It’s just an Out of the Park Baseball kind of day today isn’t it? With the assistance of Out of the Park Baseball’s head of operations Rich Grisham, we recently had an opportunity to look at the process behind Paul Sporer taking the reins of OOTP’s Perfect Team. I’d say the community is in good hands, he knows baseball period, point, blank and his passion for the game is second to none.
Make sure to read our exclusive below and congratulate him on Twitter.
When the call came, Paul Sporer’s immediate response was “Yes!”
What followed was a brief, jubilant discussion about all sorts of great opportunities. Then came a single thought:
“What the heck have I gotten myself into?”
That call to Paul came from Out of the Park Baseball’s head of operations Rich Grisham (who doubles as the head of Business Development for OOTP’s parent company Com2uS). He was seeking to add a new voice to the team responsible for designing and deploying all of the cards, missions, and competitions that make up OOTP’s popular Perfect Team mode. For the entirety of Perfect Team’s existence, Kris Jardine had been its content leader. From its humble beginnings as an add-on mode that went live in the middle of 2018 to its explosion in popularity in the ensuing years, Kris had become Perfect Team’s driver behind the scenes and the external face to the OOTP community. However, in the spring of 2022, Kris had decided to step away from the role and it was clear to the development team that big changes would be on the horizon.
“Kris did an extraordinary job, literally defining Perfect Team in almost every way over the course of his tenure,” said Grisham in an interview with Operation Sports. “And, because he’s not only brilliant but also an incredibly good person, he put the team in a great position to deliver another full game cycle’s worth of content even though he was leaving the organization. We had a lot of decisions to make, but those decisions did not have to be rushed and we were able to really think about what the right thing to do moving forward would be.”
2022 would, in fact, be the most challenging year in the long history of Out of the Park Developments. Their third party live service operations provider unexpectedly went out of business late in 2021. That left them very little time to find a replacement provider and then rebuild the entire Perfect Team infrastructure. All this was happening while the developers were simultaneously creating the new game, and ultimately caused the first-ever delayed launch of an Out of the Park Baseball title. OOTP 23 shipped in April of 2022 instead of its customary March timeframe – and the Perfect Team mode was not activated until May. A series of technical complications caused by the rebuild were inevitable, and put enormous strain on the development team as well as OOTP’s dedicated fan base.
“If we didn’t have a couple of decades of community goodwill, (the delayed launches) might have killed us,” said Grisham. “Luckily, our fans were patient and understanding, and helped us fight through a lot of the pain. It was not easy, and in many ways we are still recovering from that collective trauma. Ultimately, we got out of it alive and are back on track to delight our fans moving forward on the schedule they are accustomed to seeing.”
That was where Paul Sporer came in.
Many people in the sports gaming community know Paul from his incredible content output at FanGraphs as well as his prolific streaming of MLB The Show and Out of the Park Baseball. He’s well-known in several baseball communities, both for his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball as well as his passion for sports games.
“I’d gotten to know Paul really well over the past few years,” said Grisham. “I’d especially gotten to know him as a regular on our OOTP Now podcast, where we talk a lot of baseball. Whenever he would be a guest, I would jot down questions beforehand, but never prepare Paul with them. He never knew ahead of time what we’d be talking about – but yet he would always, every single time, just crush it. I do not know another person on the planet who knows more about baseball than Paul. Which is why I knew he would be the perfect guy to take the job.”
“When Rich and I started talking about the opportunity to design Perfect Team content, I knew something special could happen,” Sporer told us in an interview. “Anyone who knows me knows I’m a huge fan of the franchise, as well as a big part of the MLB The Show community. I’ve been on the ‘consumer’ end of content delivery for years, and have provided plenty of thoughts and feedback on that in the past. But to be part of the development team that actually brings this to life, every week, over the course of a year? I’m not going to pretend I had that on my list of career aspirations – but now that I’m all-in on it, it’s amazing. I cannot wait for the community to see what we’ve got going on for Perfect Team 24!”
Sporer, who remains with FanGraphs in addition to leading Perfect Team’s content, was able to ease into the role slowly starting in the fall of 2023.
“Unless you’ve designed live service baseball content before – and there are maybe 20 people in the world that can legitimately claim that on their resume – you don’t just show up with an entire year’s plan in your back pocket,” Sporer continued. “So I basically saddled up with the rest of the guys in November as they rolled out content each week, listening, learning, and occasionally offering an opinion. It’s an amazing, fascinating process. It didn’t take too long for me to fall in love with it, either.”
Working with the rest of the newly-created content team over the fall and winter, including Director of Product Management Nicolino DeBenedetto, Perfect Team Hype Man Rob Tomlinson, and several others, Paul began to slowly but surely build out his plans for the upcoming Perfect Team 24 (set to release on March 24).
“The best part about designing Perfect Team content in 2023 is the options,” explained Paul. “Not only do we have five-plus years of history to look back on, but we have some incredible new partnerships that really open up things that were never possible in the past. While I’m not yet able to say what those are – a lot will be revealed when we do the deep dive for Perfect Team 24 in a few weeks – the community is going to really be excited. Plus! I finally get to really push a ton of Detroit Tigers into the mix, which clearly everyone wants to see,” he laughs.
“What’s most exciting to me about Paul joining the team is the long term,” says Grisham. “We are still at the beginning of a multi-year agreement with MLB and the MLBPA, which means we’ve got a multi-year roadmap. With our new content partnerships that will be unveiled, the support of the team at Com2uS, and an expanded development team supporting the technical infrastructure, we’re just getting started. Having the best baseball brain I’ve ever known at the forefront of this amazing team is the best possible scenario. Fans of Perfect Team are going to be amazed at what it’s going to be – not just this year, but for many seasons to come. I can’t wait!”
Out of the Park Baseball 24 ships on March 24. You can pre-order it today for a 10% discount as well as 3 days of early access. We will be providing our early thoughts as well as a full review as soon as we can!
