Category Archives: All-Encompassing

Will MVP Baseball return?

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Baseball is paradoxically both one of the best sports for video games to be made on, yet also one of the worst. It is one of the best due to the general obsessiveness of baseball fans, the vast number of statistics, players and strategic decisions and varied playing fields. It is one of the worst because it is hard to make a good baseball video game these days, and expensive. It takes a lot of time and money to make all of the stadiums, uniforms (not just MLB but also MiLB and throwback unis), players (having basically everyone have the same face isn’t good enough), motion captures, play-by-play recordings and all of the other stuff. And, even then, there is a lot of intangible stuff that they can mess up. When done right, it is awesome, when done wrong, it makes you want to pull your hair out.

We are now entering what appears to be a dark age of baseball video games: The MLB 2K series, the crappy replacement that was forced upon everyone without a PlayStation when Take-Two Entertainment signed a third-party exclusivity deal with MLB in the mid-2000s, is near death. This would, usually, be a good thing. However, it also means that it is now likely that there will be no traditional baseball games outside of the PlayStation produced and exclusive The Show next year, and possibly the year after that. This is because, as I mentioned above, making a good MLB game is a time-consuming and expensive process, and now isn’t the time for a company to start from scratch.

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Great Mysteries in Baseball

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Baseball is a sport where there are a lot of thing that are unexplained or unknown. For example…

  • Where, exactly, does Lena Blackburne’s Rubbing Mud come from?
  • How and why did Big Ed Delahanty fall over Niagara Falls in 1903? Was it suicide? An accident? Murder?
  • What happened to the ball Bobby Thomson hit in the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”? I seem to remember reading somewhere that a nun caught it, and I think there might be a book out there about the quest for it, but I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.
  • Did John Smoltz really get injured while trying to iron his shirt while still wearing it?
  • Did Babe Ruth really have a piano of his fall into a pond in Massachusetts? And if so, is it still down there? (It’s a long story.)
  • Did Wade Boggs really drink over 50 (possibly as many as 64) cans of Miller Light during one cross-country flight?
  • Does, as the result of an agreement in the early 1880s, the National League (and, as the result of the merging of the AL and NL into one legal entity in the late 1990s, MLB) owe the cities of Troy, NY and Worcester, MA hundreds of exhibition games? (Essentially, the agreement was that Troy and Worcester would lose their NL teams, but as compensation would get at least two exhibition games against NL teams each year… I don’t think that’s happened anytime in at least a hundred years, and I have to figure it’s a lawsuit or publicity stunt waiting to happen.)
  • Was William White, and not Fleetwood Walker or Jackie Robinson, the first African-American ballplayer in the bigs?
  • Who put the obscenity on the bat in Bill Ripken’s infamous baseball card? Was it him trying to pull one on the card company? Was it a bat-boy? His brother Cal? Someone else?
  • Did Babe Ruth call his shot? It’s obvious from video and stills from that day that he was pointing at something, but we probably will never know what, exactly, he was pointing at.

And there are no doubt many more as well….

Cool Old Baseball Headlines: The Beginning

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Huzzah, internet! Google used to scan a bunch of old newspapers, and although they stopped doing it, the ones they did before they ceased the scanning are still there. Thus allowing us to see such headlines as this beauty from the Boston Evening Transcript July 10, 1914:

Kind of different from the reaction of Bryce Harper coming up to the bigs, huh?