[Syd Thrift]

OK, so "trash" wasn't exactly the right term. It's fun, sure. I like the way they handle scouting, which differs heavily from OOTP in that it's a tools-based rather than a results based approach (which I think comes down to more of a way baseball is played compared to soccer). I love the player personality and all the interactions you can make, from yelling at them during a game (this might not be so much of a thing for baseball but surely OOTP could have periodic clubhouse meetings and the like) to telling a player exactly what his role will be when you sign him. And of course it's a lot of fun to work with the game's strategic options.

It's not super realistic and to some extent decisions were made precisely to make it less realistic and more enjoyable: that whole notion that you can take a team sitting outside of the League in England and bring them all the way to a Premier League title is, well, risible, for instance. On top of that, lower level teams don't really play like lower level teams, I think in part because the game doesn't really "understand" the difference between pro and semi-pro and full-on amateur in terms of the amount of time these players have to train, how well they can stay in shape when they have day jobs, and so on. There are mods to add in even lower tier than the traditional "non League" level that you have for England, for instance, but they are fun to look at but so unrealistic as to be basically unplayable (that's kind of what I was thinking when I was thinking "trash") in large part because the game can't go below 1-20 (I think the reality is, once you get down to those levels everyone's a. playing for fun and b. are in varying levels of shape, and that's probably the biggest thing a "manager" interested in more than "hey boys, kick the ball towards the goal" would have to worry about).

I don't want that to say that you can't have fun doing the lower-league stuff that I mentioned. It's just... it's not just that it's mildly realistic like some of the things that happen when you use completely fictional leagues in OOTP, I mean that you can play these games and they can be fun but they're fun in the way that, like, X-COM is fun, i.e. fun in a way that is untethered to reality.