Summing up the Out of the Park Baseball 9 experience in a single sentence, paragraph, or even a small novella is not an easy thing to do. How do you sum up a game that lets your create just about every facet of a fully functional baseball world in –what is sometimes- excruciating detail? If you’re an absolute baseball stats nut this game will appeal to you. If you live to run historical simulations, this game will appeal to you. If you want to run an online baseball league this game will appeal to you. If you want to create a complete fictional league that has any number of minor league levels from AAA to short season to winter ball, other international leagues, the Rule 5 draft, salary arbitration, contracts with options years, player scouting and development, the ability to grow or shrink your league over time, and have an All Star game that plays on January 31st every year instead of mid-July… well, you can do that. The beauty of this game isn’t that it does any one thing exceptionally well, it’s that it does everything.

This is not a game for people that need to see and take active control of the players on the field. This is not MLB ’08: The Show or Major League Baseball 2k8. This is a spreadsheet game for the cerebral baseball fan. This isn’t to say you can’t take the field, in a manner of speaking, and watch games play out in front of you or control it from a managerial perspective. It just requires a bit more imagination.

If you’ve ever watched an MLB.com webcast of a game, you have some idea of how the games you watch or manage play out. You get a good look at each team’s lineups, who is pitching, in-game statistics, etc. In the game’s BNN Broadcast view you see a large, but generic, view of the field and a ball animation showing where the ball goes when it’s put in play. Unfortunately, this animation basically amounts to a large white dot that streaks across the field, with no sense of height or range or any sense if it’s been fielded or not. As a new feature, it’s useless, and I quickly found myself switching over to the BNN Webcast view which drops the detailed field view in favor of including more team information and a pitch-by-pitch view just like you’d see at MLB.com. You also get a pretty diverse text-based play-by-play that describes the action in a level of detail that can be extremely compelling when watching a big game play out. The ball animation aside, it all works extremely well as long as you go into it with the right expectations.

Fans of past editions know all this already, though. For these people, the real question is whether or not this game is enough of an improvement over previous editions to warrant a new purchase. Certainly, if you haven’t played this game since the days of Out of the Park 6 or older, this is a must-have product. The interface, as a result of a brief flirtation with publisher Sports Interactive, is wildly different (mostly for the better) and the level of depth the game offers represents a revolutionary leap forward.

To be sure, OOTP9 adds a whole lot of new features. For starters the game now comes with built-in 2008 MLB rosters. The accuracy of these rosters isn’t 100% and the contracts the players are under have no basis in reality whatsoever, but if you want to run a true to life MLB league, they can get the job done. The scouting system, which was a nightmare to deal with in the past couple versions, has seen a complete overhaul that now makes it much simpler and easier to manage and the patched version also includes the ability to globally adjust scout accuracy, which was a sticking point in the initial release. (Scouts were wildly inaccurate.)