Hell is Empty And All The Demons Walk The Earth: A Review Of Out of the Park Baseball 22
By: Billy O’Handley
Out of the Park Baseball 22 is a tropane alkaloid and stimulant drug most commonly used recreationally, the mental effects of which include an intense feeling of happiness, sexual arousal, loss of contact with reality, or agitation, and the physical effects of which may include a fast heart rate, sweating, and dilated pupils. Oh sorry, that’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia page for “cocaine.” Apologies.
Something I've realized from staring at the game for too long: the players don't have faces. WHY DIDN'T YOU GIVE THE PLAYERS FACES OOTP?
Out of the Park Baseball 22 is the most recent in the “Out of the Park” series of baseball simulation video games both developed and published by Out of the Park Developers. Despite its name, it is actually the 23rd game in the series; the 22 is referencing the year, well, not the year it actually came out or even the current nom de guerre of the MLB season at hand, but a future year, far off, possibly one where I will contract carpel tunnel from excess playing of Out of the Park Baseball 22.
The game is straightforward. Self-billed as the “infinite baseball sandbox,” Out of the Park, OOTP, or “Satan is using my brain as a marionette!” as its fans lovingly call it, takes place in a world where you are either the manager or general manager of the professional baseball team of your choosing. As your chosen brand of manager, you use the games network of trading and hiring and firing and strategy options to lead your desired team to victory against the other 29 as the game simulates year after year into the future until either the sun explodes or the game gets so waterlogged with old statistics that it renders loading impossible.
OOTP is built with the user interface of a headache. Most of the game is basically an indecipherable excel spreadsheet made for the type of people who squint while wearing glasses, essentially a data entry job that you pay for the pleasure of having. If you want to be really thrown into the action, you can play the individual baseball games themselves, which involves watching stick figures attempt to engage in the strangest brand of baseball ever created with graphics so flagrantly 80’s they should be wearing neon leg warmers. An important note here is that you can’t actually control the stick figures; you are permitted at most to watch them flop around, bodies twirling at impossible angle, pipe cleaner marionettes cruelly forced to dance for your entertainment. Sometimes, you are gifted with the ability to input strategy commands, just like in the cutting edge PS5 game Oregon Trail.
At special intervals the game will give up on graphics altogether, instead deciding to show the player an entirely black screen with commentary that loosely conveys what’s happening in crazed horror Globglogabgalab land. Out of the Park Baseball is a boring simulation of an already boring game (baseball is the sports version of a delayed flight), and I have spent the last year of my life playing it with small breaks for sleep and sustenance. It is, defying all odds and its own design, the best, most poisonous, most addictive video game I have ever fucking played. I hate it I hate it I hate it.
The 2032 Seattle Mariners, none of whom have photos, are the World Series champions! Their GM, who has spent the last 12 hours playing this game, is finally permitted to go to sleep at 4 AM.
The game has an, admittedly, niche market. It’s for kids who grew up loving baseball but were too nerdy and unathletic to ever play it, a category I fall squarely in. It’s for kids who grew up with Moneyball as their favorite movie and idolized the movie’s lead, not Brad Pitt’s suave Billy Bean but Jonah Hill’s dumpy Peter Brand. It’s for the people who could tell you that character’s true name is not Peter Brand, as the movie claims, but actually Paul DePodesta, a man who is now an executive for the Cleveland Browns, a fact we also know. If you do fit into those boxes, this game is, to put it in baseball terms, a slam dunk. Even if you jump into it as a casual fan, you’ll leave your OOTP experience knowing the names of every 17-year-old baseball player in the Dominican Republic.
The reason the game is so addictive is its simulation nature. You’re able to condense all the fanfare and drama and storyline of a baseball season (while the game itself may be boring, baseball’s emotional arc is certainly not. It’s why every English department has a class on “Baseball Literature”) into an hour and a half, and then start the next one immediately. It’s concentrated sports fandom, except you get to have a genuine impact on what happens! If you like sports (and I love sports) you will have a hard time getting away from OOTP. By that, I mean: If respiratory processes were not automatic, I would surely be dead right now.
Discovering Out of the Park Baseball is probably the worst thing that happened to me in the year 2020. It has ruined my social life, my sleep schedule, my ability to make eye contact with other humans. It’s gotten to the point where close friends of mine will ask, in a soft, worried tone “Are you playing the baseball video game again?” when they see the red spider webs of tiredness in my eyes.
Here’s a list of (mostly) true things I’ve done in an attempt to quit OOTP for good.
I’ve tried:
This is essentially the game giving me an intervention.
Deleting it from my computer.
Deleting it from my computer and hiding it in my Steam library.
Deleting it from my computer and deleting previous save files I may be emotionally attached to from my computer.
Deleting the payment record from the files in the OOTP baseball save folder that remains on my computer, ensuring that if I wanted to play it again, I would have to purchase the video game again.
Therapy.
Asking my former therapist to recommend a new therapist after ghosting the first one because I had forgotten that things outside of OOTP existed.
Acquiring other, less damaging addictions such as alcohol or gambling.
Going into the data and corrupting games files so that the game auto-quits every time it opens, causing a little bubble to appear saying “OOTP quit unexpectedly” and offering the option to reopen, at which point the entire process just repeats ad nauseam to the point that you have to force quit everything within sight to stop the game from melting your computer.
Somehow (and I’m not even sure what sorcery I had to do to make this happen) making it so that whenever you try to open the game, it goes into “updating” mode, except the actual little black “updating” bar that’s supposed to fill up as the game updates never actually does, it just stays as a little black bar until the end of time, always claiming to be “updating” and never actually “updating”, stuck in a hellish purgatory not unlike playing Out of the Park Baseball, a game that makes you permanently content but sedentary, not growing as a person except in the very narrow sense of knowing what would happen in the 2028 MLB season if the Yankees had traded a package including Gerrit Cole for Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Writing an article about my crippling addiction disguised as a video game review for a Chicago area “Zine” in an effort to convince the masses to hold me accountable as a final, desperate, failing ploy to kick OOTP once and for all.
People on Steam seem to have a similar relationship with the game to mine.
So far, I have easily managed to get around each and every one of these roadblocks.
When contacted by a friend to write this article for a video game magazine, I was confused, as I had forgotten that other video games existed. Funnily enough, the amount I am being paid for this article, while very generous, is less than the amount of money I have spent on OOTP, as I have bought it three separate times to get around previously-set-up-wallet-based blockades.
Today is Friday, July 2nd. As of writing, I am 4 days free from Out of the Park Baseball. Every day after today is a miracle.
Final review: 3/5 stars, graphics are lame.
Note: the anti-OOTP embargo did not last. It is Thursday, July 15th, and I am re-downloading the game onto my computer, after technically having deleted it earlier today at 3:30 AM in a fit of self-loathing. Now the self-loathing has worn off. And daddy wants his baseball.