What's all this then?

This blog is a commentary to my fantasy baseball manager career using Out of the Park Baseball 8.  It is purely for fun on my part and hopefully writing about the game will prevent it form becoming a by-the-number spreadsheet operation for me.

For my game world, I wanted something a little different to normal and more of a challenge so I decided to take the original game rosters (2007 season) and play through with them in automatic mode until 2014 (actually the end of the regular season 2013 so I could look at player retention).  This meant that all those real world prospects that I knew about are now fully grown superstars and all the superstars are now coming into retirement.  That gives me just the right combination of nostalgia and mystery to begin my journey.

In terms of league setup, I have the full major league/class structure (ML, 2*AAA, 3*AA, 3*A+, 2*A,1*R+, 3*R) with real world affiliations as of the 2007 season plus the addition of five feeder leagues (3*college, 2*high school) to provide players for the draft with some genuine statistics as opposed to complete unknowns.

In terms of game settings, trades are set to hard, less frequent and to favour prospects, all ratings are set to 1 to 20 except overall/potential which is 1 to 5 stars and finally talent change randomness is reduced to 25.

Starting in 2014 I made several other changes to the various settings:

• The draft is now limited to 30 rounds, the talent pool pool is available 75 days beforehand and draft picks can now be traded
• Ghost players are now allowed
• Batter ageing set to 0.700, batter development set to 1.100, pitcher ageing  et to 0.850, pitcher development set to 1.100 - all of these are to counter the accelerated drop off in skill level for players hitting their 30's.