The 2015 Boston Red Sox were doomed. They overpaid for all their free agent signings, collected a starting rotation who are best suited to pitch batting practice, and their once-dominant forty-year-old closer Koji Uehara suddenly became a once-dominant 40-year-old closer.
I took general managing responsibilities of the 2015 Boston Red Sox in Out of the Park Baseball 16, a hyper-expansive, super-realistic baseball simulator computer game, and this game has nearly perfected baseball realism, in which the Red Sox were just as bad as they were in real life.
This game goes into unbelievable detail, allowing for complete control of a baseball team’s operations. You can control a team’s entire farm system, hire a coaching staff, scout international players, change the dimensions of a stadium, sign free agents, re-sign aging veterans, Rule 5 Draft, etc. The only thing you can’t do is play a baseball game with your players. Oh wait, you actually can do that, down to the very pitch, for an entire 162 game season (or more, if you wanted to change features. You really can do anything.)
When I went to download the game from the website, I saw glowing review quotes from Red Sox owner John Henry and Red Sox racist-y video-game-company-destroying former player Curt Schilling. I also was surprised to see every baseball team’s logo on the website and thought, Huh, this must be officially licensed by MLB. Sure enough, underneath the logos a banner said, “Officially Licensed by Major League Baseball.”
(A bit of background, I grew up – and by “grew up” I mean “played from the age of five through now” – playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, the baseball simulator where you roll die to see how events happen between two baseball teams. It’s like if you took Dungeons and Dragons, made it about baseball, and then made it less cool. I love Strat. (That’s what Strat-O-Matic fans call it))
After I downloaded the game I was prompted to ask which of the baseball leagues I wanted to include. These leagues would happen simultaneously and I wouldn’t pay any attention to them as they happened, much like in real life. It is pretty cool because these leagues happen all on their own but all these random Japanese Minor League players – and I learned that there’s an independent Japanese Minor League too – will get all of their own stats and stupid injuries all the while I just play my game and figure out who to DH for an injured David Ortiz when he’s out for two months with a torn labrum.
I DH’d Rusney Castillo and bat him ninth. These Sox are terrible.
So I downloaded all of the American and Japanese leagues, and told the Dutch and Italian Professional Leagues, “Allez vous faire foutre.” That’s “Screw you,” in French, but they can figure it out.
I started my season as Jason Weitzman, the 24-year-old Lithuanian General Manager of the Boston Red Sox. Yeah, I could pick which country I was from, and I chose Lithuania – after considering Iraq. (I do like the idea of the Red Sox one day hiring a 24-year-old who does not speak English.) The game had started.
Not too far in I got a personal e-mail from John Henry.that I’m sure he wrote himself right when I signed up, He said we needed a Manager, Hitting Coach, and Pitching Coach for our short-season staff. An e-mail, John? You couldn’t have told me in person? Technology has made everything so impersonal.
I also noticed in the game Ben Cherington had been demoted to “Assistant GM” so I could fulfill the General Manager duties. My, how life imitates art. Or video games imitate life, I guess. Anyway, Cherington didn’t quit this time.
I went to the “Hire Coaching Staff” screen and was surprised to see many recognizable names that potentially could have been asked to coach a team. Barry Larkin was listed as a coach I could have hired. Dusty Rhodes was listed too, but not that Dusty Rhodes, or even the other Dusty Rhodes. It was a third, real Dusty Rhodes. Charlie Hough was as a possible pitching coach, although I’m not sure if he would have taught my pitchers to just throw knuckleballs all the time. I also saw that the True Home Run King, Japanese Baseball legend Sadaharu Oh, was a potential coach. I offered him a contract to be the hitting coach for the Lowell Spinners. He replied, “I have no intention of working for Lowell.” A little rude, Saduhara, but I understand. I then offered the position to an 80-year-old Japanese coach because I thought it would be funny if the coach just couldn’t talk to any of his players and wondered if the game would mention this. I gave another position to a 22-year-old coach from Venezuela. I also searched for who the oldest coach in the game was, and the game apparently made a mistake of some sort because a coach was listed at over 1,900 years old and had a birthday of “1062.” I did not end up hiring this man that was born in the 2nd century A.D., but I do like that this person is apparently alive and a baseball coach in this world. It’s probably the only thing that doesn’t make sense in the game.
Just the vastness of size and information is impressive. I controlled the Red Sox, but I just as easily could have been the General Manager for any team in the whole system, including all the independent, minor and foreign leagues. You can also manage a team too, or do both, and take a role the game creatively calls, “Manger and GM.” The detail goes down to the ability of changing the size of your ballpark by feet, and I’m sure it would take a full week or more to really go into detail about everything the game offers.
Anyway, actually playing games is very fun and super-realistic in the way that baseball can be extremely unrealistic. As expected, my Red Sox played sub-.300 ball for most of the first two months, which was almost the same as reality, but also Allen Craig was hitting over .400 for much of the first few weeks of the season. It all makes sense and no sense at the same time.
The starting pitching would blow every game, yet Blake Swihart was already the best player on my team, even though I stupidly traded Shane Victorino away for Miguel Montero and now I’m stuck with a worse catcher for three years taking time away from Swihart. By getting a bad player and being stuck with him for too long, I definitely know what it feel like to be a Red Sox GM. And I definitely felt the weight of those immovable Sandoval and Ramirez contracts. This game not only has the intracite details of cold hard numbers, but it grips you emotionally to see your team lose day after day and know you are still years away from contention. I felt like I was reliving the poor play of the Red Sox season all over again. It was not fun to watch.
There were a lot of fun comparisons to real life, like how my Red Sox pitching staff had an above-6.00 ERA. It really understood how bad the Red Sox would be. Also, trying to sign a player and then watching him walk was frustrating too, but in a fun way. Another frustrating concept was when the Amateur Draft auto-drafted eight 18-year-olds whose sign-ability was all either “Extremely Hard” or “Impossible.” Then when I offer a six-figure signing bonus the kids get all snooty and say, “I’ll think about it.” It really gets the realism of how huge jerks 18-year-old jocks can be.
The realism, detail, and configuration all make this game a joy to play. You can devote your life to it, or run through seasons casually, so whatever you want to put into the game you will get out of it. It’s definitely fun to watch as a baseball fan although sometimes scrolling through all of the features and remembering where each screen is can be tricky. I’m sure I didn’t mention how many different screens and configurations there are but there really are a lot you can dive into. This game teaches you a lot about running a baseball team, from signing players down to fielding a lineup, and there’s one thing it does definitely teach us, that even computers knew that the 2015 Red Sox are clearly doomed.
-Jason Weitzman
