I once played a calendar-accurate 162-game season of Griffey baseball on SNES (part 1)

by ersatz_cats

While it’s admittedly fun talking about video gaming controversies, you know what else is fun? Actually playing video games!! Today I’d like to share the story of the time I played a full 162-game season of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for Super Nintendo. While that may not be that special in and of itself, I took the added step of playing the entire season over the course of six months, accurate to the daily calendar in the SNES game.

For those who don’t follow baseball, it is a grueling marathon of a sport. “Spring Training” begins in early March, with pitchers and catchers often beginning practice a few weeks before that in February. The regular season starts around the first of April, and lasts all the way through the final day of September. This represents 162 games of regular season play, stuffed into about 183 days on the calendar. (Note that this six month timeframe is similar to the timeframe used by the NBA and NHL for their regular seasons, however both of those sports limit their regular seasons to 82 games each.) Then, of course, you begin the playoffs, with the World Series now consistently stretching into November.

Just in case there’s even the remotest mistaking about what I’m saying, there is obviously no comparison whatsoever to be made between these professional athletes staying in top physical shape, staying engaged with their craft for ten pages of the calendar, putting up three-hour performances nearly every night, and myself sitting on my duff playing a video game while watching YouTube for half an hour each day, at least when it comes to either physical exertion or personal investment. However, from a fan’s perspective, one can find one’s self as immersed in a simulated season of one’s own engagement as they can in the day-to-day goings-on of the professional squad playing 60 miles away. While fantasy sports have become a money-making industry, there are still people who play rotisserie baseball simply because they enjoy the practice.

Also, when it comes to casual gaming, a slower pace adds to that investment. There is a significant distinction between taking the time to play one game a day on each required day for over six months, versus just firing up the game and blasting through a season at a brisk pace of one’s choosing. There’s a reason baseball video games like Griffey on SNES offer alternative seasons. On Griffey, you can choose a 26-game season (facing each league opponent once at home and once away), or a 78-game season (between 5 and 7 games against each league opponent). 162 games of anything is a lot to ask of anyone. Just getting through that slog at any pace is significant enough. But completing such a campaign in a slow, patient manner is another level of commitment. Playing a six-month season is also a rare opportunity. I can only expect to live about 80 years (and that’s being optimistic), which means only 80 chances to play such a calendar-accurate baseball season, with over 40 of those opportunities already behind me. (To be fair, if I was truly serious, I totally would have tackled this at the age of two.)

Yet there I was, in the spring of 2020, having just left my job to go into COVID quarantine. Now having an excess of time on my hands, I tried to think of old gaming goals I might take the opportunity to tackle, when the postponement of the baseball season inspired me…

SPRING TRAINING (AND SETUP)

Ken Griffey baseball on SNES was not a game I had growing up, but I had dabbled in it years later, having heard nothing but top reviews from many friends over the years. I remembered getting about a third of a way through a full season many years ago, playing with auto-fielding, before getting distracted with typical young adult things. I was a bit familiar with the features, like the choice of playoff format (which I’ll get to in a moment). But my true baseball video gaming experience was with Bases Loaded on NES. While that game doesn’t have a proper calendar (thus meaning it wouldn’t work for what I was attempting), it was always a joy to play. And like Griffey SNES, I had never completed an entire season on that game, either. (Too many gaming goals, never enough time to pursue them all.) But Bases Loaded would have to wait. The idea of playing a six-month season, accurate to the in-game calendar, as real life baseball was postponed, and at that very moment at which I had found myself with spare time, had become too enticing an idea for me to ignore.

First thing’s first. As a lifelong Seattle Mariners fan, and with my childhood Mariners hero on the cover of the game, there was simply no other choice of team for me to play. I had this idea after March 26, which was supposed to be the start of the Mariners’ real season, which made me concerned that I had missed my opportunity. However, I fired up the game and was delighted to discover that the Mariners’ schedule in the SNES game didn’t start until April 6. (That schedule predated multiple expansions of the October playoffs, which have since pushed the traditional start of the regular season earlier.) However, this left me little time to decide my season options and to get up to playing speed.

Since I would be playing a full season against the slate of American League opponents (this was before MLB instituted interleague play between the American League and National League), I chose to play all my practice games against each NL opponent, just to sort of get them in the mix. And of course, given the option between manual and automatic fielding, I would play manual fielding, because I’m a self-respecting hardcore gamer who never takes shortcuts!

To say I was rough at the game would be an understatement, lol. I’m hardly a world class gamer, but I’m not terrible either, so I’m not used to just getting my ass completely handed to me by any video game, not even by the super-difficult games of yore.

However, that is exactly what happened. Do you think losing 17-5 sounds bad? Well, that wasn’t a single game. That was the AVERAGE of my 14 practice games against the National League! The Montreal Expos stomped me 24-1. THE EXPOS!!! And the Dodgers hung THIRTY-FOUR runs on me! But hey, I did squeak a single win past the Phillies.

For what it’s worth, Griffey on SNES wasn’t anything like Bases Loaded, which uses kind of a mix of manual and automatic fielding. Basically, the players hone in on fly balls on their own, and approach their respective bases when the AI determines it’s appropriate; however, you’re responsible for all fielding throws, and you can always override fielder movements if you see such a reason to. On Griffey on SNES, it’s up to you to get that fielder running after that fly ball, and you better get in the right spot with some accuracy. And suffice to say, I did not find the game very forgiving.

This was kind of a problem. I was super-excited to embark on this six-month journey, and I wasn’t going to cheat, and I was going to accept the results for what they were. But I didn’t want to go to all this trouble just to get completely destroyed! Imagine announcing this whole campaign, and then being a dead duck at 5-76 by the end of June, but still having committed to playing through the rest of this terrible season, day after day, just so that I could say I did a whole season? Or the alternative, announcing your intention to play a whole season like this, and then just slinking away halfway through because of how badly you sucked? I had people on Reddit encouraging me to stick with manual fielding, that if I kept trying it would eventually click. (Reportedly, there are just so many patterns for hit balls, and if you play enough you simply learn them all and begin reacting quickly.) And it probably would eventually click. If I had more time, I was sure I could train myself to play manual fielding at least at a competent level. But the idea of playing all of this accurate to the calendar in the game was what was prompting me to take on this campaign in the first place. Opening day was April 6, and the clock was ticking.

That’s when I thought back to a line from the movie Contact. Is there some old line from some random movie that no one else ever remembers, but for whatever reason, has always stuck with you? This is that such line for me. Any time I face some dilemma without an obvious answer, I reflect, and eventually ask myself if this is the solution:

Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

I was already committing to playing a 162-game season, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try and tough out manual fielding, and face a potentially grueling summer dwelling in the AL West basement, or wuss out to automatic fielding and actually enjoy my time playing a game that’s supposed to be fun. Why not just do both? These practice games were only like a half hour each (and that was including the extra time it took the CPU to shellack me). If I play two games each day instead of one, I could maintain the hard mode season long enough to see if I can make that turn around the difficulty curve. And if I can’t make that turn, I can always abandon the difficult season, and finish the automatic fielding season, without having wasted my time!

This also helped answer another question I was going to have to address. You see, this SNES game was released to coincide with the start of the 1994 Major League Baseball season, which was the year MLB expanded the playoffs. Previously, both leagues were split into East and West divisions, with the top teams of each division facing off in the two Championship Series, the winners of which would then advance to the World Series. However, the plan for 1994 was to split each League into three divisions each (East, Central, and West), and for those three division winners plus a “Wild Card” team to play in Division Series leading into the Championship Series. I say this was “the plan” because, ironically, the end of the 1994 season was cancelled due to a labor dispute, so these new playoffs were not implemented until 1995. (Fellow Mariners fans remember that year well.) But obviously the creators of the SNES game did not know this, and so when playing a complete season, the player is given the option between the traditional 1993 format (which was the standard while the game was being developed) and the “proposed” 1994 format. While I’d had a hard time deciding which format to use, the choice to play two concurrent seasons made that easy. I chose the 1994 format for my manual fielding team (who I began calling “M-Crew”), which meant they shared the AL West with only the California Angels, Oakland Athletics, and Texas Rangers. This smaller division presented an easier chance at making the playoffs, and I figured my manual fielders could use all the help they could get. This left my automatic fielding team (my “A-Crew”) to take on a seven-team AL West, which also included the Chicago White Sox, the Kansas City Royals, and the Minnesota Twins.

The last thing to address were the team rosters. While this game had a contract with MLB for team and stadium names, and a deal with Ken Griffey Jr. individually, it lacked a deal with the MLB Players Association. This meant instead of actual baseball stars like Ryne Sandberg, Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, and Cal Ripken Jr., team rosters were filled out with whatever fancied the programmers. The Kansas City Royals are named after U.S. Presidents, the Cincinnati Reds are famous writers, the Philadelphia Phillies have characters from Rocky, the Boston Red Sox have characters from Cheers, etc. However, the players were still fashioned after these teams’ actual rosters, such that good hitters were still good hitters and mediocre pitchers were still mediocre pitchers. As a work-around, the player (meaning, the actual player of the video game) was given the option to rename almost anyone they wanted, allowing you to customize your team without the MLBPA contract. At any rate, given that the face on the box played for the Mariners, and that the Mariners were based not far from Nintendo of America headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and that Nintendo had acquired a majority ownership of the Seattle Mariners in 1992, the programmers decided to put themselves and their Nintendo colleagues as the Mariners’ roster, around Mr. Griffey.

Obviously, that bunch of nerds wasn’t gonna do. Howard Lincoln did enough damage to the Mariners in the front office, I wasn’t gonna have him play second base as well. Astute readers may have already noticed that I played my spring training with a roster renamed after classic Mariners players like Felix Hernandez, Hisashi Iwakuma, and Jamie Moyer. This Mariners roster, along with a few Seahawks and Supersonics to round out the list, became my manual-fielding “M-Crew”:

The only player you cannot rename is Ken Griffey Jr., so whatever other theme I chose for “A-Crew” would have to be fashioned around him. Being an early Final Fantasy nut, I settled on FF characters, plus a couple Chrono Trigger guests. I made an effort to assign characters known for magic power as pitchers, and characters known for hitting power as batters. Also, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to have Dragon Quest’s legendary hero Erdrick batting lead-off:

I announced my campaign on Twitter, along with my intention to post each day’s game results under the hashtag #GriffeySNES2020. (This helped me find my own game posts easily. As a bonus, it also allowed my friends to hide these daily posts if they just weren’t interested.)

With all of that out of the way, it was time to play ball!

OPENING DAY

For game 1 with A-Crew at home against the Toronto Blue Jays, I sent out my top pitcher, FF6’s Terra Branford. (In the SNES game, she was taking the place of future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson.) One tip I’d been given, much like real life baseball, was to force the opposing starter to rack up their pitch count as much as possible to wear them out. I quickly noticed the pitch count disparity, with Terra having only thrown 14 pitches after 3 innings compared to the Toronto pitcher’s 40.

In the 5th inning, FF9’s Steiner blasted my first home run of the season, 473 feet to… whichever field I didn’t write down. Let’s just say it was left field?

Terra went the whole nine innings, giving up only a solo jack to… “Jack”. At any rate, this started me off at 1-0:

On the M-Crew side, I was not terribly surprised to see my manual fielding squad drop their first game 11-3, with their first home run coming courtesy of “Mister Mariner” Alvin Davis. However, game 2 gave me some hope for my manual fielders. On the heels of my A-Crew getting their first walk-off to go 2-0, M-Crew tied their game in the 8th on a Bret Boone double, before Seahawks legend Cortez Kennedy came off the bench to blast a walk-off homer in the bottom of the 9th.

I was happy just for M-Crew to have split that opening series against Toronto 1-1. But then something strange happened. Hosting Baltimore for three, I won again. And again. Despite my concerns, my M-Crew started out at 3-1 (tied with A-Crew)!

At this point, as my squads were about to embark on their first road trips, I should probably address a scheduling oddity:

This is the Mariners’ schedule for the month of April in the game. Astute baseball fans will notice something odd about this. In real life, the schedule is designed such that each team plays every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and always against the same team for that series. Sometimes this is stretched into a four-game series by tacking on a game on Thursday or Monday, but that Friday-to-Sunday block is always a constant. (Obviously this is meant to boost attendance, as fans are more likely to attend games on Friday nights and weekends.) Right away, you’ll notice that the given schedule here has some Fridays off, and that other Fridays are spent playing different teams than are played on Saturday. But if you look closely, this schedule actually does have firm weekend blocks; they’re just shifted over a day.

It turns out, since this SNES game was developed prior to the release of the 1994 season schedule, they just used the 1993 schedule, and slapped it onto the 1994 calendar. And since non-leap years have one extra day, this means all the days are shifted over by one. (Sort of like how your birthday will land on a Friday one year, then a Saturday the next year, then a Sunday. It will skip an additional day if it crosses over a February 29th.) This isn’t really a problem or anything. It just means, if you were to attempt to do this on any given year, your “weekend” series might fall on actual weekends, or the middle of the week, or whenever. It just so happens, in 2020, those weekend series fell on Thursday-Friday-Saturday for me. I still played the April 13th game at Toronto on April 13th. It just happens that April 13th was a Tuesday in the original 1993 schedule, a Wednesday on the SNES calendar, and a Monday for me playing in 2020.

April 14th saw the highpoint for my M-Crew, who ended a two-game skid with a win at Toronto. At 4-3 they were tied with my A-Crew, and were second in their division to only Texas at 6-2.

The following day, A-Crew looked to avoid the sweep in Toronto, with pinch runner Tidus tying it in the 9th off a Firion single. An exciting game came down to the 11th inning, when Sabin and Tifa drove in runs for the winning margin.

Note that the scoreboard sheets show all extra inning runs under inning “10”, but at the bottom of the stats pages, you can see the pitchers’ innings pitched, which total 11. (If that decimal notation is confusing, “.1” means a single out, and “.2” means two outs. So “5.1” innings pitched means Mather pitched for five innings plus another out, for a total of 16 outs.)

As another aside, each day’s game results come displayed in a mocked up newspaper, which happens to be printed at whatever size is required to include all the day’s spare pitchers and bench players. While three of the four panels contain useful information about the day’s game, the fourth one always includes a randomly generated joke headline (hence why I always replaced it with my division standings from another menu screen). A lot of these headlines are boring and procedural, but a few of them are gems.

“Returement”? Whatever that is, it sounds horrifying! Can’t they just let the poor guys retire instead? Also, it’s always awkward when the first place you hear about your team’s big news is in the newspaper.

While the A-Crew went on a roaring stretch, winning 6 of their next 7, the M-Crew took a hard turn south, losing 10 of their next 11, including a 20-5 loss at Toronto and a 25-4 loss at Detroit. This just so happened to coincide with an unexpected swollen hand on my part, forcing me to swap from game controller to keyboard. I considered calling an effective “rain out” for however long, but that would sort of defeat the original intention of playing the whole schedule accurate to the game’s calendar. In the end, I decided the show must go on. This would be like your best player going on the disabled list (which the SNES game does not include). You don’t get to just postpone your games. You have to keep trotting out the best team you can field that day.

While this may have affected M-Crew (or maybe I just sucked all along and was briefly getting a little lucky), this had almost no impact on A-Crew, whose fielding and batting inputs were light. A-Crew completed a sweep of the Red Sox in 10 innings, thanks to a solo shot and bunt from Ayla. The damn Yankees ended my six-game win streak, and nearly stole a sweep of me at the Kingdome, but in the bottom of the 5th, Lenna sent a monster 409-foot shot over the tall right field wall for a Dave Niehaus style Grand Salami, leading to a 7-2 win.

That win kicked off a NINE-game win streak, which included a sweep of Cleveland and of those same damn Yankees in New York. On April 30, A-Crew lasted 18 innings against the Bronx Bombers, technically my longest game of the year by either squad. The Yankees’ poor closer had to pitch nine innings!

Again, all those nine extra innings fall under the “10” column on the box score. I guess the newspaper can be printed as far vertically as they want, but horizontal expansion is a no-go.

A two-game sweep at Boston sent me to a towering 20-6 record, a .769 win percentage, a whole five games over my nearest competition in the division.

This was the high point of my entire season. After a two-game split at Cleveland ended my win streak, I remarked that my A-Crew Mariners were still the best team in baseball:

MIGHTY MINNESOTA

While my M-Crew was struggling at 10-16, my A-Crew was on top of the world. Better yet, I was about to play my first series against Minnesota, my nearest competition in my division, on my own field. This was my big chance to put the season away and cruise to an easy (albeit automatically-fielded) playoff berth.

Unfortunately, Minnesota proved to be the worthy competition I was looking for. They sent the first pitch over the tall right field wall in the Kingdome, later tacking on two more solo shots for a 3-0 win. Minny then quashed my quest for revenge the following night.

Here’s where things get complicated. Since the umpires in these video games are considered perfect, I suppose this would be the video game equivalent of a bad umpire call. Remember how I said my 18-inning game against the Yankees was technically my longest game of the year? Well, my May 9th game here against the Twins went to 18 and beyond. Except… I accidentally hardlocked the game!

I went to my last pitcher, Magus, but I accidentally pressed the button one more time. Since there was no available option, and since the programmers apparently didn’t account for this, the game froze. The music kept playing, but the pitcher animation stopped, and the game stopped receiving any inputs. (On Twitter, I called it a “softlock”, but it’s really more of a hard lock.)

I switched over to that evening’s M-Crew game to give me time to decide what to do. Of course, M-Crew didn’t fare any better against the Twins, dropping to 11-20. Getting back to A-Crew, since I was the one who triggered the game lock (however inadvertently), and since I didn’t want to be thought of as abusing resets or otherwise cheating the natural outcome of these games, I (somewhat ironically) threw the game, Black Sox style, simply to make sure I didn’t come away with a win which anyone might consider improper.

My big chance to destroy Minnesota came and went, and it was I who got swept. My five game lead had evaporated into a much narrower game and a half, as seen in my spreadsheet.

Here you see my starting pitchers, my result, my win/loss record and division lead (or deficit), along with on the far right, Minnesota’s record. (The black column represented the real Mariners’ results for these games from 1993. They went 82-80 that year.) You can see my rise to a five-game lead, followed by a tumble to 1.5 games by our mutual day off on May 13th.

Regardless, I was still best team in baseball, stuck in the same division with the second-best team. In fact, this struggle made the season all the more interesting. Rather than cruising to an easy win, I had a fight on my hands… a fight that might come down to my final series against Minnesota October 1-3.

There was a lot of baseball before then, though. On May 17, the Oakland Athletics briefly reared their heads in our division. On May 15, in my series at Oakland, they rocked my starter Terra for TEN earned runs, in only 3 and 1/3 innings pitched. Even a previous grand slam from Tifa left us four runs short.

In this SNES game, Terra is supposed to be future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson, and she did start out with a 4-1 record in six games pitched. But this Oakland game represented the beginning of a serious slide for my supposed ace. Her visible stats seemed to indicate she should still be my top pitcher, however it genuinely felt like her confidence had been rocked. This led me to wonder if maybe the game makes use of some kind of hidden “slump” stat for individual players. Meanwhile, my dropping two of three to the Athletics enabled them in their overtaking of Minnesota, following my subsequent loss at Texas.

Oakland then tied with me briefly atop the division, before losing five of their next six, putting them three games back in the division. Meanwhile, on May 20, my A-Crew took the Rangers into extras, tied at 7. While Terra struggled yet again, giving up 5 earned runs, my star reliever Luneth had come up big in massive spots, still sporting a flat 0 ERA into late May. I brought him in for the 9th and 10th, and he continued his streak. However, in the 11th, Vivi gave up the walk-off homer to “Varyu” of Texas.

The loss was disappointing, but despite what you may have read in the paper that day, I survived.

After 22 and 1/3 innings pitched, Luneth’s scoreless streak did finally end on May 23 at Kansas City, on a solo homer to Grover Cleveland. This game also went to 11 innings, but this time, Tifa and Ayla teamed up to score four, giving us the win.

Two days later, I suffered a 9-1 trouncing at the bats of the Angels. However, I had more important matters to consider than just the loss itself.

For the first time in a month, I was actually trailing Minnesota! While I was navigating a rough patch, they were winning 9 out of 11. I did end up winning three out of four against the Angels, with “Griffey” coincidentally trending on Twitter at that same moment, but my comfortable lead over Minnesota was gone.

While this Angels series was significant for A-Crew, it was much more significant for M-Crew. They had lost 9 out of 11 games leading into that series, floundering at a 15-29 record in the AL West basement.

I truly had lost hope of recovering my manual fielding season. The writing was firmly on the wall. I sucked at this game. However, I soldiered on, knowing this four-game series against division-leading California was on the horizon. It would either serve as hope to continue going, with potential for a comeback against a division foe, or it would be the final nail in the coffin, allowing me to retire my poor suffering Mariners in peace.

You can probably guess what happened.

After three losses, I called M-Crew’s season. I gave myself at least one last chance to go out with a win, but we got buried early on route to a 14-4 drubbing, ending our half-season with a strikeout by Edgar Martinez.

Let’s just call it SNES Sim City rules and say I was fired in the middle of the night.

Meanwhile that same night, A-Crew declared their fourth game against the Angels “commemorative beer glass night” at the Kingdome, as they poured one out for their fallen comrades on their way to an 8-1 win.

Now the only show in town, the A-Crew’s back-and-forth dance with Minnesota continued into June:

Halfway through a cross-country road trip, Sabin rocked the Incredible Hulk pitching for Milwaukee on our way to a 6-5 win. This four-game win streak bumped our lead over Minnesota back up to two games.

But a three-game skid against the Angels and Royals put the Twins back on top. From there, we and the Twins stayed within a half game of each other, trading leads for about three weeks. During this stretch, I won 8 of 10 against the Rangers, Athletics, and White Sox. However, one of my losses came at the cost of my once-dominant reliever Luneth, who had started to struggle. On June 24, entering the game in the 7th inning against Oakland with the bases loaded, Luneth allowed a grand slam to Gertrude Stein.

But three days later, Luneth redeemed himself with a four-out save to preserve the win following Steiner’s 8th inning grand slam.

One more win brought me to .640, with a 48-27 record, just a half game behind Minnesota at 48-26. On June 28th, it was time for our big rematch, this time at the Metrodome.

A classic pitcher’s duel was broken only by a solo homer by Tifa in the top of the 4th. Aeris pitched 6 scoreless innings, relieved by Vivi for 2 and Luneth for 1. I’d finally gotten my revenge on Minnesota for that sweep in May! They were vulnerable after all. Could I maybe even parlay this into a sweep of my own?

Unfortunately, my luck stopped there. Margot Kidder shut us down in game 2. Ironically, some poor auto-fielding hurt us in game 3. And then in game 4, we blew a 4-0 lead to lose 15-5. We went from a game and a half up to 2.5 games behind, our new low point of the season.

Once again, our final series in October loomed. I was able to handle most everyone else, but Minnesota consistently wrecked my face. And to make matters worse, they were my primary opposition in my own division. It was looking more and more like I would have to accumulate a three-game lead on Minnesota going into that final series if I wanted to ensure a spot in the playoffs.

ALL-STAR BREAK

A very red July brought us back out of our skid.

My Mariners took 5 of 6 against the Yankees and Red Sox, while the Twins went on a 3-7 stretch. Following a 10-1 win over Cleveland (preventing a sweep at home), this left us a game up on Minnesota going into the All-Star break.

Obviously, since I was going the full mile in playing this season, I opted into the Home Run Derby, which because of the odd calendar discrepancy, landed on a Sunday for me instead of the traditional Monday.

Since this is a purely exhibition mode of the SNES game, you’re given the option of five fake players (who I don’t think appear on any actual team rosters), or Ken Griffey Jr. You know who I picked.

I gave myself a few practice rounds, just so I’d be prepared for the real deal. I ended up going 1-3 in those rounds, but the round I did win I smashed 21 homers.

At first, it seemed like my opponent “Nick Noheart” could only hit 13, but when it came time for my official attempt, he summoned a bit more willpower, and broke his PB with a total of 14.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate my magic from my winning practice attempt. I was getting as many outs as homers. I ended up racking up only 8, with my longest at 509 feet. I only got a brief glimpse of the warehouse in right field, which actual Ken Griffey Jr. actually hit during this actual Home Run Derby at Baltimore.

The following day, I played the All-Star Game, back within season mode.

To my surprise, this is actually a required game as part of a full regular season – a bit odd, considering this was years before the ASG was used to determine home field in the World Series. Granted, I intended to play it anyway, even through the SNES game’s title screen option. I was just not expecting this to be a full season obligation.

I was a bit disappointed in that this meant I couldn’t select a field other than Camden Yards. (Notice the darkened stadium select option, which is always inaccessible in season mode.) Nothing wrong with Camden at all, but I was hoping to switch it up with an NL park. At any rate, despite forcing you to play the ASG as part of your season, it doesn’t allow you to swap in your own players! I got to play with Griffey, Terra (standing in for Randy Johnson), and… a bunch of nobodies.

Long story short, the ASG went to extras tied at 1. Rocky Balboa for the NL got to third in the top of the 11th, before my final pitcher got out of the jam. But after that, we just ran out of gas. Top of the 12th, Brian Ullrich (who happened to be this SNES game’s director, playing for the Florida Marlins) hit a bomb to left field off Silent Cal. Obviously he was the game’s final boss all along.

Obviously the game’s MVP has to be Atlanta’s Grant Park. Who the hell pitches eight innings in an All-Star Game?

As a side note, there’s a bug in the game where some players’ home run stats are erased during the All-Star break. The only player I believe this happened to on my squad was FF2’s Firion, who went from 17 homers to 0 overnight, despite retaining his 37 RBIs.

As a subtle bit of strategy, I used the opportunity of the ASG break to rearrange my pitching order. Given a five-starter rotation, both of my upcoming Minnesota series in late July and in October would face the same three starters. Thus, I used the time off to position my three best pitchers – Rydia, Aeris, and Bartz – to be in rotation for both of those series, leaving Strago and the struggling Terra to fill the other two slots. Anything I could do to eek out an advantage.

Meanwhile, in the real world, real baseball was starting up again. For the past three months, my little simulated season had been filling the gap where I would have been following the actual Mariners. But with training camp underway, and with a July 24 start date, my little pretend season was about to be overshadowed by the real one. (But don’t worry, while the real Mariners have a consistent talent for disappointment, my video game season was capable of providing some actual, genuine suspense.)

---

I hope you’re enjoying this trip so far! While it was fun digging up all my old notes and screenshots from this six-month gaming campaign of mine, I wasn’t expecting to use so many images, lol. To spare our poor browsers, I split this post into two parts, the second of which can be found here.