Yankees: An Alternate History, an OOTP Experiment

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A New York Yankees cap and glove on the dugout steps during the game against the Baltimore Orioles (Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images) /

Welcome to Yankees: An Alternate History

While I hope the situation around the Major League Baseball season changes and New York Yankees baseball returns, with each passing day I find myself missing baseball more and more.

As the waiting game continues, I have decided to go on a 100-plus year journey with the New York Yankees.

Through Out of the Park Baseball 21 (OOTP), an in-depth baseball simulation video game, we will take a journey from 1903, the birth of the New York Highlanders to the 2020 New York Yankees season, and see how the Yankees fare in this bizarro world scenario.

In this sim, historical transactions will be made. Every trade, every signing made by New York will be just as it was in real life. So the Yankees will still acquire Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, and a young shortstop from Kalamazoo, Michigan will still find himself in the Yankees organization.

However, that doesn’t mean Ruth will become the greatest baseball player of all-time or Derek Jeter will become the Captain.

Throughout this experiment, the careers of some players may look vastly different from how things played out in real-life. Players who flamed out because of injuries may develop into 10-time All-Stars, and players with numbers in Monument Park may not be remembered fondly in the OOTP universe.

I will simulate each season and breakdown how the Yankees perform. Will the Yankees be able to top their 27 championships? Or will they run into some bad injury or postseason luck, failing to develop into the most storied sports franchise in American history?

We will compare the real-life Yankees and their video game counterparts, taking a look at how some legendary players have performed and assess key moments in franchise history and how they are taking place in the simulated realm.

Before we jump into the first decade of New York Yankees (Highlanders) baseball and see how the OOTP Highlanders perform, join me for a brief history lesson on the origins of the 27-time World Series Champions.

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