[BirdWatcher]

My personal bias is that you did not waste $5 but rather that it could be the best investment of $5 you ever made.
However, it is true that there is a steep learning curve with this game. Which is mostly a reflection of just how inclusive and in-depth the game is.
My advice is to start small and simple and work your way up to a more complex approach.
For instance, you could just be the GM for a team and deal with issues of player acquisition and finances (or not finances, if you want to turn that off to begin with.) Let the manager make the in-game decisions. Okay, scratch that last bit. Not what you want. So, yes,(Or vice versa), more like that. Much of the time in-game strategy should be fairly straight-forward. Most of the time you will just swing away when on offense, for instance. If you want to go pitch-by-pitch, well, then yes, games will take longer. I'm an at-bat-by-at-bat guy myself. Even with you calling strategy, once you get the hang of it, games shouldn't take terribly long.
Me, I play as GM and manager but do very little in-game management- rather I use strategy settings to influence in-game play and then watch the game mostly as spectator. A single game goes by pretty quickly.) To start with, I think it is always good to set responsibilities for things like minor league strategies and player movement,etc. to someone other than you (i.e. the AI team personnel). (There is a great deal more advice in this vein that I am sure others will offer here. And I also encourage you to poke around the forums here and on Reddit as you will find a good deal of tips for new OOTP'ers most of which are extremely helpful and certainly got me through my early days playing this game. And which I still return to on a regular basis as a refresher.)

From what I've seen one of the biggest challenges new OOTP'ers have is that they have a very specific idea that they want the game to recreate, one that often has more to do with their past gaming experience, whether it be video/computer or tabletop, and they struggle to figure out how to get OOTP to do that. I myself came to OOTP from a tabletop (Strat-O-Matic, Replay, mostly) background but what I realized quite early on is that OOTP was not a way for me to do exactly what I did on a tabletop (only better) but was a whole new simulation gaming experience. It's not that OOTP can't recreate some of the scenarios that new gamers have in their heads (often it can, sometimes not so much) but rather that this is probably something better approached after getting to know OOTP better for what it is and what it is best designed to do.

For me part of the fun of OOTP when I first purchased the game was figuring it out. And failing. And learning from that. And failing again, but in a smarter way. Etc, etc. (Rinse and repeat, as others tend to put it.)