To give this another angle.
Before I ever even was interested in baseball, I played a TON of Football(Soccer) Manager games, like the EA Managers and some stuff produced by german companies(Anstoß 3 etc.)
The last one I really played was FM 10(EA) I guess, and when I discovered OOTP, and well, the rest is history. One main reason for that, OOTP is much quicker if you want to, no waiting 10 minutes for a week to go through, or 5 minutes for a game to simulate.
No endless details and things to manage that are mechanical after one season(like, telling your ground keeper to take care of the field, or buy merchandise), but more focus on managing the baseball team, transactions, and if you want, in-game strategy.
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I went back to finally try out SI's Football Manager 2016 this year(hard to buy in Germany...), and found this game to be between very entertaining and very annoying at the same time...
It still takes ages to load compared to OOTP. Right now, I'm in my 4th season, and on trade deadline day, I know I can push the 'Continue' button and take a shower because it will take the game like 10 minutes to simulate the day.
Speaking of the trade deadline, they do a great job there because they don't only have days as time unit, but hours and minutes, and the trade deadline day therefore feels more like the real deadline as things happen step by step on that day.
Scouting and attibutes are some kind of mess for me, every player has 25 attributes between marking, finishing and mental attributes... Player development, youth development and training... well I don't get those and let my assistants do the work.
You have to constantly take the same interviews with the media over and over again or sent your assistant, and you constantly have unhappy players that demand playing time and are pissed off whatever you do, even if they start every other game for a Champions League team in two game weeks.
The presentation is a mess and in order to get things decent enough, you have to download like 20 mods to get player pictures(!), team logos(!), uniforms, stadium pictures, a decent UI... and if you want an editor to change some things, maybe create some cool scenario... Editor is £3.99...
They did improve the in-game engine and tactics system compared to any other football manager I played before tho, and the 3D games managed by yourself with pregame talk and halftime talk are quite good and entertaining and keep me in the game.
The tranfers and finding young, quality prospects tend to be challenging if you don't have a big budget, and more often than not your best players then get lured to some big club.
For example: I sold my right back for €55M to Real because well, they wanted him and he was grumpy because he wanted to leave to a big club. I then bought a better brazilian right back for €30M right out of Brazil and one of the best right wing talents(21y) in Europe for €20M. Some things never change
Overall, I still prefer OOTP by a mile
