Well, here we are, almost a year since I reviewed Out of the Park Baseball 10, and I am honored once again by the fine folks at Out of the Park Developments to be given a chance to review their newest edition, Out of the Park Baseball 11. Fortunately, as a videogame blogger in no need of pronexin, I have the maturity to offer an honest review even though I’ve been offered a review copy of the game.

I’ve been able to watch Out of the Park Baseball 11 develop from its late beta stages to its current and more recent release, and I will say that I’ve been impressed once again, as I have been for the last few versions I’ve reviewed, with how in-touch Out of the Park Developments stays with the feedback of their beta-testing team as well as the users of the game. Issues that have been brought up have been addressed and patched with reassuring frequency, and issues that created problems early on have been addressed. This sort of ongoing support is likely why OOTP Developments has endured through ten editions of its game and is now beginning its second decade.

As usual, I prefer to judge a baseball game by looking at how accurately they capture the Minnesota Twins. This isn’t purely capricious on my part; first, the Twins are my home-state team and the only team I feel I actually know well enough to compare them to their videogame representation. And as a smaller-market team, if a developer gets the details on the Twins right, you can usually be assured they got the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels and A’s right as well.

First of all, I must point out that OOTP 11 has been surprisingly accurate on the Twins this time out. Their entire minor-league system is correct down to contract details, including the staffing of those minor-league teams; for example, Joe Mauer’s brother Jake is listed as manager of one of the Twins’ minor-league teams; I checked it out and they got it exactly right. That’s something that can’t be said for 2K Sports’ MLB titles, or even for Sony’s, over in the console world.

So what about simulation accuracy? Well, I simulated the Twins 2010 season up to the current date without making any changes to the team other than those generated by the game, such as injuries. To eliminate bias, I even had the CPU manager shuffle things around when such injuries arose.

As I write this review, the real-life Twins are 33-24. At 57 games into the 2010 season, the Twins in OOTP Baseball 11 stand at 32-25. While the scores were obviously mildly different from the real-life results, to get within one game of reality, albeit with a fictional injury list generated by the game, is proof to me that the folks behind OOTP Baseball 11 are NOT just making wild guesses and designing the game around biases toward favorite or popular teams.

Of course, I’ve come to expect this sort of accuracy from OOTP Baseball over the years; their game isn’t always a perfect prognosticator, but it does a better job than most baseball fans on any given day of the week. I’ve also gone on to play the off-season, and it’s a valid engine for simulating the sort of trades other clubs will agree to and which ones they won’t; it isn’t often that one robs another team blind in a trade in OOTP 11. To get someone of value, you must surrender players of like value.

The closest I’ve come to any sort of “steal” in OOTP 11 is a trade for center-fielder Andrew McCutcheon; I offered up one legit starter of 4.0-star value and two young prospects, but that wasn’t enough to get the deal done; the team I was bargaining with countered, asking for any one of five other prospects to be added to the deal.

I tossed in one of those players and they hemmed and hawed, but finally agreed to the deal at the Winter Meetings.

I gave up a starter and three very good young players to get a 4.5-star quality center-fielder. The four-for-one deal reflects the sort of deal-making that must be done to obtain someone of value. While it looks one-sided now, my McCutcheon deal reminded me a bit of the Twins-Giants trade that sent A.J. Pierzinski to San Fran in exchange for Francisco Liriano, Boof Bonser and Joe Nathan.

At the time, none of those three had proven themselves in the majors and Pierzinski was well-thought-of. That Pierzinski bombed after that, while Nathan became one of the best closers in the majors, Liriano had an amazing first year for the Twins before injuries set in, and Boof Bonser was a journeyman is the hindsight of the deal.

The talent I gave up to secure McCutcheon might blossom as well; McCutcheon seemed a great fit with the Twins when I made the trade, but his career was marred by injuries in successive seasons that held him back from fulfilling all my expectations, though he warmed the seat nicely for a draft pick center-fielder I’d picked up the summer before the trade. Also, the deal freed up salary space for me to keep much of my Twins intact for a few more seasons.

Of course, this reflects the organic nature of the game; even a deal that seems one-sided at the time doesn’t always turn out that way. After all, for every A.J. Pierzinski trade the Twins have made and come away from looking wise, they’ve had moments when they’ve looked foolish, such as being forced to cut David Ortiz for no compensation, before Big Papi blossomed with the Red Sox. Or trading away Johann Santana to the Mets for, well… no one who’s worked out all that great. Might as well say, “nothing.”

In that sense, Out of the Park Baseball 11 is sometimes a bit smarter than the real-life sport it is simulating, since it allows fewer block-headed deals.

What has impressed me this season more than in previous years is the historical simulation aspect of OOTP 11, which goes back as far as professional baseball has been played, and brings you up to the modern era. While Baseball Mogul does this, it does so without an historically-accurate financial model. While not quite perfect, OOTP 11 is much better on even that front.

Specifically, the game allows you to select starting a league in pretty much any year since the inception of professional baseball. It then takes you through a six-step wizard which allows you to customize your historical simulation to a preferred level of historical detail.

One of the details you can select is an accurate financial model. As the game explains it, “If you select to begin in 1940, ticket prices, attendance, salaries and the like will seem low, but will increase as time progresses.”

While I haven’t had the time to test out all 100+ years of professional baseball history to be certain that this accuracy is maintained year-to-year in career mode, I can vouch for the fact that, whatever year you choose to start in, the financial model is accurate to that year.

In this respect, Out of the Park Baseball 11 is far and away a superior historical simulator compared to the only other PC baseball management sim I’ve played that has attempted this, Baseball Mogul. BM has an inflexible financial model, meaning that while BM allows you to start at the inception of baseball and play to modern day, it all happens using the modern financial model. That means that in the Depression Era, you have Babe Ruth in the 1930s getting paid $20 million a season, while 60,000 fans per day flock in at ticket prices ranging from $20-$250 per ticket, and buying concessions like $5 hot dogs and $7 beer. In the Depression Era? Some Depression!

That doesn’t occur in Out Of the Park Baseball 11; the 1930s financial model reflects a 1930s economy. The amount of historical research alone required to achieve this is nothing short of dizzying! And yet, here it is. A truly impressive accomplishment that has made its impact on me as a reviewer more strongly this year than in any previous release of the game. In fairness, OOTP has been at it for a while, fine-tuning this aspect of the game before OOTP Baseball 11… but the realization of it in this year’s release has really impressed me with its attention to minute detail.

Not perfect? True. But very close.

In fairness to Baseball Mogul, by the way, that game is made for a younger, less demanding audience; Out of the Park Baseball 11′s audience is the true stats-obsessed baseball geek, and their historical simulation, therefore, is far more accurate.

Does the game stick strictly to history? I don’t know. I remember, for example, when the Minnesota Twins’ Kirby Puckett became the first pro baseball player to be granted a contract extension that paid him in excess of $1.0 million a season. That happened in the 1980s. Does OOTP Baseball 11 allow you to start in 1921, for example, and not hand out a $1.0 million/season contract until Puckett breaks down that financial wall in the mid-1980s? I don’t know.

But just the fact that each year is accurate-to-history when you start it is, for me, more than enough to set Out of the Park Baseball 11′s historical simulation mode far and away above the competition.

About the only complaint I have that really sticks in my craw is that, although toned down a bit from OOTP Baseball 10, OOTP Baseball 11 still features an injury rate to big-name players that seems far and away more frequent than is encountered in real-life. While the code hasn’t taken out my top three batters and four of my five starting pitchers, as OOTPB 10 did, there have been stretches where I’ve had as many as four or five starters injured at the same time for stretches lasting from two weeks to five months.

While the shorter-term injury people cycle back in quicker, those who the game decides are injury-prone never seem to stay on-the-field for very long. So, although the injury rate, especially to major stars, has been improved in OOTPB 11 over last year’s version, I’m still not convinced it’s an accurate injury-rate model just yet.

I should also add that the interface has been updated mildly, and while it improves the readability of the text on-screen, the layout is still a bit complex and requires a somewhat steep learning curve. Once you get accustomed to the layout of the game, the interface becomes less of an issue, but it’s not a game the newbie is going to pick up and understand completely, intuitively, within the first 30 minutes. The learning curve is probably pretty steep for the first couple hours, then tapers off for another few hours before becoming comfortable and normal.

As I said last year, I don’t employ a star-system, a 10-point score or a letter-grade in my reviews. That makes reviewing a game of this caliber a dumbed-down experience that allows readers to skip over the body of the review to see the final “score” of a game. I’d rather readers of my blog read the full review, then decide for themselves if a game is worth their hard-earned sheckles or not.

I can’t imagine, however, any baseball fan not enjoying Out of the Park Baseball 11 much more often than the time they spend finding minor faults and complaints about it. Right now, there’s just no other PC baseball management sim on the marker that even comes close, and even the baseball games in the console world cannot match OOTP’s accuracy. Well done, Out of the Park Developments!