[ctorg]

I'm 33. I'd always liked baseball, but I didn't start really getting into it and becoming familiar with the players until a friend of mine who was a fanatic started getting me into it in 1987, when I was 12. We were Mets fans, and they were good then, coming off their World Series victory. I started playing Strat-O-Matic that year a bit with him, which was introduced to me as being like a role-playing game for baseball (I was into Dungeons & Dragons at the time).

The big step, though, was when I got Earl Weaver Baseball for Christmas that year. I learned a lot about strategy how to manage from that game, while Strat-O-Matic taught me the players and more technical details. Then Strat came out with their computer version, and I was hooked.

A memorable turning point for me was in the summer of 1990, when two friends and I played out a full season of games in Strat-O-Matic. One friend won one division and another friend won the other. We put their stats into Earl Weaver and played the World Series in that program, which went 7 games and was won by a Tony Gwynn walk-off homerun. The main thing I realized from that was that it was more fun for me to act as commissioner than to control a single team. I think that was also the last time I actually played a baseball sim of any kind with other people involved.

I kind of got out of baseball simming (and baseball in general) during college, which was good because the Mets were terrible during that time. I got back into things around 1996. Strat-O-Matic had a greatly improved game by then, and you didn't even need the cards anymore. Eventually, though, I found myself getting tired of using real players. I started making my own Strat-O-Matic cards. I used some formulas to basically figure out how the cards were made, or at least get reasonably close to it, and made whole leagues of fictional players. I remember having this setup where I would have ten seasons worth of cards for all these players, and each year I would randomly select one of the ten seasons for each player, and that would be his card for that year. It was a very rudimentary version of the idea of player development. It was clear that I was ready for something new.

Something new came in the form of Baseball Mogul, which seemed like a breakthrough at the time. I got really into it, although I missed the statistical depth of Strat. OOTP came along then, but it was really buggy and Mogul ran much faster and better, so I didn't get fully into it. However, because OOTP had so much more depth, I found myself returning to it, visiting its forums (which were very different then), and following it.

That was OOTP2. OOTP3 was a lot better, while the next Mogul version was barely any different. OOTP was clearly making large improvements, while Mogul was adding minor tweaks. OOTP4 was what really got me hooked, IIRC. I switched over from Mogul and never looked back.

The funny thing is, there are things I still miss from Earl Weaver Baseball, things I hope make it into OOTP someday. I miss the ballpark generator and the very pixelated graphics that at least gave the impression of something happening. I miss the way managerial strategies were chosen by giving a red or green light to a list of plays, essentially allowing you to make any combination (want to put the bunt sign and the steal sign on at the same time? No problem!). But OOTP is clearly on a great path forward and I'm sure it will eventually have all the things I'm looking for in a sim.