Shopping for the national pastime.

My local home opener is April 11th this year. It’s a day game at one of these recently erected but old-styled urban ballparks – for some reason the park is in a distant suburb, but we can overlook that. You’d think I already have my tickets, that I’ve anxiously awaited the event since sometime late last year. But I haven’t paid much attention to baseball in more than twenty years.

I loved baseball when I was a kid. My father on the other hand is a devoted fan of the Dallas Cowboys and the National Football League. The conflict between a baseball fan and a football fan can be a serious matter. Sure, there are people who like both, and claim to like them equally. But when you have a feel for one and not the other, there’s a rift that can develop – especially when you’re encouraged to play the one you don’t favor. I played one season of baseball. Just one. I played football for years. My father, I think, had it in for baseball. But I loved it.

Baseball is a way of life for some children, more than it is a sport. Really, who collects football trading cards? But I had over a thousand baseball cards. They lived in a large file box, fastidiously organized by team. A trading frenzy in the leagues brought about an equal glut of activity in the file box, moving this shortstop under “Oakland” and that right fielder behind “New York”, before the players themselves had packed their bags. Around the time I realized that baseball was not to be part of my youth – we’d never attended so much as a AAA game – the box of cards fell off its shelf in the den, hopelessly scrambling the cards and their hand-lettered divider plaques. I shoved them back in the box with the idea I’d put them in order again later. Later, of course, never arrived. We all know I could retire on the value of that baseball collection, if I only had any idea what became of it.

Still I believe baseball is destined to reenter my life, and it might as well be sooner than later. My son was born early last summer, and in order to spare him a lifetime of bothering to watch football games on Sunday afternoons, I’m going to take up baseball again. Not playing, certainly not for years, until he can catch a ball and hold a bat. But I’m going to reclaim my rightful place as a fan of American baseball.

The first hesitant step on this dusty road to baseball salvation: I’m going to buy a baseball video game this year. I learned all I know about professional hockey from video games. (I also learned everything I know about interstellar space combat from video games. Thankfully, all I know about the Vietnam War is from other sources.) This is no small thing. I can hold my own in a discussion of hockey’s athletic intricacies, and I can recall the highlights of recent team rosters. As an educational foray into sports, you can do a lot worse than video games. But traditionally you can’t do much worse than baseball video games. For sheer excitement, anyway. This sport doesn’t have a long-standing reputation for well translating to game consoles.

But baseball games have changed in recent years, since the time when I thought the latest big baseball title hadn’t improved so much over the old Mattel LED handheld toys. Lately, the play mechanics have been overhauled, tens if not millions of times. Still there are complaints about batting or fielding, but something must have benefited from all that fiddling around under the hood. There are team management features that to use all of them would mean quitting your job, devoting your entire life to one season of baseball on the PlayStation 2. It is perhaps fortunate that the field of baseball simulation – as opposed to what we’d call “the arcade experience” – has been winnowed down to just two titles. (Due to some industry wrangling over player licensing, next year there may be only one game, and perhaps I should have waited until next year to make my move.) But two titles is two too many. In just a few hours of researching EA’s MVP 2005 and 2K Sports’ MLB 2K5 – no, I can’t keep them straight in my head, either – I have developed keen insight into what my father may hate about baseball. For such a simple game, it’s awfully complicated.

I wish EA had the chutzpah to initially overprice their baseball title this year. This would make my life easier. With MLB 2K5 going for 20 dollars and MVP coming in at 50, I’d save the 30 bucks and be done with it. But EA has apparently learned from last fall’s Madden football debacle that people – at least sports fans – are cheap. MVP 2005 is only a sawbuck more than MLB, and such a slim margin begs a thorough evaluation.

Having been out of the whole baseball thing for two decades, I can’t make out much difference poring over these feature lists that are indeed as long as a Louisville Slugger. Oh, there’s a lot of difference if you’re into minutiae. And the argument can be made that baseball is all about minutiae. Yet there is something greater in baseball, whether you play or merely follow the game, something that transcends rosters and RBIs and ERAs. I can tell you that I’d like to enjoy what I’m playing and not work at it like a job. I’d like to play minor league games at real minor league parks, once in a while, without aspiring to manage a baseball dynasty for 120 years. I reserve the right to play online, although I seldom will because I don’t like to be humiliated. But I would forego in a heartbeat all the depth and these amazing, expanded features for the promise that I will sit down at my console for one hour and, through this video game, experience my delight in baseball when I was a boy. For just one hour. How’s this for a feature: “All the magic of baseball, that indefinable quantity, that special something, guaranteed or your money back.”

Comments

[skyknyt]

For me, the best baseball game I ever played was Basewars - it didn't require me to figure out the endless, seemingly random factors like RBIs and batting averages (though those stats were available in game), or include a cast of thousands of vaguely recognizable names.

No, they'd refined major league baseball into the two most important parts of the experience: baseball and gladitorial combat. Oh, there were imbalances in the weapons, the huge amount of time it would take to input all the teams and rosters in a full custom league, the easiness of getting home runs with a fully upgraded batter...

But when it came to insane, crazy fun with my brothers, that was the game to play. We could load up our league, and then go at it for hours and hours between all our fictitious teams' rivalries and infighting.

In this way, I thought it was the best baseball game in the same way that Rock n Roll Racing was the best racing game - by taking the gameplay over the top, by giving players every chance to make a comeback, they made a game that transcended its content.

Of course, I also just like watching robots fight, which might influence my opinion.

[cxk6111]

Ahh, baseball. A game that is near and dear to my heart. Having been taught the game at the age of 3 by my father and playing video game versions of it since the Atari 2600, I think that console baseball comes down to two factors in whether it is good or bad. And no, graphics isn't one of them. Without a doubt, the single thing that can ruin a baseball game faster than anything else is the realism of the hitting. I've played games where the only way to score runs is through home runs. If all ground balls seem the same, and all the line drives seem the same, and all the HRs seem the same, you'll be so sick of it after an hour. The second feature that can ruin a game (and only slightly less important than the hits) is the pitching interface. You need to feel like you have some power over the computer's batter. Whether nibbling at the corners with a slider or busting a high inside heater topping 95mph for a called 3rd strike, control and a sense of being able to best the computers AI is key. A game where the computer nails every strike and never chases a ball out of the zone will kill a game in oh, say 2 hours, compared the fatal hitting flaw's 1. So how does this all relate? In the games I've personally played, World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn is absolutely the finest console baseball I've ever played. While I can't personally vouch for it, apparently World Series Baseball 2K3 for PS2 or XBox continues the strong tradition that faltered during the Sega Dreamcast days. I certainly hope you pick a good game because a good interpretation on the console will have you yelling at your runner as he is sliding headfirst into home, trying to beat the throw.