Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

In 1992, Nintendo revolutionized a game. This did not happen with respect with video games, but rather involved a move in the sports world: namely, Nintendo's purchase of the Seattle Mariners. With this purchase, the Mariners became the first Major League Baseball team owned by foreign investors. Now the game that purported to be as American as apple-pie and gun violence had Japanese ownership woven into its fabric. So revolutionary was the move that not all major league owners were on board with it. In fact, the final vote among the owners to approve the sale went 25-1, with the Cleveland Indians ownership backing out. Should we surprised, though, that a team named after and marketed around a racial caricature would be xenophobic with respect to welcoming East Asian proprietors into America's pastime?

One person who was definitely not unenthused with the move was Hiroshi Yamauchi, the venerable then-president of Nintendo. In fact, the usually inscrutable Yamauchi was over the moon at the idea of being part-owner of an MLB team. So excited was he at the Makuharu Messe convention in Tokyo in 1992 that, during his keynote address in which he detailed future prospects for the Super NES, he spontaneously announced that he had not only bought the Mariners, but that Nintendo was in the process of making the greatest baseball video game ever made. This was news to the various development ingénues in attendance, including none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. The announcement also confused Tony Harman, Nintendo's director of development and acquisitions, a former college soccer star who had parlayed a baccalaureate of engineering and a master's degree in business into a job as game reviewer for Nintendo Power. Not the least of his difficulties was the fact he didn't speak Japanese. Sitting in the presence of Nintendo's virtuosos, Harman turned to Miyamoto and asked him to dispel some of his confusion by translating. With his limited English, Miyamoto explained that the baseball game Mr. Yamauchi had reference was not only not in development, but that none of the old masters, including Miyamoto himself, had even heard of the game. Over and above that, none of the development doyennes wanted to tell Yamauchi that there was no such game in development, as they would likely be the ones entrusted with rushing the game into production. Harman asked who would be overseeing this game. And then, if the account in Blake J. Harris's Console Wars is to be believed, Miyamoto turned to Harman and said, altogether jokingly, "you." This occasioned laughter from Nintendo’s mavens, but it spurred Harman into action. Harman was going to design the greatest baseball game ever made.

That quest led to the development of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, released for the SNES in 1994. The reins were taken up by Software Creations, a developer based in Manchester, England, a curious choice given that baseball is a cultural non-entity in Britain. The baseball game that resulted unmistakably shows its British—or at least non-American—influences. America's pastime as depicted in this game looks and plays like a funhouse simulacra of itself. Many a hitter has a massive upper-torso, all bicep and chest, with a bony lower half, making for an excessively cartoonish look that may have been an attempt to satire steroid fueled baseball of the 1990s (and beyond). More egregiously, pitches can be controlled after they are thrown, making pitching an excursion into magical realism. The pitcher-batter encounter, then, is essentially reduced to a showdown between a muscle-bound monstrosity of human growth hormone and a horsehide-hucking wizard. In this version of baseball, everything is turned up to eleven. Gum-chewing batters blow bubbles insouciantly. Strike out victims break bats over their knees, shouting churlish complaints to the umpire. Every fly-ball springs off the bat, soaring high over the vast green tundra of the outfield, from which every single throw returns to the infield without a bounce. Given its international origins, the game must inevitably be read as a commentary on America. Through the combined efforts of the Japanese inceptors and British developers, what has resulted is a counter-Orientalist—or better yet intra-Occidentalist—parody of baseball. It is definitely a vision of baseball inflected with Anglo-European sensibilities of the absurd. As a result, it makes baseball look absurd. Apparently, for Nintendo's Japanese development brass, the laughs just wouldn't stop.

Bizarre aesthetics aside, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is simple enough to pick up and play, and even the baseball neophyte—your average Britisher, perhaps—will be jacking warning-track blasts right from the very outset. The game is not, however, easy, and the computer is a more than formidable opponent who can readily put a crooked number on the scoreboard if your pitches are imprecisely maneuvered after they’ve left your hurler's hand. Be prepared: you will more than occasionally lose by double digits.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball grows on you. All the MLB teams and logs are here, but the players are fictional, as the game does not have an MLBPA license. This is not entirely to the game's discredit, however, as the developers did not go with the usual generic renaming scheme as per other unlicensed sports titles. Rather, the developers provided each team with themed player names. Some of these are baseball related, as is the case for the New York Yankees, who have the sobriquets of famed Bronx Bombers, such as W. (Whitey ) Ford and T. (The) Bambino, as well as names of New York boroughs such as S. (Staten) Island. Other teams have names drawn from the world beyond baseball. The Colorado Rockies are all horror movie mainstays, including G. Romero, B. Lugosi and B. Karloff. Tom Savini takes the place of pitcher Bruce Ruffin; personally, your correspondent prefers a baseball game where practical effects genius Savini is pitching instead

Lux Interior trades his high heels for cleats

of Ruffin. Wouldn't that make for a more interesting major league? At least two teams are filled with the names of punk and rockabilly impresarios, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, which features members of The Dead Kennedys and The Cramps, among others. With the inclusion of an edit mode, the game allows the player to change these names, but why would you? Imagine the thrill of scratching out a hit with Cramps frontman Lux Interior, the man who, with jaw unhinged, performed the most profoundly surreal cover of the already psychotic Hasil Adkins classic "She Said." What other baseball game allows you to do that?

There is one player whose name cannot be changed, and that is, of course, cover-boy Ken Griffey Jr. of the Mariners, the only real baseball player in the game. Curiously enough, Griffey was not a lock to appear in the game, even after Nintendo had purchased the Mariners. Griffey was, in fact, in talks with Sega about appearing in a prospective baseball game for the Genesis right up until the verge of Nintendo's 1994 SNES release. We can only speculate as to what the effects would have been on the ongoing console wars had Griffey signed with Sega. Indeed, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball would go on to sell well for the SNES, and the family-friendly, child-like "Junior" surely had much to do with that. A middling, cartoonish game of baseball by any other name would probably not have fared so well.

What resulted from Tony Harman's toil was certainly not the greatest baseball game ever made. Nintendo may have revolutionized baseball ownership, but Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball did not do the same for video game depictions of baseball. Nonetheless, the game is worth playing to experience a parallel universe ruled by comic-book physics and baseball players who are HGH-infused avatars of truly cool people: punk rockers, horror heroes and American presidents (see the Kansas City Royals). Now that is what revolutionary truly looks like.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam

In 1998, Sammy Sosa was all at once everywhere. A man of humble roots, Sosa emerged from penurious origins in his native Dominican Republic and arrived in the major leagues on the cusp of the 90s, initially gaining some measure of fame for this evolution from a svelte base-stealer into a perennial thirty-homerun hitter as a member of the Chicago Cubs. Then, with little if any foreshadowing, the summer of ‘99 saw him on pace to break Roger Maris's record of 61 homeruns in a season. He would eventually eclipse that mark with a staggering total of 66 dingers at season’s end, but he was beaten to the record by Mark McGwire, who hit his fateful 62nd on September 8 against Sosa's Cubs and would wind up with the new and otherworldly benchmark of 70. Whether second-best or not, Sosa’s Herculean homerun total transformed him into duly vaunted superstar and, more crucially, a bona fide commercial commodity. His adorable face-rending smile found its way into ads peddling Big Macs and Pepsi-Cola, among other precious consumables. His power-hitting prowess even landed his image on the cover (and his name in the title) of 3DO's also-ran PS1 offering Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001. But one game was apparently not enough for the man who had hit a full five more homeruns than Roger Maris, for he also took the starring role in High Heat’s companion release, Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, as its hyper-alliterative title might portend, is not a good game. Its foremost failing is its resemblance to the High Heat Baseball series. Those games were notorious for their atrocious graphics, which managed to be simultaneously jagged and blurry, blocky and faceless. Their only saving grace was their fairly realistic AI, which lent itself to progressively better simulations from year to year. With Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, however, all those appealing aspects of real baseball are gone. In their place are softball—that is, slo-pitch softball—sensibilities: viz. sandlot diamonds with chain-link backstops and chalked circles instead of pitching mounds, slab-thighed people in either jeans, shorts and sweatpants playing for teams representing greasy spoon diners, labor unions and accounting firms. The gamer has the choice of playing gendered or co-ed, but the latter, quite fittingly, is the default. Players have tags like "Big Lou" and "Burger Boy." Many of them are endomorphic in shape. In terms of gameplay, throwing errors abound. In view of these hapless facets and the overall blue-collar, working class aesthetic, the game is an accurate simulation of softball. However, inexplicable arcadey trappings like flame trails on homeruns inject jarring disjunctions of surrealism into an otherwise brutally realist game. Mr. Sosa's own team, “Sammy's Slammers”, is another disjuncture, in that its female members are, to a woman, pneumatically-bosomed. Even more bizarrely, the game features a character editor which includes the option of, at a press of the square button, turning any given player into Sammy Sosa. You can, if you so choose, make Sammy Sosa every player on every team. All told, these elements turn the game into a mockery of softball, which is sort of redundant, as softball was already doing a fine job of self-mockery.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam leaves us with more questions than answers. Why did Sammy Sosa lend his name and cherubic smile to this proletarian abomination? Certainly he’s not the first athlete to endorse an appalling videogame at the lure of cash. Still, the bigger conceptual question remains: why is Sammy Sosa playing in the slo-pitch league depicted in the game? We can only tender hypotheses. Perhaps Sosa’s fictional foray into softball speaks to some deep-seated urge for lower middle-classness that lurked within the man even during the height of his celebrity. Maybe it relates to some latent guilt that stemmed from his alleged steroid use: as he grew more and more superhuman in both home run hitting and in sheer sinewy physicality, he became increasingly desperate to re-connect with the unpretentious, grassroots folk from whose stock he originally emerged. So intense was this desire that it led Sosa to approve of—perhaps even encourage—the idea that he not just participate in a slo-pitch softball simulation, but actually permeate it with quasi-divine omnipresence in his ability to incarnate as every slo-pitch player on every slo-pitch team, pervading all games on every slo-pitch field. The desperation, then, manifests as a largescale narcissistic fantasy, its attendant grandiosity taking on nothing less than a theological scope.

Perhaps Sosa's paramount blessing was finishing as runner-up to Mark McGwire in the homerun race. Because he never held the homerun record, the fact he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs has not tarnished his reputation as markedly as it did for McGwire or, for that matter, Barry Bonds. Sosa’s second place finish ensured that an asterisk needn't ever be superscripted next to his total of 66 homeruns in 1998.* But with his eponymous Softball Slam, we see that Sammy Sosa flirted with—perhaps even lusted after—something much lower than second-best. That is, he wanted to be closer to the working man and woman, and the pale simulacrum of baseball that (like video games themselves) allows such people temporary reprieve from their deplorable workaday lives.

Less distressingly, Sammy Sosa’s Softball Slam may offer a more positive takeaway, especially when we consider its player editor feature. Maybe the message is that within every single average Joe and Jane who plays softball, there is an exact replica of Sammy Sosa in his prime—we just need the right cocktail of Human Growth Hormone to unleash it.

NOTES:

*That asterisk could, however, be applied to Sosa's 2003 statistics, as it was in that year that he was caught playing with a corked bat.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to the image of Sosa and spouse included above. However, it is my vague understanding that civil law protects parodic materials. This image is, quite clearly, self-parody, either consciously or unconsciously, and on those grounds its usage in this article is, in my estimation, fair.

Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest

Do you want to see adult film legend Ron Jeremy play major league baseball? If your answer to this question is yes—and it should be—then picking up a copy of Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest is imperative. The second N64 offering in Nintendo’s cartoonish Griffey-backed baseball series contains audio clips of the names of virtually all MLBPA players from the late 90s, and announces them over the in-game public address system as they make their way out to the plate or the mound. The game also features a moderately robust create-a-player mode, and any creation with the first and/or last name of an active player will be likewise announced before batting or pitching. Thanks to Ron Gant and Jeremy Giambi,

the owner of Slugfest has the privilege of hearing porn’s most famous name ring out in any major league ballpark. Set your create-a-character’s weight at a Rubenesque 270, height at 5'8, give him a black Mario-worthy moustache and voila!—the Hardest (Working) Man in Show Business is now a major leaguer. Indeed, the irrepressible Hollywood D-Lister's Slugfest avatar bears Nintendo’s adorable spokes-plumber an odd resemblance, which has already been appreciated to great effect by the timeless adult-oriented feature Super Hornio Bros., starring Jeremy in the lead role of Hornio Hornio. What role will Ron Jeremy play on your team? His skills at third base are amply documented, at least figuratively speaking. Jeremy’s potential presence, however, is really the only enduring charm of Slugfest. True to the Griffey series’ abiding arcade sensibilities, Slugfest is built around cursor-based batting, the done-to-death darling of late-90’s baseball videogame developers. This system has not aged particularly well, as it basically reduces hitting to a mini-game. The options permit you to switch the batting style to “classic”, which relies on timing and general bat position in the style of earlier and later baseball classics such as Hardball and MVP 2004 but be prepared for low-scoring, pitching-dominated affairs where the few runs plated result from lucky-strike homeruns. Still, Slugfest’s peccadilloes are worth suffering to see Ron Jeremy go deep in Mets’ pinstripes. And for once, mercifully, he keeps his pants on while doing so.

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.

MVP Baseball 2004

Electronic Arts, while legendary in the sports genre throughout the 1990s on account of perennial favorites like the Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL series, could never quite get baseball right. While it boasted the best in football, basketball and hockey, EA failed to hit the grand slam with a great baseball sim. EA’s first foray into the national pastime was Tony La Russa’s Baseball, a multiplatform series which, like its namesake, was competent but lacked personality. EA tried again with MLBPA Baseball in 1994, but the game proved unengaging in view of its cartoonish graphics, lack of major league teams, and blustery gameplay. Giving up on the MLBPA line, EA soon after launched Triple Play Baseball, a capable simulation with quality graphics and the immersive EA feel that had made the company's other sports titles stand out. However, the 16-Bit Triple Play offerings also lacked the MLB license, and were buggy. (If you had, for example, a runner on first who had rounded second before a fly ball had been caught, you could return to the bag by leaving the base-paths and running across the infield grass.) EA kept Triple Play around for the length of the N64/PlayStation era, but the games gradually declined in quality, becoming increasingly arcadey over the years. The last of the Triple Play offerings for PS, N64, and PS2 have not aged favorably.

Three strikes did not make an out for EA, however, and the company inaugurated its fourth attempt at a baseball franchise with MVP Baseball 2003. The game featured very good graphics and a meter-based pitching and fielding mechanic, adding an unprecedented level of depth to aspects of baseball that were typically underdeveloped in even the most thoroughgoing simulations to that point. MVP 2003 was still far from perfect, though: just listen for the excessively woody, wallopy bat-on-ball sound effect and you'll quickly understand why the game is best enjoyed with the volume muted.

The next year, though, EA finally delivered its long-awaited baseball masterpiece. MVP Baseball 2004 kept all the positive features of its predecessor while polishing the presentation. The result was one of the most beautiful representations of America's pastime in any artistic medium. The confines are comely, with lovingly rendered major league stadiums, chatter-friendly minor league parks and even some classic old-timey ball-yards. As for gameplay, MVP 2004 segues from pitcher-batter duels to making the putout to slow-motion replays with a silky smoothness, transforming this sport commonly criticized for its glacial pace into a delightfully breezy visual and tactile experience. Every time you go yard, you feel it in your forearms. And you'll go yard a lot, as the game is generous with the homeruns; that said, MVP Baseball 2004 never feels like anything other than a straight-laced simulation.

If you’re looking for a better baseball game than MVP 2004, you’re really only left with the following year's MVP 2005. Even with the more powerful systems that came along in subsequent years and decades, few baseball games since have even approached these two EA offerings in quality. While MVP 2005 is the superior version, your correspondent confesses a special partiality for MVP 2004. It is, after all, the last game in which you can play as his beloved Montreal Expos, the only means by which you can still sky a towering blast into the bone-white ceiling of that major league mausoleum Stade Olympique while decked in blue pinstripes. On those grounds alone, MVP Baseball 2004 will never, for your correspondent, get old. It’s the spring, summer and fall of 2004 forever.