Peering into the future
What will baseball be like in a hundred years? Let’s see what Out of the Park Baseball 25 thinks. I started a default 2024 MLB game and left it untouched through the end of the 2124 season.
Who made the Hall of Fame? Were there any unanimous selections?

In 100 more years there was only one more unanimous Hall of Famer, a Rays pitcher named Chris O’Hanian who played in the 2070s and 2080s. What was his career like?


259 wins. Led the league in K/9 pretty regularly. Two Cy Youngs, and a nine-time All-Star. Hall of Famer for sure, but he doesn’t seem like a deep inner-circle candidate necessarily. I guess the way things are going, 220 IP in a season might be HOF-worthy all on its own.
Did any records get broken?

The single-season doubles record has felt pretty beatable lately, and it falls in 2049 to the apparently Japanese-American Ryouto Carroll. He also set the career Doubles record. Juan Argueta gets the dubious record for most strikeouts as a hitter in 2057, with 320. Jorge Urbina set the career walks record, though his career .419 on-base percentage is only 21st all-time (minimum 3,000 plate appearances).

The pitching records reveal Sean Leslie, who’s got the most beautiful page of black ink (well, red ink in OOTP) I’ve seen for a pitcher:


Eight Cy Youngs. Spent his whole career with the Reds. Led the league in strikeouts eleven times, setting the modern era record for K’s in a season with 411. This guy is a true legend, but he must have pissed off enough writers somehow to only get 99% vote for him to join the Hall.

No one threatened DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak record. 39 was the max, in 2108.
Did anyone threaten the home run records?


Not really. Nobody matched Sammy Sosa, let alone Barry Bonds, for the single-season record, with the peak being 64 by two players in the 2040s.
How did the league change overall?

The league expanded several times, up to a max of 46 teams by the end. The A’s moved to Columbus in 2035, lol. The Rays waited until 2099 to move to Omaha. The mound was lowered a few times, but the effects weren’t obvious from a bird’s eye view. Here’s what the 2124 standings looked like:

And here are the stat modifier changes (1.00 being the current 2024 frequencies):

2124 is the era of sac bunts and successful but rarely attempted stolen bases, apparently. And hardly any outfield assists at all.
Who was the greatest player of the 21st century?

By WAR, Julio Rodriguez takes the crown, narrowly beating fictional walk-monster Jorge Urbina. J-Rod ended up with 543 home runs and a career .292/.358/.535 split. He stayed with the Mariners until his age 34 season, when he went to the Dodgers for a few decent seasons, then spent a regrettable final season with the Yankees.
Did anyone get a Triple Crown?

Yeah but mostly pitchers. A few hitters, suspiciously in 2072, 2073, then 2075 despite being three different guys.
How did Ohtani do?


He did very well. 83.4% seems like an awfully low HoF vote percentage for these statlines, but I guess the computer might not know how to factor in the two-way stuff, or the Japan stuff.
Which teams were the most successful?

The graph is a little goofed up, but still legible. The big winners of the 21st century seem to be the Giants, the Royals, and the Jacksonville Tyrants, an expansion team with 5 titles already starting in 2044. The Columbus Big Stick are the relocated Athletics, who already have 9 currently in real life, so no success story there.
No one beat the 2001 Mariners record for most wins in a single season. The Dodgers had six 110+ win seasons in the simulation, but only peaked at 113.
Wouldas and Couldas
I’m a little disappointed by a few things about this experiment:
- Current minor leaguers didn’t make much of a dent on the history books. Far as I can see, of current minor league prospects, only Ethan Salas and Harry Ford made the Hall of Fame. A few other very recent big league debutantes made it: Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Wyatt Langford.
- Similarly, far as I can tell, no real-life current amateurs made the Hall of Fame. Everyone in the Hall after the current pros is a fictionally-generated player, despite the big database of real-life amateurs. The big names for this year’s draft are Charlie Condon and Ethan Holliday I think, and both had unremarkable careers.
- The league never changed up the playoff format despite adding 16 new teams over the years. Turns out Manfred had the perfect format for 30 teams or for 46.
- The list of current players who became managers in the sim isn’t super-interesting. Nick Anderson is the only name I could pick out among current active baseball pros who became a manager. Are there any current managers who were relief pitchers? Feels like a weird fit.
- Really wanted a couple more outlier seasons or big, weird statistical environment changes. But as you can see from the few records that were broken, the league evolves but not in a very extreme way.
First pitch Pawapuro-kun
The mascot of the Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu series throws out the first pitch at a 2022 Yokohama BayStars game. All you need to know, really.
New Encyclopedia Pages
Not quite done with the full series yet, but added several new pages for MLB The Show games.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Epic Baseball (PC) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Apparently Epic MegaGames (now the world-eating Fortnite monster) released a shareware version of Microleague Baseball. I really wish I could find the non-free version of it somewhere, but I’ve come up with nothing so far on auction sites or Googling around.
- Pro Yakyuu Japan 2001 (PS2) Gameplay – This Pro Yakyuu Spirits predecessor from Konami plays about the same, but has the herkiest and jerkiest animations you may ever see. Interesting piece of history in that way.
- All-Star Baseball 2004 (GameCube) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Going back to games of this era reminds me how feature-rich they all used to be. There’s no reason The Show shouldn’t have a Negro League stars team available in Exhibition by now like this game had.