[chimanbj]

I love to take a losing franchise and turn it around into a winner.
I love to insert myself and see how I would turn out as a baseball player.
I even enjoy making a team of supermen and seeing if they can run the table (haven't seen a 162-0 season yet).

But the best thing about this game, for me, is the historical replays. The complete randomness of players that bubble up to the top continues to amaze me. I have a monster league going now, including the standard MLB setup, with six rookie leagues, and six NCAA conferences (and growing). I keep adding a conference or two every few years to see where the game starts to bog down. But it really hasn't.

On my replays, I start in 1901, create the standard minor league structure, with ghost players, and let it go on autopilot. In the 1960s, I start making adjustments to the minor leagues, adding new leagues, and moving teams around to their proper league/division. In 2011, I added my first group of college conference (each, its own feeder league), and rookie leagues into Dominican and Venezuelan Summer Leagues.

I'm now in 2015, and I'm looking back at some of the best of the best. The home run leader is, as you probably guessed, Boog Powell. He bested everyone with 749 dingers. He's followed by A-Rod, Ran Santo (earning his HOF honors, finally), Frank Thomas and Carlos Delgado, all with over 600 homers. What happened with the Babe? Well, he was a decent pitcher for the White Sox, but never materialized as a batter. Hank Aaron still hit over 500 home runs, but he didn't turn out to be the home run champ like he is today.

Al Simmons holds the all time career batting average at .357, his entire career as a Phillie, where he was on 3 World Series championship teams. Ted Williams batted .323, so he was still pretty awesome for his career.

It's interesting to see some of the iconic names that didn't make a name for themselves. Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Mike Schmidt are a few that didn't live up to their real life careers. And that's awesome! It just goes to show that having the historical stats doesn't make it automatic that you'll be the best of the best in OOTP. The games still have to be played...