After spending a decent amount of time running Out of the Park Baseball 10 through its paces, I must say that I’ve come away from the experience impressed. Although the game’s interface has not undergone any dramatic changes, that’s probably for the better since version 9, finally fixed that issue up. While there are mild refinements to the graphical presentation of the game, no overhaul was needed and so refinements of that previous makeover was the goal of the day.

For those not in the know, Out of the Park Baseball 10 is the latest entry in the well-tenured Out of the Park Baseball franchise, one of the longest-running PC text-based sports management sims on the market that – surprise – is still around. Once you reach ten editions, you’re no longer a game so much as a tradition.

Fortunately, OOTP Baseball 10 is an addictive tradition, though one that might require a steep learning curve for the newbie. Of course, that steep learning curve is there for a reason: Out of the Park Baseball 10 is awash in deep, deep stats screens and tracking, and any possible way you can track players and their performances in real life, anywhere, ever, you will find in OOTP Baseball 10. And the nice thing is that the game is not a resource hog, requiring little in the way of graphical firepower, RAM or hard disc space; in fact, the game could fit on most SD cards quite easily and with room to spare.

With the new game, OOTP Baseball offers a variety of play modes and starting points. The easiest, of course, is to start with the current 2009 baseball season, which they got just right; I appreciate as a Twins fan that they had Mauer on the DL to start the season, rather than forgetting he existed, for example, as some sports games might. And I appreciate that Lirano is rated on recent post-injury performance and not his phenomenal rookie year of three seasons past. I often measure baseball games by their Twins accuracy for two reasons: one, the Twins are my local team and I know them better than any other team; and, two, the Twins are a smaller-market team, so if a developer gets the Twins right, the rest of the league’s probably just as well-looked-after.

Even so, it’s good to see that OOTP Baseball 10 has everything happen when it’s supposed to, rather than compacting it into a “post-season mode” as many console baseball games do. The rookie draft, for example, happens in June rather than after the season. That is as it’s supposed to be. I also appreciate the franchise for being so accurate on such things as each team’s minor-league system.

And roster management can be as controlled as you wish by the gamer, or can be simplified with a couple clicks to a menu that offers an “Ask manager for full rosters and depth charts” option to make things easier.

The game also is the basis of many online and email leagues, and this year’s edition certainly offers as many tools as ever to enable commissioners to do their tasks with relative ease. In fact, about the only complaint I had in the main part of the game, when I played the current season, is that the game seems to allow too many injuries too often, far beyond the rate at which teams get battered and bruised over the course of a real season. In fact, I had one stretch during a Twins season I ran when three of my starting five pitchers, as well as my top three batters, were all out for at least 15-day absences, with one out for the season. While this can happen, the injury rate seemed to remain unusually high throughout successive seasons, and it also seemed to target the biggest stars on each team to a fictional degree of frequency.

I mean, if that many big-name people were injured that often in real life, we’d have Nick Punto and Michael Cuddyer making the All-Star appearance instead of Mauer and Morneau for the Twins, simply because they’d be the only half-decent Twins not injured more than they are playing. Now, I’m sure the Out of the Park folks are already hearing this complaint and massaging the code for a maintenance patch even as I write this, so it’s a minor note in the end, but certainly notable during my time playing the final-release version of the game.

Like most developers of small sports management titles like this, Out of the Park Baseball developers have a fantastic bond with their consumers and respond to feedback on problems that arise with the code, as it arises. So I don’t expect this “all good players get injured half the time” bug to be around much longer; but it was there while I was working on my review, so, there you go.

So far, I haven’t run into any of the more serious bugs that can sometimes pop up in a game like this; however, I have not had a chance to play more than 2-3 seasons, and as we all know, sometimes the code doesn’t break until you get beyond 10 seasons or more. At times like that, sometimes the NPC GMs can get a little wonky in some games, failing to fill out their teams properly. No sign of that here yet, but again, I’m not far enough in to really know.

In the end, Out of the Park Baseball 10 feels more like a refinement than an overhaul; the game is full of information and stats. So full, in fact, that you can tell the game was designed by a group of real baseball geeks – and anyone who knows anything about baseball will recognize that as a compliment, not a slam. This is a game that is definitely a labor of love by folks who deeply appreciate the sport they are honoring.

Now that I’m an independent reviewer, I won’t use any artificial rating system, like stars or a 10-point scale, to weigh the buy-ability of this game. Instead, I’ll let my whole review stand on its own, demonstrating the things I liked and didn’t care for, and allow the reader to decide if it’s worth it to them.

I know that when it comes to baseball, there’s not another sports management PC game out there that I like as much. After all, Baseball Mogul is a much simpler game, shooting for a younger audience; and Shaun Sullivan’s PureSim Baseball is old, out-of-date and has not yet re-emerged from the ashes to be reborn as Draft Day Sports: Baseball, over at Wolverine Studios.

Does that make Out of the Park Baseball 10 the champ by default? Certainly not. The game has been a standard-setter for quite a while, so even of Shaun’s new game were out, OOTP Baseball 10 would be giving it a run for its money.