Out of the Park Baseball 20 - Make your team Perfecter!

FYI, if you create a PT team before the 29th (I think) you will get a free “gold” pack which guarantees your starter team will have at least 2 gold players on it.

Don Larson from the NYY pitched a no hitter for me earning me 1,500 points. :) This mode is really neat. I just leave it open on my second screen and check it out every once and while.

Grats on Don Larson. Now he has to give you his perfect game in the World Series!

Pro tip: if you don’t want spoilers on the outcome of your games, you can check “hide scores” on the screen that comes up informing you of the results of the most recent sim. I always keep this checked. Most of the time I just click box score, but for big games, I click game log (or highlights) and read (or play through) the game without knowing the outcome.

Speaking of old Yankees starters, I got Jim Bouton – but 1969 almost-washed-up knuckleballing Bouton, not the early 60s fireballer. He wrote “Ball Four,” the classic early 70s insider account of baseball. I read it about 4 times when I was a teenager.

On top of that, I got Wally Pipp, the Yank who was a starting first baseman until he missed a game (supposedly because of a headache) and was replaced by some guy named Lou Gehrig, who went on to play 2,130 straight games. I also have Wally in my OOTP 19 league.

Both Wally and Bouton are on my reserve roster, but I will keep them there for the duration. Odd, given that I’m a Red Sox fan, but those are two pretty iconic Yankees for me.

Also, I’ve added all managers of Charlatan and KWhit. Are there other manager names to friend? It would be really fun to start off in the same Iron League next week.

I need tips on managing my relievers. First off, they’re mediocre. I know that. But the AI manages them so strangely (probably because of how I’ve set them up). For most relievers I’ve chosen a role, say setup, or middle relief, or whatever. And for some of them (but not all) I’ve given a backup role (say specialist for a couple of them). Seems reasonable to me.

When the games sim out and my starter leaves the game, the AI manager plays musical chairs. It’s not unusual for me to use 5 relievers in a game, each pitching between 0 and 1 inning.

Is that due to the roles I’ve set up, is it due to their stamina (most have stamina in the 15-17 range) or is it due to something else? I need some 'splanin.

So I jumped in and grabbed OOTP 20. I pulled a Gold card from one of the starter packs and got the one with the Gold pack obviously. But I didn’t get a second gold pack. Not sure if I missed the opening week thing, or have to actually play in a PT game to unlock it or something. Either way, I if a pretty nice starting lineup but my pitching staff is bad (except for my gold card closer!).

lostcawz is my manager.

The stamina is a factor, yes. Are your pitchers all tired? In the entry pool league, my pitchers (especially relievers) are all exhausted by Saturday, as the team has to play 6 days in a row. It’s not as bad in the Iron/Bronze leagues, but even so, if you have a lot of low-quality relievers with low stamina, fatigue will be an issue.

Also, the AI does a bad job of matching relievers to roles. You don’t want “red stamina” guys doing middle or long relief. They should be setup, closers, “openers,” or specialty (meaning left-handed specialists, brought in to pitch to lefties). I had to switch all mine around. “Blue stamina” guys should be starters, long relief, or middle relief. “Green stamina” can be in all roles, but if they start, I put pitch count limits on them.

One intriguing question is whether to use the new “opener/follower” roles. I’m trying it now, as an experiment – setting a low-stamina reliever to “opener” and a high-stamina one to “follower”. I don’t know how this affects the regular rotation. A related question: is lefty “specialist” still a thing? Does baseball now require relievers to pitch to 3 batters or something?

You can change how often the AI hooks your pitchers in both Team (also called “Global” or Overall") Strategy and Player Strategy. If you click on your team menu, you’ll see options for both.

In Team Strategy, you can set overall priorities for hooking pitchers, depending on the phase of the game. You can also decide how much to emphasize handedness matchups, how to handle intentional walks and pitch-arounds, etc. I don’t use Team Strategy as much in PT as I do in other modes. In regular OOTP, I can sim many games quickly and see how Team Strategy is affecting things more clearly. That’s harder in PT.

I do use Player Strategy in PT, though. In particular, for starters with mediocre Stamina, I set pitch-count limits: 80-90 pitches for a pitcher with stamina in the 60s, say. In addition, you’ll see options for when to hook a reliever, etc. For batters, you can adjust base-stealing frequency, bunting, pinch-hitting, benching, etc. The easiest way to get to these options is to select strategy from the “Actions” drop-down menu on the top-right of the player’s screen.

As I understand it you usually don’t get a gold pack when you form a team, just the starter packs, so the one gold pack you received was your bonus pack. And since you’re guaranteed one gold player in your starter set that free gold pack gives you a second guaranteed gold player.

Funny enough, two of my three teams got a gold closer in their initial allotment.

Aaaah, gotcha. I thought everyone got a gold pack to start and the bonus was a second one. My bad.

I’ve been able to grab a few silver pitchers for cheap on the auction house. So my team is doing well now. Even had a 10 game winning streak and a couple of 2 hitters. Of course my gold closer is kinda lame. Not bad but outshined by the rest of my strong bullpen.

I’ve had mixed luck with silver starting pitchers. Some of them do great while others look like they should be good but they get blasted time and time again. I think I need to understand the different ratings better.

I’m DantesWitness in OOTP20. I’ve played every single OOTP but this is my first foray into Perfect Team, so be prepared to crush me.

I"m not seeing any ‘hide score’ option on the little popup. But I’m just in the Entry thing until next week so maybe it’s not available there.

Also, the only place I can see to add friends is on the Discord app. I’ve never used it before, but is that where we add managers to play in leagues? I think I’m missing the option in game somewhere.

This is where it is located for ootp19:

Perfect, thanks.

In OOTP20 the hide score checkbox is found here

Enter Perfect Team
from the Main menu select Perfect Team Home Screen
on the Overview tab
on the far right of the top bar:

I tried it once and it turned out the game was one of those where my bullpen blew a 3 run lead in the top of the 9th so my only experience with this is that it’s rage inducing!

For adding managers as friends:

Step 1 (do this only once for each account you use)

  • from the Main menu select Perfect Team Home Screen
  • select the Profile & Settings tab
  • on the right side of the screen select Use Friends List for League Placement Setting

Step 2 (do this for every friend you want to add)

  • from the Main menu select Perfect Team Home Screen
  • select the Universe tab
  • select the Managers & Rankings subtab
  • type a manager name into the Search User: text field
  • make sure the only show managers from my league and only show my friends checkboxes are unchecked
  • click Apply Filters/Sort/Refresh button
  • find the users you want and click the + Add as Friend text on the right of each line

Oh man, thanks a ton. So many little tabs and stuff just kind of blend into the background. Its getting better, but for now I miss things I know I’ve seen but can’t remember where.

OOTP mornings: go to bed 14-2, wake up 22 and 16 with most of my pitchers tired or exhausted. Raaaage!

EDIT: I went thru and grabbed the manager names I could find and added them. Below is the list for ease of use for anyone adding managers and to confirm I didn’t miss any.

DantesWitness
Yastrzemski
Carl_Yastrzemski
Charlatan
CharlatanPrime
Charlatan2
KWhit
Cigarsandbeer
Octavious230

Octavious230 is mine.

When I went to sleep last night I was still winning my division. I was actually playing MLB 19 on my one monitor while I left perfect team up on the other monitor. Finish a game in 19 and check the last sim. Rinse repeat. I’m going to OD on baseball before the season even starts.

@lostcawz : Thanks for summarizing all the manager names. I’ve added everybody.

@Charlatan: Thanks for summarizing how to find things in the UI. I should have done that. I appreciate it! The UI is busy, but it works, and one gets used to it over time.

Heh, I’m more pumped for baseball than I have been in years, thanks to PT. Also, I’m really glad they’ve made “Live” cards track in-season performance now. It brings PT closer to fantasy baseball.

Edit: I bought Rich Gedman, and in his first game, he went 3-for-3, was Player of the Game, got the Double Dinger achievement (earning me 20PP of his 4-digit price back). And for now he’s batting 1.000. These Red Stockings will try to be an all-Boston team, so Gedman is a first step in that direction.

@Spock I’ve got Rick Burleson on my defense team and you can’t have him! Nyahhhh Nyahh

Why would my batting order change from my lineup? I replaced my 3B with David Freese and set him to bat 6th, I moved my old 3B to DH and he was set to bat 8th. On both vs LH and RH.

But I just noticed that my old 3B batted 7th and Freese 8th in my last game.

I’ve made changes and noticed for the next game that the lineup changes didn’t seem to “take.” I’ve also noticed that when my subs play the AI seems to tinker with the lineup a lot.