Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) 23 offers users a wide array of different settings and customization options. Users can tweak the player rating scales, injury settings, to even more involved components like scheduling free agent drafts, and designing the league to how you see fit. But settings should you hone in on, for a more realistic experience, in OOTP 23? Let’s go over our recommendations.

Global Settings

  • Use Complete Scouting SystemUse 20-80 Player Rating ScalesUse Coaching System

We do recommend using the scouting and coaching systems, for a much more potent challenge. And as far the rating system goes, we do recommend going with the 20-80 rating scale. This scale is used by real MLB teams to grade how players currently grade out in various categories, and how those athletes could look in the future.

If you need a primer on how this scale works, here’s a look at what each value means, per Baseball America:

  • 20: Bad30: Poor40: Below Average45: Fringe-Average50: MLB Average55: Above-Average60: Plus70: Plus-Plus80: High End Elite

Players & Facegen

  • Enable InjuriesSet Short & Long Term Injury Frequency to either High or Very LowKeep Player Personality settings onKeep Player Development system close or at 1, but tweak setting slightly higher (~1.05) if older players tend to not regress, and slightly lower (~.95) if the opposite occursDo not disable player development

For a realistic experience, keep the injuries on. However, there are three key injury settings to really hone in on: Normal, High, or Very Low. Normal is the OOTP classic setting. High is the setting that most represents injuries at the pro baseball level. Very Low keeps the injury count down considerably. While there are other injury settings, these are the ones to focus on, with a high preference to High or Very Low. We do want to note, however, that injuries in Out of the Park Baseball happen very frequently, even on Normal. If you want more of an automated experience, it might be best to keep this down. But for a more authentic experience, keep it up.

Also, make sure to tinker with the Player Development System. This one really can only be fine-tuned with a lot of gametime. It takes quite a bit of time to analyze how fast, or slow, players can regress in OOTP. That’s why it’s a good idea to either keep this at 1, or increase or decrease it every so slightly, to test the results and see if the new system works better.

AI Settings

  • Keep Trading Difficulty in middle, or slightly increase itPush Trading Preference slightly closer to “Favor Prospects“

As far as Trading difficulty, tune this to your preferences. However, we do want to note that Trading difficulty at Normal does provide a solid challenge. So, feel free to either keep it in the middle, or slightly increase it.

Also, perhaps tune the trading preferences to make it favor prospects a bit more. A good amount of trades on a yearly basis do feature prospects going back and forth. But, don’t push it too far in that direction.

As for everything else, those settings are really up to you. ‘Almanac’ may not be of much use to you, unless you want to use HTML or MySQL to sparse through OOTP data. ‘Online League,’ as the name suggests, are settings for online games with multiple users. ‘Database’ is for files that are in the game, while League Settings mainly have to do with MLB rules, division structures, and so forth.