What Out Of The Park Baseball 25 Thinks About The '24 Season

Yes, this is another excuse to run a bunch of simulations using the beloved video game franchise.

Ronald Acuna Jr., presumably simulating a few quick games from his OOTP league in the dugout. (Mark Cunningham/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

With the baseball season starting in earnest on Thursday (Seoul Series notwithstanding), I thought it would be fun to revive an exercise I did last year — using Out of the Park Baseball to simulate a bunch of MLB seasons and tracking how the game tends to think each team will do in 2024.

For the uninitiated, OOTP is a baseball simulation game (now in its 25th year) which puts you in charge of any team you want, both in 2024 or throughout history. It’s probably my favorite video game at this stage of my life — no comment on what that says about me, LOL¹ — and I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with the makers a bunch over the years.

(My favorite in that genre was our reconstruction of the 1994 MLB season, if the strike had never happened — give it a read!)

I also think we can learn things from simulations like this. For instance, last year’s version identified the Arizona Diamondbacks as a team to be reckoned with, long before their surprising run to the World Series. Who will be this year’s D-backs??

Today, I asked the game² to run 25 different parallel versions of the 2024 MLB universe, in honor of OOTP 25.³ Using the default quickstart file for this season, I ran the AI manager on each team, then did a simulation all the way through the World Series, tracking the details of the season — standings, scoring, playoff results, etc. Here are the average numbers across all 25 of those seasons:

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And here’s how often the World Series ended up with different teams in our 25 simulations:

• Atlanta Braves: 16 wins

• Baltimore Orioles: 2

• Houston Astros: 2

• L.A. Dodgers: 1

• Minnesota Twins: 1

• Boston Red Sox: 1

• Cleveland Guardians: 1

• New York Mets: 1

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Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this game really, really likes the Braves.

Atlanta is the only team that averaged 100+ wins in these simulations, cracking triple-digits on 15 occasions in 25 sims. (No other team did it more than the Dodgers, at 4 times.) Its average margin in the NL East was 20.1 games. It won 16 of 25 possible World Series. As I was running through the different universes, I had to laugh as the game almost always found a way to get the Braves into the Fall Classic, even when they trailed in the NLCS, etc.

I am a native Atlantan, sure… but I am also a Mets fan. No thumb on the scale here! Still, with all the talk of the Ohtani Dodgers being a superteam, OOTP still sees Atlanta as the class of MLB. Compared with the other odds and models I tend to look at heading into each MLB season, Atlanta’s average of 102.1 wins in OOTP was 3.7 higher than elsewhere.

Here the other teams OOTP was higher on than those other forecasts:

• Cincinnati Reds: 79.8 wins in other models | 87.3 in OOTP (+7.5)

• Chicago White Sox: 65.1 wins in other models | 72.3 in OOTP (+7.2)

• San Francisco Giants: 81.7 wins in other models | 85.9 in OOTP (+4.2)

• Boston Red Sox: 79.3 wins in other models | 83.3 in OOTP (+4.0)

• Cleveland Guardians: 79.9 wins in other models | 83.2 in OOTP (+3.3)

Meanwhile, here are the teams that were lower in the OOTP sims than other forecasts:

• Philadelphia Phillies: 88.3 wins in other models | 79.4 in OOTP (-8.9)

• Los Angeles Dodgers: 98.1 wins in other models | 91.7 in OOTP (-6.5)

• Toronto Blue Jays: 86.4 wins in other models | 81.4 in OOTP (-5.0)

• Tampa Bay Rays: 86.9 wins in other models | 82.0 in OOTP (-4.8)

• Pittsburgh Pirates: 74.5 wins in other models | 69.9 in OOTP (-4.7)

• New York Yankees: 88.0 wins in other models | 84.3 in OOTP (-3.7)

Finally, I’ll replicate another chart I made last season — showing the overall win ranges for each team across the 25 different simulated versions of 2024:

How much of this will come to pass? Only time will tell. Until then, we’ll just have to keep playing the game and simulating out our own alternate baseball universes.

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Filed under: Baseball, Statgeekery

1. Hey, playing with stats and a user interface that is basically a series of spreadsheets is a fun time!

2. Specifically, OOTP Baseball 25.1 Build 47, which includes recent roster developments like Gerrit Cole’s injury.

3. Also, these things take a while to run. Check with me if I am still celebrating the version number when OOTP 50 comes out!