Last Friday was the worldwide release of Out of the Park Baseball 26. To celebrate, I fired up a stream on Twitch.tv/ThatSportsGamer (archived on YouTube) to start a new franchise. I discussed my plan for this franchise in detail in a previous post. The only real change from that post was that I renamed the North Carolina team the Cloudbusters, named after the Cloudbuster Nine baseball team from the elite Navy training school at UNC-Chapel Hill during WWII.
When you look at the team, one thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that with an expansion adding six teams means that one hundred and fifty-six players who would have normally been in the minors are now on Major League clubs. Also, being that I plan on doing this franchise for a long while, in-game time, I focused more on playing the long game. None of my main players are over 30 years old, and a lot of them are low-overall high-potential guys.
Ohtani is slotted as our ace, but surprisingly he was taken pretty late in the draft. I think that was pretty much from a combo of the value on his contract, and some surprisingly low ratings. Bradley has had two decent seasons with the Rays after being a top prospect for them. Painter has been the top prospect in the Phillies org since ’22, and now he’s got a spot in our rotation. Hopefully, Lewis and Vrieling can be passable back-end starters for the time being.
The bullpen was tough to draft, but we ended up finishing it with what seems to be a fairly strong one. While no one really stands out, they are all good-to-high quality relievers. For some reason, Adrian Morejon always seems to end up on my OOTP teams. Maybe I just like saying his last name with Spanish flair.
During the draft, I did select some guys with injuries, nothing extremely long, but my offense does have Spencer Steer and Francisco Alvarez starting the season on the IL. Gunnar Henderson was our first-round pick at #10 overall. He’s going to be the anchor of our infield for years (decades?). Salas probably isn’t ready yet, but he’s going to hold it down until Alvarez is healthy. Martinez also bows out when Steer returns.
Crews and Campbell get their chances to be full-time players who can hopefully blossom into superstars. Melton is more of a super-defensive guy out there to help lock down the outfield with Bleday next to Crews. If Royce Lewis can stay healthy, I think we’ve got a pretty good offense and a great chance at making the playoffs out of the NL East.
I’ll be streaming this franchise Monday nights at 10pm ET on Twitch.tv/ThatSportGamer, with archives going up afterward on YouTube.com/ThatSportsGamer.