Category Archives: Video Games

Bizarre Baseball Culture: Crummy Teams, Fanatics, and Pokémon in “The Double Trouble Header”

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction.

In a first for Bizarre Baseball Culture, we’re going international to look at one of the more strange appearances of baseball in Japanese culture. To be more exact, we’re looking at an old episode of the Pokémon anime, entitled “The Double Trouble Header”.

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Okay, are you done laughing/rolling your eyes? Good. Now go below the jump for this installment, which has been weeks in the making:

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WBC Simulation: USA vs. Canada

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On Sunday, March 30, 2013, Team USA and Canada will play the final Pool D game at Chase Field in Phoenix. Canada will technically be the home team. It’s entirely possible that who has advanced in the WBC would already be decided, but the sometimes erratic tie-breaking procedures of the round robin first round make it unlikely that both would be decided, and it is entirely likely that this game would decide the fates of at least one of the teams playing.

So, how might it go down? Well, using Out of the Park Baseball, I am simulating it! Go after the jump for the rest.

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Coming Soon: WBC Simulations on Out of the Park Baseball

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I’m a big fan of a game called Out Of The Park Baseball. It’s a baseball simulator, which can let you do almost anything. If you want to, you can replay baseball history just as it was, or you could play a whole new history with fictional characters, or even do a bit of both, perhaps using fictional teams but real players. It’s the spiritual descendant of APBA and Strat-O-Matic.

I’m, however, going to use it to do some simulations of World Baseball Classic baseball. Essentially, I downloaded a roster set that has the rosters of Major League Baseball and the minors at the end of the 2012 season. I then deleted all of the leagues, making everybody free agents. I then created a league of National teams: the USA Americans, the Dominican Republic Dominicans, the Italy Italians, etc.

And now I am putting players on the teams, as well as updating the attributes of some of the players (you can enter what their stats in a major league environment was and it’ll give you what their most recent power, contact, etc. abilities would be- otherwise it’d be going off of 2011 numbers, making Mike Trout merely a prospect instead of the most exciting player in baseball).

So far, I’ve created the USA, the Dominican, Australia, Italy (which has a heavy number of Italian-Americans) and I’m working on Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Canada. So, for example, I could play a game with a lineup like this:

Screen Shot 2012-12-23 at 12.14.28 PM

It isn’t a perfect simulation: the simulation lacks pitch-count rules (thus allowing Justin Verlander to complete-game shutout the Italians and Australians almost any time he faces them) and sometimes the decisions made by the AI are a bit wonky (it made Joe Mauer the starting 1B originally, and had Ben Zobrist the starting 2B instead of the super-utility guy off the bench.. and I’m still trying to figure out why they have Clayton Tanner as the ace of the Australians and not Travis Blackley)… but it’s neat. So I’ll be sharing some of the stuff from it in the next few days.

For example, I think it’s safe to say, based on this simulation of 1000 games between Team USA and Italy, that the Americans should easily win the Pool D game against Italia:

Screen Shot 2012-12-23 at 12.30.45 PM

Random Video of the Undetermined Amount of Time: Game 6 of the 1986 World Series… in RBI Baseball

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RBI Baseball was one of the great baseball video games of all time. A few years back, somebody used the game to recreate the final inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, complete with Vin Scully commentary.

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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