Putting the contract stuff aside, this sort of talent and statistical falloff isn’t unheard of for a major league player, a pitcher in particular, but if you’re the sort of gamer who believes they know more about these players than the game, then the results you get from using the default MLB rosters may not be to your liking, in which case you’d be better served playing an authentic MLB league with fictional players. (Note that this is not an issue in historical leagues where the game can draw on a player’s entire career in deriving talent ratings.)

If there’s a downside to Out of the Park X it’s that if you’re willing to look hard enough you’re going to find the occasional oddity: A contract or trade that makes absolutely no sense, a quality player forced to languish in the minors because he was behind an established vet with a big contract, or an unlikely statistical record being set. With the exception of its penchant for sometimes releasing newly drafted or traded for players, the ability of the game’s AI to manage its teams is actually noticeably improved in this edition. The simple fact of the matter, however, is that in a game world this huge and complex things are going to happen that stretch your suspension of disbelief. If that bothers you to the point of setting a game like this aside, then there probably isn’t a game of this type out there that will satisfy your standard of perfection. For the rest of us, the main thing that could possibly make this game better is the need for some kind of animated in-game interface. No fan of this game is asking for it to become MLB ’09: The Show, but it would add so much to the experience of playing Out of the Park if you could actually watch an animated game play out like in the old days of Microleague Baseball.

For now, though, we’ll just have to settle for what Out of the Park X is: The single most brilliant, most thorough, most customizable baseball management game in existence.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .

Editor's Note: There are new features that we were unable to fully test -- specifically for online leagues. We just started our 30 team online league and will write up a separate report detailing how the new features work after we have played a season or two. OOTP’s online features are robust and this is a fantastic way in which to play this game; we just haven’t had time to fully test its new additions.