‘OOTP Baseball:’ How a German programmer created the deepest baseball sim ever made

It was 2008, and Markus Heinsohn needed every bit of his willpower to leave the house.

His father had recently died in a terrible traffic accident. He was the founder of a computer game, and an arrangement with a parent software company had just dissolved. On top of all that, it was the dawn of the financial crisis. He lived in Germany. Most of his customer base lived in the United States. The conversion rate from the Euro to the U.S. dollar was in the toilet.

“Basically,” Heinsohn said, “we were almost broke.”

Although Heinsohn had created a game that already received heaps of critical acclaim, including Metacritic’s 2007 PC Game of the Year, behind the scenes he was suffering from panic attacks. He needed medication to ease the pounding anxiety.

One day, when he went to buy groceries, his credit card was declined. If not for the last 50 Euros in his pocket, he wouldn’t have been able to buy food.

“I still have nightmares from those times,” he said.

His company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Their only saving grace: They had a new game due out soon. It was called “Out of the Park Baseball 9.”

“We convinced the bank to not close our accounts,” Heinsohn said. “They gave us another two weeks.”

The funds due from a new game bought Heinsohn and his small group of colleagues just enough time to survive. Timing, and sheer chance, are at the heart of Heinsohn’s journey.

“Out of the Park Baseball 24” comes out Friday. The computer game started with a niche audience and has slowly become more mainstream. OOTP — as it’s colloquially known — is hailed perennially for its depth and its realism. It’s an open-ended sandbox that can make the average fan on their couch feel like a big-league GM. The game is so realistic that multiple MLB clubs and coaching staffs have begun to use it as a tool.

It took a lot of time to create this game, a lot of time to get here. And in a time of great personal turmoil, Heinsohn found solace in his work, peace through baseball.

“I always had the love for the game,” Heinsohn said, “and this is what kept me afloat, I think.”

Before the programming and the panic attacks, the popularity and the pandemic, there was a bat.

Heinsohn was 14, and his friend Lars Gerken had just returned from a trip to see family in Miami. Gerken came bearing gifts — family members sent him back across the Atlantic with a baseball bat, a glove and a few balls. He brought them to a park outside the local elementary school where Heinsohn and his friends spent their summer goofing around, playing table tennis or soccer.

This time, the boys took turns throwing a baseball up in the air and hitting it. They had no idea what they were doing. Like any group of kids who have ever played baseball, they eventually had to chase the balls over neighboring fences.

“This,” Heinsohn said, “is where my life took a turn without me knowing … We just couldn’t stop hitting and throwing this ball. It was just so much fun.”

Eventually Gerken’s father, who worked at the Dow Chemical plant, started asking around. Many Americans worked at the plant. Might any of them be able to teach the boys a little more about baseball?

Nelson Castro, a native of Colombia, stepped in and volunteered. Over the next year, the group kept playing and got a local sports league to add baseball. They played in actual German leagues under organized rules, and Heinsohn became a decent pitcher.

But as a kid who taught himself how to code on an old Commodore VIC-20 at age 11, the sport resonated in another way. He would scour some of the first sports sites on the internet for information. Whenever he could, he would pick up an American newspaper and dig through box scores.

“Soccer in Germany, they only kept track of goals,” Heinsohn said. “Just no statistical culture at all. Baseball was full of statistics and numbers, and I became hooked.”

When Heinsohn was a computer science student at the University of Hamburg, he and a few friends would stay up late, drinking beer, crunching chips and watching weekly MLB games broadcast in Germany. He fell in love with the Atlanta Braves, admired Greg Maddux’s command and Ryan Klesko’s swagger.

Trying to replicate it all, he forked out a bundle of money to order a copy of Diamond Mind, an early computer descendant of tabletop games like Strat-O-Matic. He had it shipped from the U.S. to Hamburg on a 3.5-inch wide floppy disc. He had also played rudimentary baseball games such as “Hardball III” and “Hardball IV.” He was usually underwhelmed. He craved more depth, like the soccer simulations he grew up playing in Germany.

“The statistics were terrible,” Heinsohn said. “When you were simulating a season you would have pitchers with a 0.30 ERA and hitters hitting like 80 home runs.”

By this point, Heinsohn’s coding abilities had grown. He enjoyed the challenge.

“For me, it was like playing with Legos, but more advanced,” he said.

And one day, in October of 1997, an idea popped in his head. What if he tried to create his own baseball game, one where you could generate new draft classes, trade players, sign free agents, customize everything and play into the infinite future?

That’s how the best baseball sim ever made was born.

Sean Lahman used to get a lot of emails. He ran the website baseball1.com, better known as The Baseball Archive. Lahman is a pioneer of compiling historic stats. Back then, he sold the data on his website.

Often, people would write to him, asking if they could use his data to help build a video game or some kind of fantasy league. Lahman always said yes. He rarely heard back.

“I hoped that doing this would draw more people into (sabermetrics),” Lahman said, “smarter people than me who would end up doing cool things with it.”

Lahman knew early on something was different with this Markus Heinsohn guy. Heinsohn reached out, told him he was building something new and outlined his grand idea: Not a game where you would manage a single game or a single season, but one where you could act as GM and do anything you wanted.

“When I saw what he was doing, I wanted to get more involved if for no other reason than selfish reasons,” Lahman said. “I wanted to play this game. … It was enormously audacious. It was unlike anything that was on the market. Even though it was an early demo, I saw right away what he was trying to do was absolutely fascinating.”

Heinsohn needed a way to sell his game, and Lahman had the perfect platform. The infrastructure was already in place thanks to his baseball stats. Soon the game was sold via a link on the website. There was no other marketing.

At first, Heinsohn estimates, he sold maybe 250 copies.

“I was already tapped into that very nerdy baseball community,” Lahman said. “I think that just really allowed the game to find that niche that already existed.”

As for the name, Heinsohn called his game Out of the Park Baseball for a simple reason.

“Home Run Baseball was taken,” Heinsohn said. “Strikeout Baseball was taken. All those obvious things were already taken by companies who were almost defunct, or very old things from the ’70s.”

One night, Heinsohn was watching an MLB game. Someone hit a home run, and the broadcaster said the guy hit it out of the park.

“As a general manager, you’re sitting in your office,” Heinsohn said. “You’re in the park, but you’re also out of the park. So it was like, ‘OK, cool, that kind of fits.’”

That first year, Heinsohn did all the coding himself. He even wrote the script for the game’s play by play. There were small errors and plenty of awkward phrasing.

“Back then it sounded like it was written by a German student, which was actually the case,” Heinsohn said.

Although users in Out of the Park can play individual games in manager mode, essentially overseeing in-game strategy, OOTP’s biggest appeal is the ability to be a GM, to build a franchise, replay historic seasons or create completely fictional leagues. That level of customization was an early priority. Want to see what would happen if Ken Griffey Jr. never battled injuries? If a team today tried to steal bases like it was the 1970s? If the Red Sox had kept Babe Ruth? You can do all that and more.

Lahman started collecting the orders and mailing discs to buyers. At first, he says, maybe a dozen a week. Eventually, it was more like a dozen a day. Lahman, now a data journalist at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, was then working as a software developer and writing about baseball on the side. The work became too much to handle.

“By the end of that first year, I don’t recall any numbers, but there must have been thousands of people playing this,” Lahman said. “It just spiraled.”

Heinsohn had already dropped out of school to focus on the game. OOTP was bringing in enough income, he said, to make a decent living. Still lacking a complete education, he started an apprenticeship at a German software company, but the work behind Out of the Park was again proving to be a heavy enough load on its own. Eventually, he told his bosses.

“At first they were looking at me like I was some kind of lunatic,” Heinsohn said. Then he showed them the game. Eventually, one of them became intrigued: Coworker Andreas Raht left with Heinsohn to start developing it. Raht provided more advanced help on the technical end. They also brought in a graphic designer named Aurelio Barrios. Heinsohn was the only one who knew anything about baseball.

In 2002, Heinsohn and a few other developers formed .400 Software Studios, which published “OOTP 5.” In 2005, the game was sold to the company Sports Interactive. There have been plenty of changes on the business end since. The game is now distributed as part of the Korean company Com2uS, and OOTP now has a team of about 20 employees. Spread out between Germany, Canada and the U.S., scheduling weekly meetings gets to be a challenge.

Heinsohn remains deeply involved in the game’s development. He used to code all night, but now, at age 45, he joked he gets tired after about four hours.

“We have far more talented people now anyway,” he said.

After the first or second edition of the game, Heinshon had a problem.

He was altering the game’s ratings and code to account for the fact pitchers often have wild variations in hits allowed. Greg Maddux, for example, allowed nearly three more hits per nine innings in 1999 than he did in 1998.

Without knowing it, Heinsohn had essentially discovered the concept of Batting Average on Balls in Play.

It was around that time sabermetrician Voros McCracken published a detailed study that would become the seminal text for BABIP. Essentially, pitchers have little control over what happens when a batted ball enters the field of play.

“Hits allowed,” Heinsohn realized, was a flawed way to rate pitchers. Pitcher ratings in OOTP evolved to become based on stuff, movement and control.

“At first (the game) was just like 100 lines of code doing the core simulation,” Heinsohn said. “Now it’s several thousands, if not tens of thousands.”

One thing that has separated Heinsohn’s product from similar games is the fact OOTP has followed along on the cutting edge of baseball’s statistical evolution.

Player dashboards now feature both conventional and advanced stats. The intricacies of modern player acquisition can be reflected in the game. Although OOTP doesn’t yet use Statcast data as a real basis for scouting, OOTP at its best is an introduction to baseball analytics.

Matt Arnold — not to be confused with the Brewers general manager also named Matt Arnold — is now the game’s lead developer. He started as a disciple of the early editions of the game and got involved with its online forums. About nine years ago, he saw a posting for a developer job. He applied and got it.

“My wasted hours on internet message boards paid off,” Arnold said.

Now he oversees much of the game and its coding. He pulls data from Baseball Savant and FanGraphs. OOTP obsesses over little things, making sure the simulation engine feels like actual baseball.

“When we simulate games, are base hits going to the right spots on the field? Are we getting the right breakdown of pop-ups to line drives?” Arnold said. “If too many pop-ups go to the wrong spots, suddenly the stats are wrong because you’re getting a different distribution.”

OOTP’s portrayal of league rules — service time, arbitration, minor-league options and more — are also remarkably detailed and realistic. It all makes for a baseball game that has a steeper learning curve than most of its counterparts.

Only in time, though, would Heinsohn and his team learn just how true to life some parts of the game really are.

Markus Heinsohn, left, with Matt Arnold and Rich Grisham (right), have seen OOTP go from a tiny niche product to much broader baseball audience. (Courtesy of Rich Grisham)

In 2020, Gabe Kapler and his staff were on a video call. It was Kapler’s first spring as manager of the San Francisco Giants, and it was his 13-person coaching staff’s first time working together — all while baseball was on hiatus as COVID-19’s spread accelerated.

Teams were looking to stay engaged, and Kapler was searching for methods to connect with his club and his coaches.

Rich Grisham, OOTP’s chief marketing officer, had been in touch with MLB’s league office ever since OOTP got an official league license in 2015. MLB’s office eventually connected him with several clubs.

“One of the things I felt so strongly about to this day: If we could get this in the hands of some major-league teams, I know that they would see what we see,” Grisham said, “which is you can do a lot of research, you can have a lot of fun.”

So one day while Kapler was still stationed at the Giants’ spring-training home in Arizona, Grisham hopped on the call and ran the Giants staff through an OOTP tutorial. Kapler, interested, spoke up: Could we use this to run through scenarios?

Quickly, Grisham set up a situation using OOTP’s 3D gameplay. Say, fourth inning, the starter’s pitch count is rising, runners on first and third. What do you do? Who are you getting up in the bullpen?

Grisham witnessed as Kapler and the Giants staff discussed.They went around the virtual room, each coach analyzing the situation.

“I think it’s a useful tool, first and foremost, to get to know the roster,” Kapler said recently. “At that point, it gave us a sneak-preview of how we would use the roster as a coaching staff and how we viewed the roster as individuals, and it prompted discussion around some late-game, in-game strategy.”

Rocco Baldelli’s Minnesota Twins did the same thing at the outset of the pandemic. The coaching staff got information sheets together just like they were in the dugout and worked through simulated games.

“It’s more real than unreal, I’ll tell you that,” Baldelli said in 2020. “It’s very realistic the way that things come up. It’s one thing to have a discussion and look at information on a page and try to get into it, but it’s another thing when you’re watching it unfold in front of your eyes … And talking through it, just as you would in the dugout, that’s gold.”

Grisham says he has now met with at least half of MLB’s 30 clubs. Some teams have been more interested in OOTP than others. Some have been more public about it than others. But from running through scenarios to using OOTP’s simulations, teams have found ways to incorporate a video game into their increasingly complex processes.

“What we knew then and what I’m even more confident in now is that the game has more capability than even we used it for,” Kapler said. “It’s just an awesome simulator. And that’s what these games are designed to do: Simulate what might happen in the game and remind how random the game can be at times, and let you go back in and get a ton of reps. I think it’s a great tool for any coach or manager. And it’s fun.”

Those teams using OOTP at the onset of the pandemic? They weren’t alone.

With MLB’s season postponed and the whole world stuck at home, people were looking for ways to kill time. Media outlets, including The Athletic, were using OOTP simulations to help create content. Something to do, something to talk about.

For Heinsohn, it created contrasting feelings. The timing of his business success coincided with a devastating pandemic.

“I was torn all the time,” he said.

Heinsohn said OOTP’s growth has been slow and linear over the years. The only real boom was in 2020 when, he says, business grew by about 50 percent.

Once only known by about 250 people on an archaic website, OOTP now has partnerships with MLB Network running annual playoff predictions. The game is advertised on Baseball-Reference and prominent on MLB.com. It has drawn rave reviews from multiple pro ballplayers. Its Perfect Team card-collecting mode has made the game more appealing to casual users.

OOTP developments is still a tiny group, with a marketing budget Grisham said is “like a rounding error” compared to titans in the gaming industry. But over the past five-plus years, they’ve worked to make sure OOTP has a widespread presence, from podcasts to Twitch streams. The goal was to prove OOTP is more than a glorified spreadsheet.

Heinsohn still remembers the day an email popped up in the company’s info account. The message was from someone named John Henry. Heinsohn was busy that day, and it wasn’t until a coworker reminded him of the email that the light bulbs went off. “Dude, is this the John Henry?”

The OOTP team did some digging and verified the email’s domain. Sure enough, they had just received a message from the owner of the Boston Red Sox. Henry, Heinsohn said, likes to run through historic St. Louis Cardinals simulations.

“That was the first time I actually realized people who are part of the inner circle of the baseball world, the baseball universe, are actually paying attention and playing the game,” Heinsohn said.

Henry and Heinsohn still keep in touch, and Henry has even offered suggestions to improve the product.

Not bad for a game that started as a disc sold on a little baseball website.

“One of the things that continues to amaze me is at any point Markus could have packed it in,” Grisham said. “He could have said, ‘Nah, we’re good.’ But he didn’t, and only through sheer force of his will does this game continue to come out every single year.”

Heinsohn thinks back to that period around 2008 often, even if he would rather forget.

His focus on the game gave him something to care about. He also got by thanks to love — from friends who checked on him, and even members of the OOTP community whom he had only ever interacted with online.

“Talking to them actually helped, and I didn’t feel alone,” Heinsohn said.

The game has grown a lot in the years since. And so has he — working through anxiety, understanding the importance of openness around mental health.

“When you decide for yourself to be (proactive) about this and decide to talk about this problem and actively work on this, then there is a good chance you’re actually going to make it through,” Heinsohn said. “That was my lesson.”

Strange, too, for Heinsohn to look back on how all this started. To think that there are people who care about his game and his story.

“I’m pretty sure there are many little things we don’t even realize in our lives that cut out the paths for our future,” Heinsohn said.

Twenty-five years after the inception of Out of the Park, Heinsohn has something to say — to the people who sent his friend Lars back from the U.S. with a baseball bat, to people he does not even know who have played his game, to all the people who helped change his life.

“I was lucky,” Heinsohn said. “So thank you.”

(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy of Markus Heinsohn and OOTP Developments)