Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 427: Owen Good on the Past, Present, and Future of Baseball Video Games

Episode Date: April 14, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Owen Good about MLB 14: The Show, where baseball video games have been, and where they’re going.

Good morning and welcome to episode 427 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. And today we have a guest. He is Owen Good. You may know him from his work as the longtime weekend editor at Kotaku, where he wrote the stick jockey column about sports games and once made my year by publishing something I wrote. And you might know him from Deadspin, but you should know him now also from Polygon, where he is the senior reporter and sports columnist. And we're going to talk to

him about the new baseball video game of the year and baseball video games in general. So, hey, Owen. Hey, Ben. Thanks for having me on. I'd also like to point out I am a lifelong Play Index subscriber. I love it. Gave it to my father for Father's Day once, too. So, love the Play Index. And it's been helpful to what I write, too. Yes. Make sure to use the coupon code every time that you resubscribe now. BP. All right. So, there's a new game out, MLB 14. The show is out now for PlayStation 3. It'll be out next month for PS4. You reviewed it for Polygon. One of the most interesting things about your review, you start off just sort of musing on whether baseball is a

good video game sport, basically. And you draw this analogy, which I love and I'm going to steal in the future, between baseball and turn-based RPGs, basically. And I'm a gamer, but not so much a sports gamer. But when I have dabbled in sports games, it's been in sports that I know nothing about, really. If I'm going to pick up something and play it, it'll be an NHL game or FIFA or something. Do you think that baseball is a good video game sport? I think it is. And this will get in a little of why I praise the show this year so highly. It's, you know, it's a game of set pieces. You know, obviously it has no clock, defense possesses the ball, all that weird, uncommon

stuff. But it's in the individual interactions, the things that I describe, I don't think are strikes against it or bad things. You know, as I did mention, you know, the similarity to like a turn based combat in a Japanese role playing game. But people play the hell out of that and enjoy that. And, you know, they have varying combat systems of varying quality, just like there are, quote, combat systems of varying quality, end quote, in baseball video games, too. But, you know, I think for fans of the sport or for people who like the tension or the strategy or want to see, you know, do I really set up the hitter in this matchup? You know, I do most of my gameplay in pitching, whether that was Road to the Show in years past, and that's the career mode in which you are just a single player,

or now what you can do, and we'll talk about it, I'm sure, in a second, is something called player lock, which is you effectively possess, for lack of a better term, one of the guys on the diamond, and you can do it between at bat, in the middle of an at bat if you want. But I'm usually playing as the pitcher because that's just a little bit more intriguing to me, and it's got a little bit – I mean, hell, we all remember Little League when we're standing out there in right field, you know, either A, waiting for the ball to be hit to us and it never was,

or B, praying that it wasn't. So – and you can do that if you want, but people tend to automate forward through all that stuff. So baseball, I think what the show is doing is it's understanding what really is entertaining about it. And for the longest time, we would hear like the pitcher-hitter matchup has really got to be highlighted and the strategy there has got to be brought to the fore.

And it's like, no, actually, I mean, that's great that you can do that, but what people really need is a more compact experience where they can come in, they can put 20 minutes into a game because the season is 162 games long, and still feel like they had a fulfilling experience. And I think that's what the show has gotten this year because, you know, up to this, it was the domain of the hardcore that you would play even the majority of a full season in one of your franchise modes. And even then, if you were bulk simulating games, you always felt like you were robbing yourself of something. Mm hmm. You know, a few years ago, there was that attempt to make that more mainstream, I guess, with the Billy Bean branded MLB front office manager game, which was not well received at all. I mean, is there an element of that? Can you enjoy the show in that way also?

Or is it, you know, more just you're there for the gameplay more so than the stats or the strategy? so than the stats or the strategy. I think in a roundabout way, not to cheerlead too much for it, but it's not going to be a management simulation like Out of the Park or Sega's Baseball Manager. Those things are entirely about management and they have their own appeal. Those games are appealing on PC in ways that they aren't on console, which is what we saw with the front office manager, which was by 2K Sports, which to me and to a lot of others just sort of struck folks as a low-cost way

to get another product off of that license, which was a very, very expensive license for them. And it just didn't go over well at all. But with the show, its management simulation is there and it's robust. And for people who like to do trades and who like to scout, I mean, there's a scouting engine in this that was introduced last year that factors now into the draft that you'll do in June. So it's not just, okay, here are the players that, you know, the background gives you and, you know, now you

go through the free agency engine for, you know, to sign them, which is basically what you're doing. You know, now you're actually like, okay, well, here are my needs, you know, as the Cleveland Indians and these scouts operate in this part of the country and they're really good at finding this type of a player. And so now I'm going to, you know, assign them to this kind of a priority. It can get really deep and granular in the management area. And what I would say the value is in the show is you can do all of that stuff and still pop in for a game or two here or there as a particularly intriguing player. You know, if you want to play, if you're taking the Dodgers and you're doing whatever you want to do to them for their management this season, but you want to play as Yaziel Puig for this game that's coming up with San Francisco, hop in, have fun, take your four at-bats, maybe you do something

crazy. And I think that player lock, again, that's what, that's the feature that we're talking about here. I think it does more to make a long season relevant and also to invite people to come over to gameplay in a long season from either road to the show or just from doing the management and batch simulating everything else. So we talk on this podcast about a lot of ways to change the sport consider the merits of them on sort of the

the grounds of uh... like sort of purity of competition but also the enjoyment level of it from a fan's perspective in those things often clash uh... most kind of recently in the the way that three true outcomes uh... has has taken over the game uh... and strike out to become so common some people think that that sort of ruins the enjoyment of it. So, um, these games want to be realistic, as realistic as possible. Are there ways though, that they cheat sort of to, um, make the strategy, uh, kind of more, uh, aesthetically pleasing, uh, for the fan, like our strikeouts as common now,

uh, in this game as they are in real life? Are walks and home runs as incentivized as they are in real life? This was more of a problem for 2K Sports' line of the game, which discontinued after last year. A lot of people playing that felt like, you know, it was a home run derby at the normal settings. Now, obviously, you can go in and you can massage the probability of certain events, you know, home runs, solid contact, foul balls, all of that other good stuff. But with the show, what I would say is I find that I keep wanting to do an analysis of how many foul balls do I see in a nine inning game in the show versus how many actually get hit

in real life. Because man, you can just feel that game putting the screws to you sometimes, which is like, you know, this guy is way out in front because everybody usually pitches inside the strike zone because you've got that reticle there. You can see, you know, where your target is. They do have variable strike zone officiating if you want to turn that on so you can get hosed on a borderline call somewhere maybe, or they expand it. But people will generally pitch to the strike zone, and they will pitch to contact, and they'll try to strike hitters out. And you can feel the game take over sometimes,

and the guy just starts fouling off every pitch, and you get into like a 9 or a 10 pitch at bat, and you're completely worn out out and then he gaps one. So that's, that's what I observe. And it's sort of a pet peeve that I have, as I said, as mostly as a pitcher, but I feel like where they really have to rein things in, they, I don't think they necessarily cater to long balls, to, you know, to strikeouts, you know, to the three true outcomes, I think they have to try to, because you are so easy, I think it's a little bit easier to teach to the test,

for lack of a better term, to those outcomes when you are a human player against the CPU. Online against other people, it's a completely different ballgame. So they have to figure out ways to blend them out while still making the age-old truism that you fail seven out of ten times, you're having a good year, while still making all of those failures acceptable. So that's more where I observe it. And I don't know if this is either here or there. I also at one point wanted to – I thought that everybody wants to talk about Moneyball and everybody wants to talk about the rules of what Billy Bean learned and all that other stuff, and they generally missed the point. But I do feel like that there are certain things that they introduced that are like almost made for baseball. Like, you know, the, the, the uselessness of the sacrifice bunt is, is even more useless in video game baseball because of the schizophrenic way in which you handle base running.

I mean, I just automate base running. So it's like, why the hell would you even attempt it? Cause you're probably just going to get out. So there are some commonalities there, but, but overall, I'd say they try to keep things away from, from, from, from those ends and try to keep things away from those ends and try to account for people more able to manipulate them. Do a third of your pitchers have to get Tommy John surgery? Oh, man. Who was it that got hurt on the athletics, like on the first game in the second inning? Their opening day starter.

I'm sorry. My mind is going blank here. But when I started my franchise with the Cleveland Indians, it's like, you know, their opening day starter i'm sorry my mind is going blank here but when i was i started my my franchise with the cleveland indians it's like you know their opening day starter went down and i'm thinking oh my god uh so no they don't they don't necessarily go through tommy john surgery um was it jared parker because that actually happened no it wasn't parker it was the other guy um jesus this is bad because i'm wearing an oakland ace jersey right now but i'm not out of touch with them sunny gray yes it was sunny gray and i just marveled at that i'm like wow you know that actually kind of makes sense to me at least

you know because you do see goofy stuff like that happen and the game will do goofy stuff to you in your career too like it'll you know you'll you'll be having a great season in double a or triple a and you'll get traded and and it is a head-snapping thing when that happens um and you can always reload the save if you really you know hell bent on playing for the team that that you're on and they may trade you again but i usually just role play it out and say okay well you know this is how this is how it works one thing they did in did in the road to the show this year too also is they introduced when you enter the draft, if you just want to randomize the team you end up on, you can choose to hold out of the draft for one to four years and, you know, reenter it later to either improve your position, but you also get like a training point bonus.

So I really don't know why anybody wouldn't hold out for another four years and get, you know, the 600 training points. Cause it's not like it's going to simulate you getting injured in college, but I did, I did go down in my draft stock. Um, uh, Arizona picked me, I held out and then, um, I got picked up in the third round by the Royals where I am now. Uh, you did a really good article for Kotaku about four years ago with the help of our friend Mark Normandin, where you kind of tried to reverse engineer these games a little bit to see how rigorous they were statistically. And at the time, it seemed like the show was sort of behind 2K in that it didn't really account for park factors. Or if a player had come up and had, you know, 300 really good at bats at the end of the previous season, his ratings would be off the charts. And these games kind of have to do,

you know, maybe a stripped down version of what we do with Pocota or what any projection system does where they have to kind of try to determine the player's true talent so that they can say how good he is so that you can simulate a season and have it not be completely crazy. So do you have any sense of whether they've gotten more sophisticated in that area in the last four years or what kind of effort they put into that now? I don't pay as much attention to that sort of thing as I was in the year. And that was about four years ago that Mark and I did that story. That was about four years ago that Mark and I did that story. But what I do understand from talking to them is they're not necessarily trying to return an actual player evaluation model. And how you guys would predict someone either to regress or improve. would predict someone either to regress or improve, they're more concerned with making sure that the individual statistics don't look completely insane.

And that's a real hard trick to pull off because it's like, you know, obviously in reality, your tolerance for insane numbers is infinite because it actually happened but if you know if you're going through a season and you see a guy you know who had 140 hits the previous year and all of a sudden he's at you know 210 and he's past age 33 you're kind of wondering what's going on here so they they really they do try to keep things within certain norms but it but it is mostly to keep the illusion going as opposed to actually grading, I think, a player's ability and where he should end up this year. And do you have a good sense of how these games sort of balance the user, the player's timing and performance with those player attributes?

Is it sort of like, you know, does it work like a game like Morrowind or something where you'll swing a sword, but whether you actually hit the guy you're trying to hit is pretty much dependent on what your character's stats are. It's not so much whether you swung the sword at the right moment. Is it kind of like that? How do they balance, you know, if you're playing and you time a pitch really well, but you're, you know, you're playing as a bad player as opposed to a good player, how does, do you know how the game kind of determines what happens?

There is a bit of a dice roll. You know, they're going to want Bryce Harper to behave, you know, a lot differently from, you know, Jimmy Rollins, for example. That may not have been such a great comparison, but, you know, just two different types of players are going to, are going to, with you, you, they have to have a dice roll in there because if you do figure out the timing, then you're going to start, and then it's going to be like, you know, the Stone Age days, like I remember with games

on the Commodore 64, which is, you know, you've got, you know, 224 hitters going up there cranking home runs. So what happens is this. They do a dice roll and that affects the strength of the contact and the trajectory of the ball off of that. And I know that at 2K Sports, and I've not seen this at San Diego's just because I haven't visited their studio. But 2K Sports had this really complicated model of simulating a ball thrown here, swung on, or contacted at this point in the swing with this type of player is going to produce, you know, this kind of a trajectory. And they were working off of, you know, stuff from Stats Inc. and things like that too. And so it does get that sophisticated,

but it, that's, you know, that's something that I do need to talk to them more about, because that I think is where the real magic lies. You don't want to give people an experience that is so frustrating that they just give up on it. And this was frankly the problem with the career modes in the past is that you would have these players who had to naturally develop. But while they were sort of specialized along, you know, maybe some guy was a faster player, maybe someone was a middle infielder and you were concentrating more on defense, although why you would do that in this game, I don't know. Or, you know, somebody was a power hitter, you could specialize, but your attributes were still a little average across the board. Now,

the way they create players in your career mode, you do feel like you're coming out and it's like, okay, I am the hot prospect who has some really superlative talent, whether it is a power hitter or whether it's seeing the ball very well, getting a lot of hits, or whether it is a blazing fastball strikeout. And you carry that weapon in a way that you're a little more able to grow into this game. And the rest of your stats, I mean, obviously you do sacrifice some, you know, maybe it's in your control, maybe it's in your endurance, something like that, in the pitching example, but you do feel like you're the stud. You know, you do feel like you're Stevenven strasburg coming out of san diego state

and it's like it's just a matter of time before he gets to the major leagues and he is throwing faster than anybody has ever seen in double a and triple a that's more capable now than in the past so i don't really know if i answer your question i do get long-winded on this stuff but but there is there there are dice rolls in the background and And as I suggested earlier, when you just get into one of those incredibly long, frustrating at-bats, you really smell it happening with the computer chugging in the background to screw you, basically. the new version of the show, where does it fall on the spectrum of sports game updates, right? Because you've got the, you know, you've got the some series where one year they will completely redo all the mechanics and it'll be a full overhaul. And then, you know, the next year it'll be updated rosters and, you know, a slight facelift, but it's essentially the same game. So how does this compare to the 2013 version?

Where does it fall on that spectrum of newness uh for for my reaction to it with the addition of player lock and what that does for making a long season more palatable and for the changes that it made a road to the show which were very important because if you put in player lock, you could very easily, because it's playing perspective is the same as Road to the Show, they could have very easily mooted that mode if they had done nothing to Road to the Show. But they have changed your experience accrual and the goals that you would have in development in minor league

are now different or gone even actually. So Road to the Show got some nice changes have in development in minor league are now different or gone even actually um so road to the show got some some nice changes that make you feel distinct from the ready-made major leaguers that you have if you play with that mode uh in in franchise i think it is the most recognizably improved of the of the sports video games that are closing out the last console generation, which would be the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, when you play with it, it just makes the preceding edition feel thin. And the preceding edition was very good.

It's not to say that it's perfect. It's not to say that there are long-running issues that don't need to be addressed. I mean, obviously the commentary is something that I've never felt like they've had like a real strong budget for this sort of thing. It's no secret why they have Matt Vestruggerian in this game. It's because he's in San Diego and so are they. And there's just – they rely too much on the visuals that you see on the screen, you know, the crowd, people, you know, a beach ball coming on in the field. You know, if you leave it in idle too long, you'll see guys give each other a hot foot

in the dugout even. You know, they do that kind of thing. But making it actually look like a broadcast, they have nowhere near the muscle that an outfit like 2K Sports did. And that's disappointing, especially when you're playing long career modes is you really hear the repetition and you don't hear something. Baseball, obviously, is a very conversational sport, and you don't hear a lot of that.

But to summarize my answer to your question, it is absolutely a full improvement over last year's game. Last year's game was very good. This year's game is really good. Um, and you play it once and you understand. Uh, I was, uh, pretty impressed by the realism of the show when I'm, when I, uh, read you note the wooden line reading of Eric Karras and Steve Lyons. You have to, it's pretty amazing if you can make a show so realistic that you get to rip on the announcers just like in, real life um what i'm just curious what would you want out of the out of the commentators what would be useful because it does seem like it's going to be impossible to get any sort of spontaneity and i don't know if

they're going to be if a real analysis is possible in that setting so what would you like to see them do with those with those roles mlb2k was a series that had a lot of problems, but it absolutely beat the pants off the show in the area of broadcast presentation. So it is possible. They had a booth with Gary Thorne, Steve Phillips, and John Kruk, and Kruk was so authentic I disliked him in this game, but not because he did a bad job, but because he was actually John Kruk was so authentic, I disliked him in this game, but not because he did a bad job, but because he was actually John Kruk. And the key to that is they recorded their lines together,

and they had a massive library. They brought these guys in and had a huge recording session where they would go over all of these anecdotes for the preceding season. Then they would go over all of these situational things as the season you played progressed. You actually got a stronger—it takes a lot of work. You really have to have a lot more people working on this than the show does. But you did get a sense that they were actually watching this game. And I think the fundamental improvement would be get these guys to record their

lines together. I don't know if they don't, it does not sound like they do. And there's just, Oh God, you know, when I'm, when I'm playing and I'm pitching in the minor leagues, you know, there's a, Karros will, will you know, when I, when, when I go through a three pitch strikeout, you know, there's a, Karros will, will, you know, when I, when, when I go through a three pitch strikeout, you know, he will, he has this hokey ass line about, you know, came into the kitchen, sat down, had a cup of coffee. I'm sick of hearing. So, so it's like, you know, they, if they're not going to do a deeper library for these guys to record, then bring them in and just let them talk to each other

and try to catalog that. And who knows what that'll – I mean, it's easy for me to say all this. But I know that EA Sports has Jim Nance and Phil Simms recording together from Madden, and that creates a lot of more authentic broadcast moments. I mean, people have their own opinions of Jim Nance and Phil Simms, but they actually do have dialogue in there where they correct themselves. And even if you just had that in this, you know, it would sound a little less, you know, wooden.

So how did we get to the point where there is one baseball video game a year? Is this the first time that one franchise has had a virtual monopoly on baseball video gaming? And I guess parts B and C to that, is this an industry-wide trend? Because it seems like there's been some consolidation in other sport genres also. And is that a good thing for for you know competition and innovation well the history on this is that okay so 2k sports is its studio is visual concepts and it was an old sega studio and you know they had the 2k line of games which were originally attached to the dreamcast which folded in like 2002 but the studio lived on and they continued to produce games. Anyway, Madden NFL and EA Sports got the infamous exclusive license

to make NFL video games in 2004, you know, beginning in the 2005 season. And, you know, that sent away, you know, the NFL 2K5 product that was just such a world beater. And Sega just decided to get the hell out of this altogether and sold this to Take-Two Interactive, where it, you know, this was one of their sports division was one of the things that created 2K Games. I know I'm getting really granular here, but it's kind of important. Their next step, and this was under a management, a previous leadership that frankly was corrupt. Like I think there was even investigations going on. It is not the current leadership, but they really popped their suspenders and ponied up a lot of money and overpaid for a license to make Major League Baseball games that wasn't even a console exclusive. But it was definitely, it was like a revenge rebound move to strike back at EA Sports. Well, you took away NFL 2K5, we're going to take away MVP Baseball.

Now, we're the only ones who are permitted as third-party developers, which means people who, studios, publishers that don't make a console that's what that means um you know now we're the only ones that can make this for the effectively for the xbox 360 because microsoft was not interested in making baseball video games sony was interested in continuing with its baseball video game that's why we have the show so that's sort of how we arrived at this point but major league baseball 2k that series i think the the word on it was that it cost take two interactive something like it was like a 20 million dollar loss every year uh they had completely overpaid for the license they could not sell enough and this also gets back to what i was saying earlier it's like you know is baseball really a viable video game

sport because when you look at things like you know, is baseball really a viable video game sport? Because when you look at things like, you know, the most played video games and Microsoft will do this a lot with, you know, what's the most 20 most played video games on Xbox Live this week. And you will see hockey on there way out of season. You never saw baseball. And I don't think it has anything to do with the quality of the game, you because people complain about Madden all the time and Madden is always on there so it's just it just they they really over overplayed their hand and thought they had something that was more valuable than it was and of course MLB Advanced Media was like you're gonna throw all this money and I was hell yes we'll take that now the trends and you are correct to note that there is contraction and the trends are you know that the contraction is because the licenses are more expensive the leagues actually

leagues and their players unions actually know what these things are worth now and expect those that premium rate and the development costs on modern console generation are only getting more difficult and and and higher. So that's where the contraction comes from. And then the final thing is with MLB2K having an exclusive as a third party, that means like as long as that agreement is active, nobody else can even have access to official Major League Baseball park dimensions, any of the MLBPA style books or player mugshots for character modeling.

You think about how many people are in this game, actually, in MLBPA, that have to be modeled somewhat realistically. And it's an enormous amount of work. And there is absolutely no way. I mean, it would have to be built from of work and there is absolutely no way. I mean, it would have to be built from scratch. And there's absolutely no way to do that on a single year turnaround.

And that's why you don't have baseball this year. I don't know if we'll have it next year, but, you know, clearly major league baseball goes, you know, they were in a take it or leave it. They were in a take it or leave it situation with 2K sports and 2K sports was absolutely happy to leave it after losing all that money and putting out a game that was just beaten up you know year after year after year they're happy to take their ball and go back to wwe and and basketball and ride that money train and say the hell with baseball baseball is well what do we do and that's why you got this this rbi baseball right reboot which it it's very telling to me that the players don't they didn't even try to make the players look like actual players

this is basically a mobile game ported over to a console very long-winded answer but that's how we got here so is that good or bad or or neutral for sports games in general i mean is there any incentive to you know really make a big improvement from year to year? Will people just buy it because it has new packaging and it has a new player on the front and new rosters? Or do you actually have to put some work into it if you're the only show in town, if you pardon the pun? Well, for a game like baseball,

which does not have the kind of basement couch appeal as Madden does, I think you really do have to do your homework on this. And Sony can't just sit back and go, hey, we're the best in the business. We can just update the rosters and put in some more dialogue and, hey, everything's fine. Because the people who are the ones buying this year after year after year and are your best customers and your advocates for it will notice that very quickly. It's – and I think that's what you saw with – the show tried harder, as I said, in the final year on the PS3 than Madden did in its final year on that console generation, than FIFA did. And FIFA's a great

game, then NBA 2K, then NHL, you know, and so they busted their ass on that. As for whether it's, you know, a good or a bad thing, I mean, we were talking about this in a panel at PAX East, which just got done, it's a big expo in Boston, And it's like, on one hand, there's sort of this conventional wisdom that you want a competitive marketplace because that creates more options for consumer and competition drives all of these products to be better because if they don't, they're going to be out. But at the same time, you know, we're in this era of exclusive licenses. We only have really, there's only direct competition in two properties. That would be soccer between Pro Evolution and FIFA and basketball.

And in basketball, it's only nominal competition because NBA 2K is so far ahead of NBA Live. And the thing is it's like even with these fewer options, the games that are there really do stand out as good, deep, playable games with modes that you can just get sucked into and are, you know, just individual components of them will provide enough gameplay that is worth the $60 spend every year. All right. Well, so before we wrap up, you've been playing baseball video games since the beginning. What stands out to you as kind of the baseball video game pantheon? Either the games that you remember the most fondly from your own experience, or just the ones that you feel have been the most influential in terms of, you know, adding some new mechanic that revolutionized the genre and was copied by every subsequent game?

I have a few stars in this, but I will have to admit that I have a big gap in my playing days, and that came from after I graduated college, and it was about a 10-year span until I picked up console gaming again. So people listening to this podcast, if I don't mention your favorite game on the Genesis or the Super Nintendo or PlayStation 1, it's not because it wasn't any good. It's not because it wasn't any good. It's just because it's something that I'm not that familiar with. But to go through a list of what I consider some of the most influential games, I think, you know, first of all, if you're going back into prehistory here, everybody would talk about microleague baseball, which was one of

the first licensed titles of any sports variety. And it did allow users the ability to play a full season. But I'll actually go with Earl Weaver baseball, which is still loved to this day by a lot of people who still continue to play it on emulation because it introduced the ability to bulk simulate a season without observing the result. And this was very important to a lot of people who you know, who were, you know, sort of in that three ring binder era of, I want to play an entire season and see how this, this looks, you know, does it match up? And with micro league, you were having to play every game and with Earl Weaver, you could actually simulate through. It was also the first time that stadiums were represented with different dimensions in a sports

video game, in a baseball video game. And that's an important breakthrough. And it even had umpire manager arguments, which is something they don't do today, because I guess it's so controversial. So Earl Weaver baseball is sort of the first real big shot across the bow, and contemporaneous with that would be hardball by Accolade, which was the first with a broadcast camera perspective from the pitching mound, which I think that's the first of any sports video game to attempt to recreate, you know, what you see on the television. And that's very important because, you know, there's a big ongoing debate now. It's like, you know, should you be playing these games

as they are actually played, as you would observe them on the field, or should you play them as you observe them on television? Epic's Sporting News Baseball was a real favorite of mine also from this era. And if I'm not mistaken, that one introduced the catcher's eye batting view. And it also had teams with all-time greats on it from back through the history, which I'm sure they did not pay the estates of Luke Garrett for that. But it was sort of a Wild West era. Going up the ladder, RBI baseball, which we just talked about,

was the first console game with MLBPA licensing. That was very important because you had real players in the games, or at least things that – I mean, Wally Joyner was always batting.297, but you at least felt like he was in the game. MVP baseball – now I'm really fast forwarding but mvp baseball 2005 was a great swan song for that series on xbox and on playstation 2 um and it spawned one of the greatest anomalies in sports video gaming which was mvp ncaa baseball 2006 and 07 they actually made a licensed game for a non-revenue

collegiate sport. Sounds like a big seller. But, well, I mean, they did it because they still had this engine and they still wanted to do something with it. And they obviously had NCAA licensing through their football and their March Madness properties. And so they said, hey, why the hell not? But what's interesting about it is

they came up with, they called it Load and Fire load and fire and that was you know down on the analog stick and up to swing the bat and the next year they had rock and fire and that was another analog gesture for pitching and and you know before then all of that all that stuff was either button or or meter so it really did introduce the the gesture-based analog controls that we use now, a lot of us use now anyway, and make the game a little more deterministic and less of an automatic. So, you know, those are the ones that really stick out to me for the groundbreaking things that they introduced. Is there any really obvious next step that you foresee? I mean, I guess everything is virtual reality is the next step.

But is there something that baseball video game fans lament that has not been included in any game so far that maybe better technology will allow it to be? I think as this stuff gets more sophisticated, it's just I think they've got to start pushing into the realm. I don't know if it's for baseball to do, but some sports series is going to incorporate more role-playing elements. And not just in the way you level up, but you look at a series like NBA 2K. I mean, they make your first season into a story with recognizable plot points and an adversary, a rival as you come out of the draft and all this other great stuff. And it's really good. And I think, I don't know if the show would be the one to do that. They tend to be less engaged in the Hollywood aspect of this,

you know, than an outfit like 2K Sports would. But you do want to see, like, you know, I invent all of these meta narratives and background stories. I mean, as I have been, you know, an up-from-nothing pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which have never had a Hall of Fame pitcher in their, you know, franchise history, or nobody with a cap in Cooperstown anyway. And, you know, I come into my 18th year,

and I can't agree on a contract with management and I'm going to be traded in the middle of the season. And in my final game, I throw a shutout and vow to the fans that I will never appear in Pittsburgh in anything other than a pirate's uniform. You know, I want to see that kind of crap. But you also talk to some other people and they go, hey, look, you know, this is a game that its big stock in trade is its history. You know, the numbers in this game mean more to this sport than any other sport.

You know, give us something like that. Give us maybe a tour of what it was like when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Tell us, you know, have us inhabit the persona of Hank Aaron, you know, who's 715th home run, turned 40 last week. Do some things like that. But I think those can sort of come off a little gimmicky, a little forced, a little task-driven. And then there's also, frankly, the money that you would have to pay to the estates of these guys. And they're going to want control, and they're not going to want to shack up with somebody's just going to half-ass it so it's a little difficult talking about your career mode characters is always a big hit at cocktail parties it's just a great way to break

the ice i get the feeling though i get the feeling it's like talking about your uh your roto league team basically yeah you know that i i don't i don't bring this up at all but oh but i will tell you in 2010 you know i was a hothead rookie for the Washington Nationals. And I got hit on the hand by Javier Vasquez when I was batting. And I walked, I was going to send a message. I walked two hitters to get to Chipper Jones and drilled him between the shoulder blades. You know, it was like, I mean, could you imagine if that happened in real life? I mean, the internet would melt down.

And the real Vasquez retired not long after that. He just couldn't keep going. All right, well, this was excellent. Thank you for joining us, Owen. Everyone should go follow Owen. He has a really cool job, and he's really good at it. On Twitter, at Owen Good. You can read his review of the show and everything else he writes at Polygon.

I won't spoil the review score, but I will link to the review at Baseball Perspectives and in the Facebook group so you can go read that and check out all the other things Owen does. So thank you, Owen. Thank you, Ben. All right. So please support our sponsor. Be like Owen Good, and subscribe to the Play Index.

Use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we will be back with a new show tomorrow. My microphone is sort of, it's odd. It's just I use the in-computer microphone, and it's sort of strange because I usually sound like I'm standing 30 feet away, but it picks up the sound of a raccoon four blocks away knocking over a trash can. Ben will hear birds that I can't hear.

He actually picks up wildlife that I can't hear where I live. Okay. Well, I've got a snowball mic here, but I do have a window open, and so if there are birds jumping on this audio, let me know about that too. But I think it sounds like we're good. We like the birds. The birds are part of the – Well, it's like – it's the masters. Yeah, exactly.