The Out of the Park Baseball 18 development team is hard at work on the game, gearing up for its March 24 release. You can still pre-order it for $34.99, a 10% discount, and receive the Gold Master version of the game on March 20, four days ahead of the worldwide launch.

The OOTP 18 Road to Release series is still rolling along, and this time we’re looking at the new tournaments feature in the game, starting with the World Baseball Classic. The 2017 WBC is in its second round as I write this, but I was able to fire up OOTP 18 and play through the tournament for a glimpse at what might happen. I’ll also talk about the ability to create your own tournaments in OOTP 18, as well as the addition of the Arizona Fall League.

The World Baseball Classic

To play through the 2017 WBC, start a Standard Game and make sure you check the box next to “World Cup of Baseball” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) when selecting the leagues for your game. If you don’t, the WBC won’t exist in your baseball world.

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OOTP normally skips spring training when you create a Standard Game, but if you include the WBC, it starts earlier in the calendar so you can run through the tournament before the 2017 season starts. (By the time Opening Day rolls around, all the WBC players are back on their teams and the MLB season starts with full rosters.) As with any OOTP league, you can take control of one of the countries and call the shots during the tournament, or you can take a step back and run through the proceedings in commissioner mode for the high-level view.

The WBC is conducted much the same way the soccer World Cup works. There’s an opening round of pool play, with the teams with the best records moving on to the next round. I simmed through that first round, which consisted of three games per team. There were four pools with four countries in each pool, and the top two teams in each pool moved on to the next round.

Nothing too shocking happened in the opening round. Teams that no one would expect to be very competitive, such as The Netherlands and Australia, were quickly eliminated with winless records. In Pool A, Japan, China, and Cuba tied with 2-1 records, but tie-breaker rules sent Cuba packing.

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The second round saw South Korea, Venezuela, the United States, and Chinese Taipei move on to the semifinals, a single-elimination affair in which Venezuela and the US prevailed. In the championship game, the US handily defeated Venezuela, 6-2, with Buster Posey going 3-for-5 to lead a 14-hit attack and Michael Fulmer tossing 5.2 innings for the win.

Plenty of MLB players did well during the WBC, as evidenced by the hitting and pitching leaders charts. As in real life, players return to their teams when the tournament ends.

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Adding other tournaments

If you’re interested in adding your own tournament to your OOTP 18 league, the developers have you covered there too. Just go to the Game Settings screen, click Available Global Actions, and select “Add a new tournament to this game.”

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When you do that, OOTP 18 takes you through a step-by-step wizard that gives you a variety of options for rolling your own tournament. You can also select a real world tournament, the WBC or the Olympics, or the Arizona Fall League, and make modifications from there. (The AFL? We’ll get to that in the next section.)

Just like you can create the league of your dreams in OOTP 18, you can create that tournament you’ve always wanted to see. You can have up to 50 divisions, with up to 50 teams per division. When you’ve decided what you want, you can move on to the next step.

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After that, you can name it and decide if you’d rather it be a winter league, as the AFL is. You can also choose more tournament format options, such as whether you’d like OOTP to select the top nations to compete in the tournament, choose them yourself, or even set up the teams to each draw from a region. So, for example, if you want to have a tournament with each team drawing the best players from a single state, you can do that.

Step three offers a bunch of interesting options, including minimum and maximum talent levels allowed in the tournament (for example, you can keep out MLB players), the tournament’s frequency (every four years is the default), and how often pitchers and batters may choose not to join the teams that select them. (That last one is set to “sometimes” by default and ranges from “never” to “very often.”) You can also go through the advanced setup and set many options that apply to regular leagues too, such as roster sizes and age limits.

The Arizona Fall League

OOTP 18’s final new addition in this category is the aforementioned AFL, a small six-team league that has multiple MLB affiliates for each club. It’s typically a showcase for Double-A and Triple-A players and it plays an abbreviated schedule of around 31 or 32 games per team, with ties a possibility, and a single championship game between the two division leaders. Several past stars have shown their might in the AFL, ranging from Mike Trout and Kris Bryant to last year’s MVP in Yankees prospect Gleyber Torres, or even “future star” Tim Tebow.

We asked the OOTP Developments team why they consider the AFL a tournament when it’s not really one, and they explained that they classify it that way within the game because of the way the teams interact with players. Because each AFL club draws its talent pool from multiple MLB organizations, they do not fit within the current OOTP minor league structure.

Now that the tournament functionality has been added to OOTP 18 and the AFL is included, the plan is to eventually add the various Caribbean Winter Leagues, which operate in a similar way.

Stay tuned to find out what the OOTP development team has in store for this exciting new feature in 2017!