Out of the Park Baseball is one of the elite computer baseball games. Among its outstanding features is the breadth and depth of its attention to baseball history. Its Major League database goes back to 1871, and it has Negro league and minor league coverage starting in the early part of the 20th Century. You can – and some players do – begin with the debut year of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players and create an alternative history of the game that extends to the present and as far into the future as you like.
But that will change when the newest version of the game is released. The company that produces OOTP (headquartered, interestingly, in Germany, where there is a small but vigorous baseball fan base, and now owned by a South Korean parent) has a license from Major League Baseball that enables it to include team logos and other proprietary intellectual property in the game. This year MLB imposed a condition for license renewal: The Cleveland Indians must become the Cleveland Guardians; and not just starting in 2022, the first season under the new name. No, “Indians” must be deleted from the database wherever it occurs.
The team that won the World Series in 1920 and 1948, that was swept by the underdog New York Giants in 1954, that includes Bob Feller, Tris Speaker, Lou Boudreau, Frank Robinson, Joe Sewell, Herb Score and Satchel Paige in its Hall of Fame, that signed the American League’s first black player, and that is memorable for the colorful tenure of owner Bill Veeck (“as in wreck”) (1946-49) will now appear in OOTP exclusively as the “Cleveland Guardians”.
Somewhere, having learned to love Big Brother Rob Manfred, Winston Smith is smiling.
Comments