Hey! Do you like baseball? Okay, thanks for the answer - but let's try to keep the swearing to a minimum. Here's another question: do you like sports management games? If you answered "No" to either of the above then you're almost certainly not cut out for the niche that Out of the Park Baseball occupies. If you've answered "Yes", however, then you're probably going to be happier than Manny Ramirez on an oestrogen high to hear that, as OotP moves into its tenth innings, it goes way beyond the requirements of regulation play to provide what is arguably the most comprehensive baseball world yet.

More than possibly any other sport, America's favourite pastime is obsessed with statistics; its facts and figures are just as important a part of the game's essence as the smell of cut grass in the outfield and the lusty thwack of wood meeting leather that launches a ball into the summer sky. It stands to reason, then, that baseball should be the natural home of sports management simulation, yet it isn't quite as simple as that; while most devotees of the genre won't miss the irony that in order to recreate the very public, outdoors experience that is a baseball game, they shut themselves away in a darkened room where natural light is seen as an unwelcome intruder, their counter argument has always been that management games are a very individual pursuit. It's a point well made and it means that to have any chance of success in the field, sports management sims need to come with as many options as possible, so that they can be personalised to exacting individual tastes.

A large part of what makes OotP 10 such a hit with its target audience is the huge amount of choice it provides; while many will plump for the new MLB 09 season with its real-life teams and players, there are all manner of single, double and triple-A leagues to begin your career with here. On top of these, if you're open to broadening your horizons then the winter sun of Mexico and the Dominican Republic or OBPs with the Oriental flavour of Korea and Japan may appeal, or - for something even further out of left field - there's the chance to play in historic leagues dating back to 1871 and even in completely fictitious baseball divisions, as well as the now almost mandatory options to import your game from the last OotP release and to compete in an online league. These, however, are only the very tip of the customisation iceberg, and below its surface lies a mass of options so huge that they provide you with the ability to control everything from simulating an entire season in a matter of minutes right down to the minutiae of every individual pitch. Attempting to do justice to such depth in the relatively meagre amount of words available here would be an exercise in futility; suffice it to say that OotP 10 would give Cooperstown a run for its money as the home of baseball.

At first this may seem worryingly like the kind of kitchen sink design that could lead to chaos - simply chucking in as much content as possible and leaving it up to you to invest the time necessary to arrange it into something resembling a workable experience. Such fears can be quickly allayed though, because, while OotP 10 is certainly complex, Out of the Park Developments have used their experience from past iterations to structure a very clearly regimented product, turning the game into less of a maze and more of a multi-storey car park of stats. Despite this, the presentation style remains an eclectic one, obviously based upon the Football Management model but individualised with its own combinations of components. The information pages are framed by a bar of icons at the bottom, which take you to the most important screens concerning yourself, your team and the league, and another bar of word-based tabs at the top that hide the drop down menus dealing with more specific matters such as advancing time and studying individual opponents. Although the splitting of the navigation tools in such a way can make things more confusing initially, when combined with the back button (which can always be used to follow the invisible breadcrumbs back to the safety of more familiar surroundings) and the advanced search box, they form a comprehensive suite of ways to navigate the game.

The data itself is presented as a mixture of words, figures and multicoloured bar graphs, often supported by an idiot-proof five star summary. Players' abilities and personalities are deconstructed into an extensive range of categories, from calculable stats such as speed to the intangibles of pitchers' 'stuff' and even individuals' greed. Teams' finances and scouting networks are laid bare for dissection and your staff are given very few places to hide in justifying their continuing employment. So vast are the almanac-worthy reams of information that just keeping up with the news of injuries, trades, hot and cold players, suspensions and contract negotiations sent to you in email inbox is a task all on its own.

With so many ways to tinker with your team, it's sometimes even harder to isolate whether any of your decisions lead to results and, if so, whether they are good or bad; the more you play and tune into the game's mechanics, however, the more you get a stronger sense of cause and effect that goes beyond the basics of needing to look at your pitching rotation if you're giving away too many runs and trying to find a way to heat up your bats if you're not scoring enough. If nothing else, at least OotP 10 makes clear how difficult it can be just to complete a simple trade, even with the help of the game's OSA trade summaries, and how easy it can be to throw away a victory. It's not even as though OotP limits your clout to the front office and locker room; whilst the type of pitches thrown during games remain the preserve of the long distance relationship between pitcher and catcher, from your invisible position on the pine you can order your talisman on the mound to check runners, try to throw strikes, pitch around opponents or even send a message by drilling them. Similarly, when your batters are at the plate you can decide whether the leave pitches, swing away and when base runners go. If you feel that managing every single pitch is a bit too demanding, you can coach on a batter-by-batter basis or simulate individual innings (or entire games) to make the one hundred and sixty-two fixtures move along at a quicker pace.

You are once again offered a plethora of choices when it comes to the presentation of matches, the default of which is a still photo of the field with players' current positions and numbers shown in the appropriate places. While the only moving feature is a slightly oversized ball that shoots around when hits are made, the real animation to the action comes from the text-based commentary, which you can hear being delivered by the announcer's voice in your head. Put together with the background crowd noise, the effect is a quaint, very baseballey package whose nostalgia value harkens back to times gone by.

As almost any management sim aficionado will agree, the biggest annoyance with any such title comes on the occasions when events seem like they're being predetermined by the game rather than the result of your input. In OotP 10, at its very worst the issue spawns tales of games cheating you out of victories and injuring key players, but the problem can also manifest itself in more discrete, less easily noticeable ways. There's a thin line between organically recreating the unpredictability of real sport and forcibly doing so, and the mere whiff of the latter can trigger fans to engage in the kind of rants that would make even Lou Piniella blush. While such moments do arise from time to time in OotP 10, they certainly don't spoil what a great success the title is overall (although how detrimental an effect they have will vary depending on the individual's resilience to such matters). By contrast, other more definitive improvements that could be made involve the match engine, which remains OotP's most evolving feature, with more realistic representations of the on-field action being top of the list.

For anyone looking to get into baseball management sims, Out of the Park Baseball 10 is a perfectly fine place to begin getting to grips with the complexities and steep learning curve of the sub-genre. Having said that, this really is a game that's built for veterans in the field who will delight at the scope they're given to involve themselves in almost every aspect of baseball. OotP 10 stays true to the traditions of both the sport and the genre whilst also managing to provide the volume of content required to fill at least one management title - and probably about three more as well! Prepare to lose your life - in a good way - to this grand slam of a game.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).