The Recycle Bin

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. My preview time with Out of the Park Baseball 2007 will end while I’m at work and it’s locked down until the game release on the 23^rd. The good news is that everything I looked at is pretty stable and nothing went wrong during any sim I ran. The bad news is that I only got to scratch the surface of this very good game.

I just want to mention the wonderful reports that are available because this is what makes OOTPB 2007 a must buy as far as I am concerned. The minor league system report is back to what it should be – a replicate of the OOTPB 6.5 minor league report. It now tells you whether or not a player should be kept at the current level or moved. This is something those of us struggling with OOTPB 2006 will really appreciate having back.

The star system returns but I honestly didn’t mind it being gone. I found using statistical performance a much better indicator in OOTPB 2006. But some folks wanted them back and Markus listened.

The new reports are the icing on the cake. The positional strength overview report is HUGE, simply HUGE. Here your players are ranked against the league at the position and (more importantly) your best prospect for each position’s rank is listed. I can’t express how happy I am to see this in the game.

The development report returns, but I didn’t get a chance to see if it was improved over the dismal previous development reports, even those in OOTPB 6.5. There are plenty of mod makers for 6.5 and at least one for 2006 that made what owners need in their development reports. We need to see talent increases AND up ticks or down ticks in the ratings.

Some people continue to moan and groan about the interface. They’re idiots, pardon my French. Yes the interface is different than OOTPB 6.5. However, it is much improved over OOTPB 2006. And if this interface is keeping you from playing OOTPB 2007 with all its baseball gaming goodness then you simply are not a GM baseball text gaming fan. Sorry to be so blunt, but no baseball gaming product of any kind comes close to what OOTPB 2007 can do.

We’ll get to see if everything works as advertised on March 23^rd.

Funny thing about Calvert #3 is that my gaming has rapidly decreased.  It is not like I do not want to play anything, but finding the time or energy is another story.  A good example; it is five minutes short of 4AM right now, and I am up with Joseph, giving Tonya a much needed break.  So I am watching bad TV, not getting a lot of sleep, and pretty much killing any chance I have of wanting to play anything tonight.  After work, soccer practice, and getting the kids to bed, I am going to be completely shot.

It has been this way for the last six weeks.  I am going to have to make a WoW decision; I just threw away $15 in February, not even logging 5 minutes with the game.  Then there is the stuff I would like to play – MVP 07 (still pissed about the rosters, but I do want to play), and the Christmas games – God of War, Gun, and Final Fantasy XII.  My UK trip this weekend will give me some playing time, but probably not enough to write home about.  Maybe that in itself will be worth a story.

Meanwhile, at 4AM, the TV viewing sucks.  There is a lot of bad programming on at this time of night/day.  I am a big fan of educational type programming, but you can only watch so many reruns on Discovery, Discovery HD, History, History International, and Science channel.  It looks like there is a new Girls Gone Wild video out, but even that sucks because of the little black bars that obstruct the better part of my curiosity.  At 4AM there should be an understanding that black bars are not required.  My $5/month sports package is giving me some Boca Juniors on Fox Soccer, which is OK, but I do not like watching random soccer matches for less than an hour (I hope to get back to bed in the next hour).  What else?  Surfing, Women’s basketball, college hockey, and some no name division college basketball.  Not that I was expecting that much, but this is fairly ridiculous.

I’m really, really liking the player development. One of the top four hitters in the AL in 2027 was a 23^rd round pick! You’d never see that in any version of Out of the Park Baseball. The best pitcher in the AL was a second rounder and the second best pitcher was selected in the 15^th round. The leagues are still producing good players in the high portions of the draft. The difference is that players drafted in the later rounds have some probability of making an impact in the big leagues.

There’s no evidence yet that anything is drastically out of whack with the sim engine. I don’t want to get my hopes up too high and feed too much to the hype machine, but OOTPB 2007 is looking pretty damned good.

I’m not going to examine too closely the AI player trades since we only use human AI in online leagues. The much discussed Commish Portal is a nice place where everything that needs to be done can be checked and automated. The only real problem I see is with DFA removal.

The way the portal is set up players can be automatically released if they have zero days left on the DFA list. A nice addition, but not necessarily a practical one. The following sequence usually occurs when I have to make a DFA decision for another owner during a sim. The first thing I do is to try and move the player with zero days to the AAA team. Only if the player refuses the assignment (assuming he’s on the DFA and cleared waivers) do I cut the player from the team. The way the Commish Portal is set up will too greatly penalize owners who for whatever reason didn’t get their export in on time. So I’ll probably leave that option off for now.

HUGE addition for online leagues – owners can now designate if the team wants to pull back a player off of waivers if claimed by another team. We’ve been forced to make all waivers irrevocable in the online world or use a fancy system to allow owners to pull back players. I do have a question about the system. If I designate a player to be pulled back and my roster has 25 players on it, where does the player go, especially if the player can refuse assignment to the minors? It’s not clear to me how the game handles this type of situation in an online setting.

More later…

Last week I mentioned that I was surprised at the cost of high-end HD cables, so I did some research, and came to the conclusion that a $15 cable is almost as good as a $200 cable.

I decided to place an order with monoprice and I can report that the cables arrived quickly, and more importantly, they work great. I picked up a 6ft Gold Plated HDMI DVI (24AWG) cable for $15.77, and a “premium” 6ft (22AWG) RCA audio cable for $3.39. As I have mentioned several times, I am not a huge AV buff, but I think these cables give a great picture, even on SD stuff like History channel broadcasts.

Are the high-end HD cables from Monster and other vendors better than what I just purchased? While I have not done any sort of side-by-side comparisons, I would be hard pressed to imagine that my picture could be any better than what I am seeing right now.

The cables from monoprice are nice and think, look well shielded, and the connectors look very sturdy. I am going to place another order for my various analog cables used in my video game switch box to see if I can get any sort of signal upgrade.

It took me a while to run my 20 season sim because it turns out that you need to manually resign all of your human owners assigned to teams even if the game is told to run everything via computer AI. The AI will handle everything but the DFA & waiver wire if a human owner is attached to an AI team.

It took roughly two plus hours to run the 20 season sim and that is a great improvement over Out of the Park Baseball 2006. My initial reaction to the statistics results – so far so good. League averages started at .283 and 5.35 ERA for the AL in 2006. This reflects the abysmal OOTPB 2006 development algorithm and I expected this. OOTPB 2007 quickly made adjustments and got the league average to .275 in 2007 and a league ERA at 4.87. And this is where the league average and ERA essentially stayed for the entire 20 season sim. There was some slight deviation up or down, but the results were very consistent. Same story for the NL.

The career leader boards looked very good. Two times a single player hit over .400, but one of those seasons was an OOTPB 2006 season. The highest HR total was 65 and 176 RBIs were the most during a single season. All of the pitching stats were within spec and in line with real life baseball statistics. It’s clear that the development team spent a lot of time fixing the overall league statistics performance within the OOTPB 2007 engine.

Ok, stats seem great. Next I’ll take a look at the details…

Yes spring training is in full swing, but for me the sweet melody of spring is watching a bunch of four-year-olds chase around a soccer ball on a neatly trimmed pitch.  Funny that Chris just mentioned soccer in his previous post, because I was about to do the same.  Today was opening day at the Columbus Soccer Complex, and Nathan found the net twice.  Happy days (and proud dads) are here again.

I have to go and watch Holly “Sweet Feet” Johnson score some goals this morning, but I am liking what I see so far in Out of the Park Baseball 2007.  A lot.  So much so that I think Sports Interactive should refund every OOTPB 2006 owner the full price of that premature release.  The game is about 100 times more stable.  It feels like OOTPB 6.5 in terms of ease of navagation through menus.  There are some differences, but everything is smoothly implemented.  I hate the way that in OOTPB 2006 when my mouse cursor moves out of the game, my scroll stops in whatever game window I am looking at.  Not a problem in OOTPB 2007.

The FaceGen addition is a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE game improvement.  Did I mention it is a HUGE improvement?  Markus et. al. added the ability to update pictures for trades and/or other player movements with a simple push of the button.  A HUGE addition for fantasy players.

Enough about the eye candy.  I’m running a 20 year sim this morning.  Will post more later!

It took me 18 clicks (that’s right 18) to get to my world.dat file, but I finally was able to import my league file into Out of the Park Baseball 2007.  The “explore” button in the import dialogue doesn’t do anything as far as I can tell.  At least it doesn’t change the import directory as far as I can tell.  I’m not sure what the explore button is supposed to do, but the DOS-like directory selection seems to be a design decision and not a bug.

The good folks at Sports Interactive sent out preview builds to online commissioners and others to take a look at their latest and greatest (we hope) work, Out of the Park Baseball 2007. This is a five-day limited build intended to let everyone see how much progress the mighty OOTPB development team made since the abomination known as OOTPB 2006 was released to the world.

Hopefully I will get the thing running before my five days run out.

I told the game to install to my E:\ partition where my program files are. This seemed to confuse it in a number of ways. Since I only really care how OOTPB 2007 works with my online league, I immediately tried to import a copy of my current OOTPB 2006 league file. I use the word “try” because I have to use the word “fail” to describe the process so far.

Why can’t we get a normal Windows Explorer interface when we look for files on our hard drives in OOTPB? And why can’t I select the correct directory where my online league file resides in OOTPB 2007? OOTPB 2007 installed a bunch of stuff on my C:\ partition. Don’t know why – because I told the game to install on E:\. So when I go to try and import my league file, the game defaults to something under My Documents. I hit the explore button, go to the weird version of Windows Explorer that doesn’t let me drop down directories, but I click away until I find the correct folder under my OOTPB folders. I find my world.dat file, click on it, and…nothing. The sad part is that the “explore” button doesn’t mean that it will change the directory that it is looking in for the league file to import. It sort of teases by letting you know it knows where the correct directory is, but it’s not changing its My Documents ways.

Did anybody with multiple hard drives and partitions try and import a league file during beta testing? Since I am not copying my league file onto my operating system partition, it may be a while before I have something to say about OOTPB 2007.

Because I only care how it runs my online league…

I love The Hardball Times (the site as well as the yearly annuals). If you are a baseball fan, you owe it to yourself to make the site part of your daily surfing.

John Brattain recently wrote an interesting article titled Whom would You Choose? where Mr. Brattain debates “Suppose you had a Hall of Fame ballot with one spot left and you had to choose between Schilling and Smoltz: Whom would you choose?”

Before I started this column, I would’ve voted for Curt Schilling. My mind is changed. If I have one vote to cast between the two at this point, I vote for John Smoltz.

It is a fascinating article, but there are a couple of decent follow-ups.

The first is via a blog (The Pastime) where the author makes a compelling case for Schilling.

The second is a subsequent article by Mr. Brattain titled “You Said It” where Mr. Brattain quotes (and answers) a serious of well-written emails to his first article, mostly in support of Schilling.

All three articles are a great way to start your work week. BTW, I am biased towards Smoltz. I think being a top closer adds to his legacy, and in no way detracts from John Smoltz’s Hall of Fame credentials.

As much as I’ve bad mouthed Out of the Park Baseball 2006 I think it’s only proper to give credit where credit is due. I am having a blast with Spring Training in my online league. It opens a whole new game play dimension over previous OOTPB versions. I can track individual Spring Training splits to see who is doing what on the field and on the mound.

I had to make some decisions about a couple of older players versus AAA prospects to see who was ready to play and who needed to be moved or cut. I have two weeks of data on the prospects, so I can start shopping the older players I want to move before the season starts. Now we have the scenario in OOTPB 2006 of older players being invited to camp and then let go or offered minor league contracts for the regular season. I like this a lot.

Another scenario – I had to make some decisions about who would play catcher for me. I gathered data for the first two weeks of Spring Training, didn’t like what I saw, so brought up some borderline prospects to take a look at. Fun stuff.

The other very nice addition is that players need to actually play new positions during Spring Training to learn them.

These changes make Spring Training much more exciting in online leagues. Getting to Spring Training is painful because it takes so long to sim from November to March. But once you’re there, the season really “feels” like it’s beginning. It helps our league that we have a development report utility that adds an incredible amount of depth to an otherwise complicated and tedious built in system.

Blu-ray: So I am walking around Target yesterday (my wife sent me to spend money at her favorite store since she was not feeling well) and while I was looking at the DVDs, I overheard a couple of young dudes talking about Blu-Ray. Conversation was along the lines of

[dude 1] “What is the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD?”
[dude 2] “Beats me. Never heard of it before.”

The interesting part of this conversation was that these guys are obviously GIs (Fort Benning is in Columbus, GA). Stereotype coming, but I expected young dudes to know the difference between Blu-Ray, DVD, and HD-DVD formats, but they did not have a clue. Sony may have missed the boat on this one.

HD Hockey: Every once in a while I try to get into hockey, but it never works. Everyone says that you have to watch the game in person, and while we do have a decent lower level minor league team in my area (not to mention the Thrashers are 90 minutes away); I can never seem to get into the sport. Last night, one of the HD channels had Nashville (vs. some other team that I cannot recall), so I tried to watch for a few minutes. I can see why everyone raves above HD hockey (better puck viewing, and more action shows on the TV at one time); I still could not get into the game. I am sure I will try again, but for now, hockey is still not sticking with this Southern boy.

How the other half live (Part I): In the February 26, 2007 SI, I read that Ken Griffy Jr. (Reds often injured outfielder) broke his left hand “horsing around with his kids on the family’s yacht in the Bahamas in December.” I can only imagine.

How the other half live (Part II): Or maybe we should title this one “how many millions is really enough?” I read in this morning’s paper that Atlanta Falcons defensive end Patrick Kerney has voided his contract. Boo hiss. I realize that he is coming off of surgery, and he can make more money as a free agent, but what ever happened to team loyalty? Kerney was quoted by the AP as saying:

“I’ve only got about five more years to play, and I’ve got to make the most out of it. As great as it would have been to finish my career with Atlanta, where everybody, especially the fans, have been great to me in my eight years there, the business side is there.”

Thanks for that Patrick. I cannot honestly say what I would do in his position, but what happened to the days when players would spend their entire career with one team? The reality is that the Falcons could cut Kerney at any time – contracts in the NFL are not guaranteed – at the same time, the Falcons were not looking for a change in direction.

EA Sports is lazy: Unbelievable. Why would EA Sports be so lazy as to swap MVP 06 rosters with MVP 07 rosters? I knew that UGA did not look right, but I was really off the mark. UGA has Nebraska’s MVP 06 roster.  Seriously, WTF? I previously posted that the game was easily worth $29.99, even as a slightly updated version of last year’s game, but I have to retract that statement. MVP 07 is a lot of fun, but come on, how much money would it have cost EA Sports to update the rosters? I would suggest that PS2 owners only buy this one used or when it hits the bargain bin; $14.99 is probably a fair price.

Holy price gauging Batman!  Has anyone seen the prices of HDMI cables at Best Buy (presumably the same at other electronics stores)?  Yesterday I was in Best Buy to pick up a DVI (HD cable box out) to HDMI (TV in) for my new Sony 40″ BRAVIA V-Series HDTV (KDL-40V2500), but was shocked at the prices of HDMI cables.  We are talking about $80 or so for a “low end” cable, while the top end cables will set you back about $145 (plus tax).  There is also the $35 to be spent on the DVI to HDMI adaptor.

This is completely insane.  First, I spend two grand on a TV.  Next I spend some money to upgrade to Charter HD service.  Now I have to spend another $100-200 on cables.  Where does it end?  I assume if later this year I decided to pick up a 360 or PS3, I will have to spend even more money on more digital cables.

I have been doing some reading/research at it seems there are two camps.  The first firmly believes that spending top dollar on high-end cables such as those provided by Monster are an absolute necessity.  The other camp believes that a digital cable is a digital cable (assuming reasonable cable length), and you should go as cheap as possible.  I sure hope that the latter is correct because I do not want to spend this much money on cables.

I am sorry that LaDainian Tomlinson’s father was tragically and unexpectedly killed when his truck flipped over on a Texas highway last Friday afternoon. With that said, why would ESPN run the following headline – “Tomlinson says he’s ‘devastated’ by father’s death”? Of course he is devastated, as most of us would be at the news of a parent’s unexpected death. Why not just report the news with a simple headline such as “LaDainian Tomlinson’s father killed in traffic accident” and then use the “devastated” quote within the story? Maybe I am becoming a prude in my old age, but I am getting sick and tired of shock/sensational journalism.

Pretty solid game for the PSP. My wife got this for me as a Christmas present; I think it was probably $39.99 (or $49.99) at the time, but is now a nice $29.99 at most stores. I opened it for the first time earlier in the week on the flight to Costa Rica, and managed to put in a solid couple of hours with the game. On the flight back I did not play as much (maybe an hour). I think people either love the GTA series or they cannot stand the games; not a whole lot of middle ground for gamers to take it or leave it. I have always enjoyed the games because I find them fairly compelling – free roaming immersive environment, tons of fun missions, plenty of cars, great for pick-up-and play rampant destruction, great soundtracks (especially Vice City games), and just downright fun.

The only problem I have with the game is that I can only take GTA games in small doses, and I have never finished one. Of course I cannot play the game (or the PS2 counterparts) in front of the kids. Something about cussing, shooting, and hookers does not make for a family experience.

Vice City Stories features standard camera and control issues that we have come to expect with the GTA series. No real show stoppers, but it is a pain to target multiple folks, and the camera does tend to do squirrelly things from time to time.

I have not seen a deeper (non sports) game on the PSP, and the graphics are remarkable. It is hard to believe that the developers managed to get Vice City into a PSP UMD.