I had a very strange relationship to video games growing up. My parents were, and in some ways still are, opposed to the morals of the hobby. Their opposition isn’t in the “video games turn boys into school shooters!” panic that ripped through the suburbs of the late 90s and early 2000s, rather a more old school “video games stunt social development” that would have made for a Very Special Episode in the late 80s.
My parents made every effort to ensure that I was outside, or reading, or if we were sitting in front of a screen it was something the entire family was doing — Leafs games on Saturday nights and the ALDS come October. Screentime was controlled pretty tightly.
However, my parents also taught me another lesson; once you earn your own money, you can do whatever you want with it. At 30, this means I have more tattoos than my mother appreciates, which is to say I have tattoos. At 13, a paper route meant a PlayStation 3 and within a couple of months, a copy of MLB 2K8. I was a little late to the party for something like MVP Baseball 2005, and maybe I missed out on some fundamental memories by jumping right into seventh-gen play, but I was finally on it.
As a side note, MLB 2K8 was also my introduction to The Hold Steady, thanks to Stuck Between Stations on the soundtrack. If you know me you know how impactful that’s been in my life, but perhaps that’s for a different blog.
For being someone so late to the game — pun fully intended — I felt like I had to pour a lot of my time into “catching up”. I was only vaguely familiar with games like Goldeneye 64, or after school Tony Hawk sessions on mostly sixth-gen consoles. Call of Duty Modern Warfare (the first one) came out right around the same time, so there was incredible demand for the attention of a 13-year-old boy.
Still, as it often happens, I drift back and back to baseball. 2K8 included a revamped analog control system for both hitting and pitching, and improved baserunning controls, although any baserunner I control to this day brings a certain Gleyber Torres-may-care attitude to the job. That year also brought us Dead Space, which remains much more my kind of video game than any sports franchise, but there’s just something about force trading Grady Sizemore and Manny Ramírez to hit second and third between Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez.
Since then, I’ve been on a three-year rotation with baseball video games. The 2K series has wilted away and I’ve bounced between Out of the Park and the headlining MLB The Show series, depending on whether I want to try and build a pennant winner without any $50 million guaranteed contracts, or cosplay as a 4’11” centerfielder with a 2.100 OPS.
I even used The Show to get us through a bad time for everyone, and in a low stakes way an even worse time for baseball bloggers, the three-month MLB shutdown as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. With five years of hindsight, you can see how even a silly little pastime like that series was a exercise in finding something routine and a little more normal. It says something about goofy baseball video games that they could be that for an old colleague and I.
We’re about a month out from MLB The Show 2025’s release date, and I’m waffling on whether to add it to my library or not. By my own rule I should wait one more year, but there are enough new features, not to mention a cooler cover than we’ve had in recent years (physical media always). MLB is the only sports game I own, indeed, the only game that’s not one of those annoying, 80 hour open world campaign things you play alone. I generally eschew online, multiplayer games, but maybe in six weeks or so I’ll see you from the Thunderbirds’ home field.
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