Out of the Park Baseball 26 Review – A Baseball Nerd’s Dream!

With the new baseball season now in full swing, a new entry in the long running Out of the Park Baseball series has also been released. This baseball management simulation series has been running since the late 1990’s and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down with Out of the Park Baseball 26.

Now before we get into the rest of the review, I should let you know that this was my first time playing Out of the Park Baseball. As a diehard baseball fan, I’ve always wanted to give the series a try. I just never have before for one reason or another. I know I’m still figuring things out, and I’ve just started to scratch the surface of what this game offers. However, after about 26 hours with the game, I feel I have enough of a feel for it to tell you what I did and did not enjoy. With all that out of the way, let’s get into our review for Out of the Park Baseball 26.

Gameplay

Out of the Park Baseball is a baseball simulation and management game. You are able to take full control of an organization, from the majors to the minor leagues. When I say full control, I mean FULL control. I always knew this series had a reputation for being really in-depth. However, I had no idea how deep it went until I actually played the game.

I was really impressed with how deep the minor league system is. Beyond Triple-A and Double-A, you also have High A, Low A, Rookie Ball, Development Leagues, as well as an international complex. You can hire full teams of staff for each of these levels or just focus on the majors while your Assistant GM handles your minor league staff.

Beyond just setting your lineup, you also have full control over your depth chart. You can set who will sub in for each position, as well as how often those substitutions will be made. I liked being able to make sure that the young players on my bench will get plenty of reps throughout the season to help them develop.

World Baseball Classic

It’s not just MLB teams you can take control of. You can become the GM or Manager of any MLB or MILB team, as well as teams from several other leagues featured in the game. New to Out of the Park Baseball 26, you can also now control one of the national teams and play through the World Baseball Classic. You get to pick your full roster of players from the country you control.

I really enjoyed getting to stack my USA team full of the best players in the game. Every game was high pressure and had me anxious to make sure we came out on top. I will say though, make sure on top of filling out your roster, you also select plenty of reserves as well. Players will get injured during the tournament, and you’ll want guys to call on when someone goes down.

Player Development Lab

Also new this year there are some updates to the Player Development Lab. This is a feature that was originally introduced last year in Out of the Park Baseball 25. Progress bars have been added to give you a clear view of how your players are moving along in their assignments. You also now get midterm reports that allow you to cut your losses if it looks like a player isn’t going to be able to complete the program you have assigned them.

While I really like the concept of the Player Development Lab, the outcome of using it seemed to be more detrimental to my team than it was helpful. Even with an excellent lineup of coaches, the majority of my programs led to players either having lower ratings than before or even getting injured during training. Some tuning to the success rate of the harder programs would definitely make the feature more useful. Thankfully, there is a setting in the game to lower the difficulty of programs. I recommend using this setting for now if you are also having this issue.

MLB Draft

The MLB Draft experience also received some updates in Out of the Park Baseball 26. New menu layouts aim to streamline the process of making your picks during the draft. Also, the new Draft Combine lets you scout and build relationships with players before the draft. I enjoyed the draft process in this game, and it really was one of the high points of the season. The combine let me get a good feel for how I wanted to approach the draft and target certain players in each round. My only gripe with it is that you cannot draft a player when you view them through the Player Pool screen. You have to go back to the Draft Central screen and scroll through a very tiny menu to find them and then draft them.

Drive for the Pennant

Outside of your typical franchise mode, Drive for the Pennant offers a more streamlined way to play through an MLB season. This year, Drive for the Pennant is now available for any of the historical seasons in the game, as well as the current season.

I tried this mode out with the 2019 New York Yankees to see if I could change history and get past the Astros in the playoffs. I enjoyed this more streamlined version of the game. The ability to hop into close games to try and pull off a clutch win has always been something I enjoy in sports games.

I did have a few issues with this mode though. First, I often got prompted to hop into games where my team was either winning or losing my more than 10 runs. I’m not sure why the CPU thought I would want to hop into these games where the outcome was basically decided already.

Also, you are unable to manage your depth chart in this mode. Instead, your bench coach has control over this for you. This became frustrating when I would try to set my lineup. My bench coach would often have someone I didn’t want in the lineup slated to play every other day. It would be better if I could either control the depth chart, or if it was disabled entirely for this streamlined mode, and the simulation just used the lineup I set for the team.

Presentation/Performance

In-game presentation in Out of the Park Baseball 26 is very impressive. You are able to set up your office menu to show just about whatever information you want to have quickly available. All of the menus are easy to read, and it doesn’t take long to get a feel for where important screens are located.

When you actually hop into a game, the on-field visuals look impressive. It was easy to quickly watch the action play out, and it really got me excited when things were close late in a game. I did have one issue where when a player would throw the ball to first base, the camera would constantly continue to pan off to the right and into the crowd.

Moving on to performance, I reviewed this game on my HP Laptop. My machine has an Intel Core i5 CPU and an Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU. I understand this is a relatively low powered machine. Despite this I was able to run the game without issue. Load times were reasonable for the power of my computer. I only experienced one crash in my 26+ hours, and that came while setting up a new league. After the crash, I was able to go right back into the game and successfully set up the league, so it was more likely caused by my computer than the game.

Conclusion

As a baseball nerd, I have dipped my toes into several different baseball videos games throughout the years. Out of the Park Baseball however, is one I had always wanted to try. I kept putting it off though because I feared getting too sucked into the baseball simulation series. Well, this year I finally took the plunge, and it appears my fears have become reality. I am as hooked as I have ever been on a simulation/management style game since Factorio.

There are some aspects of the game that can definitely be improved upon. I also realize that I am very new to the game. My thoughts on it will likely change and evolve as I continue to pour dozens upon dozens of hours into it. With that said, at this point I am very happy I finally gave this series a try. I can’t wait to continue running several new simulations in Out of the Park Baseball 26.