OOTP Staff

Acing a Marketing Class Project With OOTP

May 31, 2017 by OOTP Staff

Want to use OOTP in your class or after-school club, or know a teacher who would like to use it? We’re happy to provide free copies of OOTP for use in K-12 and higher education settings. Please get in touch via the OOTP Developments contact page.

Nearly everyone has been asked, at least once during their schooling, to come up with an idea for a project, execute on their vision, and present their findings to a class. Few, however, have done so with Out of the Park Baseball.

LaGrange College student Stephen Coelho and classmates Josh Garland and James Poropatic are among those few. Tasked by their marketing class instructor with creating a business or product and developing a business plan for it, Coelho says he “decided to get creative and set up an expansion team in OOTP,” bringing his fellow students along for the ride as part of a group project.

Tales From the OOTP Multi-Verse: Contest Winners Find Themselves in OOTP 18

April 30, 2017 by OOTP Staff

What if you had a chance to see if a virtual representation of yourself could crack the big leagues, or even end up with a career that lands you in the Hall of Fame? Sure, you could do that in Out of the Park Baseball 18 by creating a fictional player with your name and tweaking his ratings to your heart’s content, but what if your virtual self ended up in every copy of OOTP 18 sold?

That’s what happened this year when five lucky winners in the OOTP 18 pre-order contest found themselves in the game as virtual prospects with a chance at baseball immortality. They were able to dictate the basics of their in-game player, including position, handedness, and age, height, and weight. We chatted with three of them to find out what they thought of the experience.

OOTP and Yankees AA affiliate, Trenton Thunder, announce partnership

April 14, 2017 by OOTP Staff

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, contact:

Tips For Success With FHM 3’s Achievements

February 14, 2017 by OOTP Staff

Officially licensed by the NHL (click to enlarge)

Everybody loves Achievements! They add interesting wrinkles to many games, and their presence in Franchise Hockey Manager 3 is no exception. Available when you choose Path to Glory mode, achievements in FHM 3 allow you to tout your ability to do many things, from winning a minor league championship to emerging victorious in the Stanley Cup® Playoffs.

There are too many achievements in FHM 3 to list here, but we’ll cover the highlights, starting with the toughest ones – and some tips for achieving success.

GAF Online Baseball League Gives Thanks for OOTP

December 22, 2016 by OOTP Staff

A portrait of the commissioner as a young man.

Brent Long, commissioner of the GAF Online Baseball League that came together on the NeoGAF forum, discovered Out of the Park Baseball with last year’s version 16, but once he did, he was hooked. “When I play any game that tries to simulate a sport, I’m always most interested in the long-term development of my team,” he says. “You get to see what would happen if you were in control and, right now, OOTP probably does that the best out of any game that I’ve played.”

He joined the GOBL not long after its inception and soon became the commissioner. “GOBL brings me into the game every single day,” Long observes. “There’s a lot more intrigue when you know you’re competing against other people and not just the CPU.” (The league has a few openings, so anyone who’s interested in joining should see the thread on the NeoGAF forum and contact Long (he’s “brentech”) for more information.)

Overeducated Baseball League Mixes Highbrow and Lowbrow

November 17, 2016 by OOTP Staff

Some consider baseball the most cerebral of the pro sports, so it’s not a surprise that an enterprising Out of the Park Baseball player would capitalize on the idea with the Overeducated Baseball League. Consisting of fictional athletes playing in the Platonic and Socratic Leagues, with Kant and Hobbes Divisions in the former and Hegel and Calvin Divisions in the latter, the OEL has been going strong for ten years. There have been 20 simmed seasons completed.

“Yes, we’ve made all the ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ jokes,” OEL co-founder Nate Wooley says without being asked the obvious question. While that comic strip’s main character was fond of a game called Calvinball that involved rules created on the fly, Wooley is a stock broker and his fellow co-founder Mack is an attorney, so they’re sticklers for rules. [Read more…] about Overeducated Baseball League Mixes Highbrow and Lowbrow

Franchise Hockey Manager 3: Top new features for armchair GMs

November 9, 2016 by OOTP Staff

Franchise Hockey Manager 3 is now available worldwide, so we thought we’d take it for a spin and highlight the major features that armchair hockey GMs have been anticipating the most. Like OOTP Developments’ other games, FHM 3 offers a deep, authentic experience that you can explore any way you want, from a day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts GM view to a “sim a season in minutes and watch a world unfold” commissioner perspective.

Here’s what you can look forward to. There’s much more than this, of course, so please visit the official Franchise Hockey Manager 3 page to learn more and get your copy today.

College Class Uses OOTP, Gets to Ask Us Questions

October 25, 2016 by OOTP Staff

Out of the Park Developments Chief Marketing Officer Rich Grisham recently spent some time in a Skype chat with students at Georgia Southern University. They’re using Out of the Park Baseball in a class taught by assistant professor Solomon K. Smith, who’s a member of the History department at the school.

Smith said that his students are in charge of five teams in their OOTP league, and they will be simming one week of their virtual baseball world each day. At the end, students will have to present the strategy they used in running their teams and why they used it. “They won’t need to win their league to get an ‘A,’ but they will have to be able to defend their strategy,” Smith explained to us.

Hall of Very Good Determines the Best of the Very Good

September 28, 2016 by OOTP Staff

Baseball fans love to discuss who would make their roster if they had the pick of players throughout history, and of course many Hall of Famers typically make the cut. However, what about the guys who were pretty good but didn’t quite have enough oomph in their stats to survive past one or two Hall of Fame ballots?

That’s what Shawn Anderson’s Hall of Very Good (HOVG) website is all about: It’s a celebration of the also-rans who were pretty good players and who are often the favorites of a few baseball fans. Anderson has been inducting players into his Hall since 2012, and the current roster includes Jim Kaat, Lee Smith, Luis Tiant, Dale Murphy, and Tommy John, among others. Out of the Park Baseball has been a proud sponsor of the annual HOVG induction awards, as well as the site’s podcast.

OOTP as a Game-Based Learning Project

May 31, 2016 by OOTP Staff

We’re happy to publish guest posts any time someone approaches us with an idea. Here’s the latest one:

Out of the Park Baseball as a Digital Game-Based Learning Project: The 1879 Northwestern League, Frank Bandle and the Omaha Green Stockings

(The full article, with all of the relevant data and screenshots, can be downloaded online.)

By Robert Roy Foresman

In the spring semester of 2015, I was given the opportunity to develop a digital history project at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Since my historical interest mainly involves baseball, and at that time I was researching the 1879 Northwestern Baseball League for a book, I was thinking about what options there might be to create a digital history project that included the 1879 NWBL. At that time, I had recently discovered that the league had only played half of its season when it folded in mid-July. One of the obvious historical questions that had been on my mind was that if a complete ‘championship season’ ran its’ course in 1879, who would have won? Was there a way to simulate the season that might provide this information? I had done this on other gaming platforms with contemporary baseball rosters and seasons.

Then, I realized that Out of the Park Baseball (OOTPB) provided a perfect opportunity to uniquely answer this question. This is how my idea for a digital history project came about. OOTP Baseball allows the user to recreate historical baseball leagues or even develop fictional leagues at the creators’ discretion. For this project, parameters were set to function in 1879, and the league with all the historical data gathered was included. The 36-game season was the framework for this ‘tryout’ that included a championship series occurring at the end of the simulated 1879 season. The simulation model was set for 10 seasons to give an impartial representation of what the actual results might have been if a whole season had been played.

The emergent digital game-based learning (DGBL) concept is attracting educational enthusiasts across the world. This article will follow that global trend and demonstrate how Out of the Park Baseball provides a valuable framework for classroom-based, DGBL projects. The aim of this article is to exhibit the benefits, learning outcomes and potential for DGBL baseball projects in college and high school classrooms. This commentary will also reveal that DGBL can provide learning engagement and motivation for students when given the opportunity to participate in similar DGBL ventures. The editorial will offer a brief explanation of DGBL and provide simulation results, comparative analysis and conceptual modeling for a DGBL baseball project utilizing Out of the Park Baseball. Additionally, the work will provide learning outcomes for the classroom project and includes a suggested reading list that potential instructors may access. The hope is that this article will be referenced as a curriculum development resource in future DGBL projects.

Please feel free to contact me at foresmanrr@lopers.unk.edu with any questions or for the opportunity to collaborate further. The full article is free and open to the public. You may also download this article and others at my academia.edu profile.

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