, as you have the real life achievements and player stats to compare your own game against).

In many ways this game is like Championship Manager <2005, before the rock-paper-scissors approach to tactics, media interviews and player (and as extension of that; team) morale took hold. Championship Manager was once a game where you could fill a positition with a player with specific high attributes and you knew he'd "buy" you wins. Repeat that process across your team (within the confines of your budget) and you would have a succesful team; hopefully!

Without wanting to turn this post into a FM/CM bashing post; the game has moved away from what made it succesful. Without a winning tactic you will get nowhere. Even when you've found a winning tactic, you need to micromanage your team, the players, the media, the board, etc, etc. Sure, you can assign some of those tasks to staff members (who you also have to micromanage!), but there's always an underlying feeling that other things are at play aside from your 11 players v the opposition. It often seems like the game engine is constantly number crunching numbers you not only can't see, but have no control over.

FM was once described (not entirely unfairly!) as a "spreadsheet with graphics". That description is no longer accurate, so much goes on behind the scenes that it can be difficult to guage what you are doing right (or worse; what you are doing wrong!), even with the cut down "Classic" mode.

Trust me when I say I mean this as a compliment; OOTP is more of a "spreadsheet with numbers" than recent iterations of Football Manager have been! If you are losing constantly you can look through the stats and you WILL see why you are losing (if you look hard enough). You will see that your 2nd rotation pitcher is causing you to lose every game he plays, or that a player or two in the middle of your batting lineup are hitting way below average, or that a star player is picking up too many injuries, or he is a season or two beyond his prime (or even that your coach is beyond his prime; the game moves on and alters through the years. The slider tactic settings that your coach set may no longer be effective. You can override him, or sack him, or get the bench coach to set the tactics. This is just one small example of the depth of the game!). This is the same numerical conundrum that FM/CM used to be, it is just packaged up as a different sport. I'm being absolutely serious when I say that this game reminds me more of Championship Manager of old than the current version of Football Manager does! (Oh, and there's no microtransactions and/or built in game cheats!).

The game has player morale, but morale is slightly affected by the type of players you sign (there are a whole range of player personalities and interests, but you don't need to micromanage them so much as make sensible choices about who to sign in the first place!) and they are affected a LOT by their own skill level and expectation and how the team is performing. If you're performing at a reasonably high standard your star player is going to be happy with his lot (and, if you're not, maybe it's time to rebuild anyway?).

The game has depth, but it can be as "light" or as complicated as you want to make it. If you just want to act as a GM and draft players and trade players you can zoom through 100 years of game time in a few days (or as fast as your computer can handle) if you feel like it. If you want a full hands on approach you can micromanage every small detail of the team, from hiring coaches in the minor leagues, setting the scouting/coaching budgets, ticket prices, etc, etc. The attention to detail is astonishing, and if, like me, you are a football (soccer) fan, you'll be green eyed with envy that nobody ever thought to make a football game with this level of historic detail.

There is certainly a learning curve (especially if you know nothing of baseball!), but the game does well in introducing new players. You are first greeted with a pop-up windown, which takes you to online videos (recommended!), an instruction manual, the forums. You can start in commisioner mode (allowing you to change anything and everything on your save game. A sandbox mode by anyother name) and change things to your hearts content. The on line community is great, you'll find other players are eager to help us newbies, even the developers respond to (what must be for them) pretty basic questions to get you going, both on the Steam forums and on the OOTP forum.

I've gone a bit mad this past year game wise, taking advantage of all the Steam sales, Xbox 360 games being reduced to virtually nothing, buying an Xbox One (and Wii U!). I've played a lot of good games (and a lot of bad), this game is right up there with the best of them. It is certainly the most surprising (the amount of time I've put into it has caught me somewhat off guard! The "just one more game" element of FM is certainly in effect here), and I might even put it into the debate of the best game on any platform in the past year! (and remember; I'm a European dude who has never seen a game of baseball in his life!).

If you yearn for Championship Manager of old (i.e. CM4), you need this game in your life!

P.S. Just a tip; you may have read the game comes without real team names when starting a "live" game (all historic teams are properly named, as far as I can tell). Just click randomise 3 (maybe 4) times and all team names will be real.

I created a fictional league based on the MLB. I didn't want to use historical players and wanted every team to start on even ground.

I'm from Cleveland, so I played as the Indians.

My top draft pick was a bust, BOTH my solid closers got 4+ month injuries, I was constantly plagued with minor injuries to almost every player no matter how young and durable they were, and despite starting with a solid rank in the power rankings, ended up dead last and extremely frustrated with 0 room for payroll and my only good players gladly signed with another team when they became FA's.

10/10 for realism

edit: Because this is technically listed under the Helpful Reviews section, I feel like I should say a little more than just a joke.

This is a great sim, and while there are frustrating seasons, the satisfaction felt from building a great team really makes it worth it. It's daunting at first, and if you're a casual fan, there will be struggles. They don't simplify statistics for you, and just like real life, there are intangibles to consider when it comes to players you sign/draft (whether they are injury prone or durable, whether your scouts consider them quick or slow learners which is huge for development for young kids, whether or not they dog it too often on the field, and seriously, for the love of God, check their defense ratings and whether or not they have good range at their position. They all come in to play and punish you for simply drafting the highest available talent without considering anything else).
But boy do I have fun during inaugural drafts. There's just something enjoyable about filling different types of teams, trying to build teams with extreme groundball pitchers backed up by scrappy, young, high contact, low power, great fielding players to make your pitchers unstoppable but struggling to score runs yourself. Or, building a team with the most power in the league, but realizing your poor defense and speed is costing you the division.

The In-Game play could be better. It gets to the point where I have almost memorized the first lines of the play-by-play and know exactly whether I've grounded out or hit a home run. There are no 3D models or accurate displays/routes of any balls in play (I've seen the ball rocket out of the plate, but the description be "soft fly ball"). But you can still micro manage games: call for steals, hit and runs, pitch outs, bunt etc., while still being able to just simulate each game if you aren't feeling that.

I highly recommend this game.

I'm not much of a sports guy. What little interest I had in following professional baseball faded over 10 years ago. So you would reasonably assume that I wouldn't care for this game.

I'm here to tell you, that if you have a deep interest in management simulation, statistics, and strategy, then this game is a must-play, whether you know anything about baseball or not.

My knowledge of baseball statistics was severely lacking when I started playing OOTP15. However, I put in a small amount of research time (an hour's worth of google-fu) and then jumped headfirst into the game. The first thing I noticed was the nearly overwhelming amount of complete statistics for every single player, and not just those in the majors - from the lowest of Rookie Leagues through every level of the minors. Your scouting director can give you a report about any player and summarize their playing ability (and, just like in real life, sometimes the scouts are wrong!) You have the option of managing your team with as much or as little control as possible. You can play as the commissioner and simply watch the teams develop around you. You can play as a GM who lets his staff make all the decisions about lineups and strategy. Or you can micromanage every single game in the season! Don't want to play with actual players and actual teams? You can create a fictional league, with fictional players. Don't want to play alone? There are many different leagues running online that you can join, which opens up trading to be much more interesting than it is when playing against the AI. The level of control and customization you have in this game is nearly absurd - and I mean that in the best possible way.

It has to be emphasized at some point in the review that this isn't a game where you play the player - there is no point where you are at bat or pitching. Rather, you're the manager - you can give some limited orders (bunt, pitch around, etc.) but it's up to your autonomous players to win the game. If you're expecting to watch 3D rendered baseball games, you won't get that either - if you watch a game, you're given a text play-by-play, with some limited graphical representation about where the ball gets hit and which player is standing where. The quality of the game doesn't come from its graphics, of course. It comes from the depth of the simulation - down to where and how each individual pitch was thrown.

In conclusion - give this game a chance. I'm not a baseball junkie - I can't even name 10 current MLB players off the top of my head, yet I'm in love with OOTP. I think that speaks pretty highly of how good this gem really is.

Very realistic. Jays still can't make it to the postseason even in simulation.

EDIT: This review acknowledges that the Blue Jays have finally made it to the postseason in 2015.

Let me be frank: if sorting through pages and pages of statistics and micromanaging a budget isn't your idea of fun, OOTP isn't your game. If you squint it looks more like chartered accountancy than a game.
However, if you're the kind of weirdo who likes that stuff, this game is extremely satisfying. I've been a Bill James fan nearly as long as I've been a baseball fan, and building a team using WAR and FIP and having awards conferred according to ability rather than popularity is deeply gratifying on some embarrassing math nerd level.

The game isn't perfect. The interface isn't very intuitive and it takes too many clicks to get to some screens. The strength overview report takes nearly five minutes to generate, and has to regenerate every time I click the back button, so I avoid it entirely. The stat pages also have an annoying habit of forgetting your sorting parameters when you click back.

And what's with the impossibility of being a female manager/GM? I know there aren't any, but women have been assistant GMs and Kim Ng has been a candidate for GM jobs with several teams. So it could happen! It's a bit irksome to get emails addressed to Mr. Sarah. Come on, OOTP developers, it's a fantasy game, let a girl have her nerdy fantasy.

You should play this game and actually make the Chicago Cubs relevant again.

Before I begin, make sure you understand that you don't actually play baseball in this game like in MLB the Show, you manage or simulate the games. You are in complete control.

I have an Xbox One and a PC so there weren't many choices for me for a baseball game this year. I had heard some great reviews about how immersive and addicting OOTP can be, so I watched some youtube videos of gameplay and decided that this would be great for me since I absolutely love baseball.

Oh my god. I bought this 5 days ago and I've already put in ~22 hours into it. It is easily one of the most addicting games I've played in a long time. You can play the 2014 season with current 2014 rosters, or play the 2014 season after holding a fantasy draft. Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw on the Giants? Hell yeah! You can also play any season in the history of baseball with accurate rosters on every team from that time period. So many choices right off the bat, it was overwhelming. But I looked at the OOTP 15 community online and they helped me get used to the game.

I then created my own fictional franchise, two leagues with 6 divisions of 6 teams in each league for a total of 72 teams overall. I edited the names of every division, team city, and team name to my liking. Then I edited all the basic information and advanced information of the league. Did I want the DH in either league? Do I want the scouts to be 100% accurate or not? Should the CPU be in charge of making executive decisions or not? These are just some of the many, many options and decisions you can make before you start your franchise.

I then held an inaugural fantasy draft where you can look at the pool of thousands and thousands of fictional players. You can view their batting stats, potential stats, birthplace, defensive stats, morale, fanbase, mood, etc. Then draft players based on your liking for your team or have the CPU draft for you. There's just SO much going on and once you learn how to navigate the many menu screens, it is so much fun.

Managing games is really interesting too. It's all text based with options you can choose throughout your offensive or defensive innings. Make substitions based on the situation, etc. I love being the manager, I love the strategy part of this game, deciding whether to bench a player against a certain pitcher, whether to steal second base when your runner has a speed stat of 70 and the catcher has a defensive stat of 60. The gamble in this game is so addicting. You win some games and you lose some games. Usually when I've played baseball games, I try for the 162-0 season. But that is impossible in this game, since stuff happens. It feels like a real baseball season.

The game in franchise mode even generates news about players in the league and sends them to your inbox (if you want to receive that mail). Every player on every team has their own statistics, has their own breakout games, their own lives. It's so neat.

I would recommend this game to ANY baseball fan who wants a game they can sink hours and hours and hours (and probably days) into over extended periods of time. Out of the Park Baseball 15 is so addicting, and I bought it for $40 and I know I already got my money's worth, and I'll be playing this game for a very long time.

tl;dr buy this game if you are a baseball fan.

If you are any kind of baseball fan, or a management sim fan, this game will cause you stay up way past your bed time. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it. You can play in Commisioner, General Manager, or Manager mode. Or all three at the same time. This is not a arcade game, it is a text sim in that the action on the field is delivered by text play-by-play of the pitch of decision. There are so many historical seasons available from years gone by it is staggering. An active mod community plus a very friendly and helpful player base will make your gaming experience easier to get a handle on at start.