OOTP's predictions so accurate it's spooky

If you've played Out of the Park Baseball's simulation and management game, you know the depth and sophistication of its roster-building capabilities as you become the front office and field manager of your own Major League club. So it would come as no surprise that OOTP has accurately predicted three of the last four World Series champions after running 1,000 simulations of each year's postseason field.

OOTP correctly projected that the 2017 Astros, '18 Red Sox and '20 Dodgers would win it all, and in the season its projection of the World Series winner wasn't spot-on, it accurately selected the two clubs who would play in the Fall Classic, with the Astros and Nationals facing off in '19. While Washington won in seven games, OOTP was off by just one, calling Houston in seven.

So how does it work?

"There's multiple layers to it," said OOTP Developments chief operating officer and chief marketing officer Richard Grisham. "But at its core, there's an engine which produces results based upon what we've created over the years [an ever-updating database of rosters, past performances, etc.]. Long story short, we basically create an instance of a season at a certain point, in this case right before the playoffs. Then we execute 1,000 play-throughs from the beginning through the end of the playoffs, and then we aggregate all the results.

"We aggregate the winners of each round -- so, for instance, how many times in the 1,000 simulations did the A's beat the White Sox in the [American League] Wild Card round? And then moving forward, we run the simulations for each round to see who wins. So the goal is to see which team won the World Series in the highest number of simulations. So in this year's case, the Dodgers won the most World Series. And then we sort of work our way back and we say, OK, how many times did the Dodgers win the pennant but not the World Series?"

In each of the past four years, OOTP has revealed its projections on MLB Network before the first pitch of the postseason. And given all of the unpredictable variables of the playoffs, especially this year, when the field was expanded to 16 teams, OOTP's record is remarkable.

"The last couple of years, we've been able to integrate live data into the franchise mode, which feeds into the simulation module. Prior to 2018, we did not. However, we did manually factor in, before the postseason started, the rotations and sort of how they had fared in the regular season. But from 2018 on, it's been based on the latest real-time injury information and performance, etcetera."

OOTP Baseball began in 1999, and is in many ways the modern version of older baseball strategy games like Strat-O-Matic Baseball. And on the topic of history, users have the option of building rosters from a pool that includes every Major League and Minor League club dating back to the 19th century.

"We literally have the entire history of baseball," Grisham said. "It's unbelievable how much we've got. You can execute it as it happened in the real world and challenge yourself in what the real situation was, or you can set it to evolve differently. You can create your own custom leagues and universes based on a variety of factors. And it's not just the players -- it's scouting, finances, coaching staff, everything that's associated with running a baseball organization."

The upcoming season will be OOTP's 23rd, and it is fully licensed by both MLB and the MLB Players Assocation. More information on the game can be found at OOTPDevelopments.com.