MLB 2003

Fans of baseball and Aristotelian poetics are well acquainted with the story of Barry Bonds. He started as the lean, spry base-stealing son-of-a-big-leaguer, and then evolved rather abruptly into a 240-pound behemoth. In 2001, Bonds destroyed Mark McGwire's three-year old homerun record by slamming 73 round-trippers. Of course, Bonds was by this point on enough Human Growth Hormone to fell a Clydesdale…his singular flaw. Nonetheless, he embodied sheer power in its most hulking, testicularly-shriveled incarnation. Though he sullied the baseball record books (at least from the perspective of a normal man), in 2001 he truly embodied the spirit of America—superlative success by any means necessary, transcending common definitions of humanity and morality in the process.

By contrast, 989’s MLB series, perennially released for the PlayStation, was by no means superlative. The gameplay was solid, though the graphics were humdrum, the animations leaving something to be desired. There were a few years here and there in which MLB was the better PS baseball game, depending on whether EA's streaky Triple Play offering was a hit or a miss. That said, the MLB games did nothing to challenge the supremacy of Acclaim's All-Star Baseball series for N64, which was the more robust simulation in terms of both gameplay and graphics. By the 360/PS3 era, once EA had lost the MLB license to 2K Sports, MLB held out as the dark-horse candidate and would eventually become the de facto go-to baseball game year after year as The Show, a role it never assumed in its 32-bit iterations. That said, every year in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the MLB series could be counted on to turn in a competent simulation of baseball.

You may be asking: Why should any of these early MLB games be noteworthy? What does this have to do with Barry Bonds? The answer to both questions is MLB 2003. The 2003 offering was made for the 2002 season and therefore based on 2001 stats (don't ask), so in this game, Bonds brings to the dish the power of 73 steroid-aided homeruns. There are two swing types in the MLB games, contact and power, and if you use the latter as Bonds in 2003 and put the bat on the ball, you've got about a 50/50 chance of putting said ball in the right-field seats. In short, you can jack dingers like nobody's business. Play a full season, and you'll have Barry in triple digits for homers. It's sheer domination. It never stops feeling good; in fact, the one-man slugfest helps you forget that you're playing a mediocre PS1 baseball game that hasn't aged well.

Don't get your correspondent wrong: Barry Bonds ruined baseball. He's damaged the record books—or at least its homerun record section, marring it with asterisks and footnotes. But in terms of sheer video game power, the processors of MLB 2003 know no steroids and failed drug tests, so Bond’s in-game avatar is clean and pure. What we are left with is the closest simulation of a genuine 73 homerun hitter as we will ever know. If nothing else, Bonds has left a video game legacy.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so harsh on Barry Bonds. Perhaps his legendary (enhanced) performance in the real-life national pastime is as laudable as that in the virtual one as depicted in MLB 2003. After all, isn't it fundamentally American to slash a tear in the fabric of America itself and expect praise for it? In that sense, Barry Bonds is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.