Playing A Baseball Simulator Made Me A Fanatic Again

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I really loved attending games. Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Miami came at the old Dolphins/Marlins stadium, a truly horrible place to watch any sporting event, but also one that was a mere 10-minute drive from my home. I went to countless Marlins games in the summer of 2003, watching them slowly put things together into what would eventually be an improbable second World Series title that fall. (I was lucky enough to attend Game 5 of that World Series, back when tickets were merely expensive and not expensive.) Baseball's constant motion kept me grounded in the rudderless months of Miami summer, when the heat is so stifling that you could get tickets behind home plate for Sunday afternoon games for about $20.

There's another reason that I loved baseball so much, though, and that is that I was in the exact right age demographic for the golden age of baseball video games. My late single-digit years and my early teens coinciding with the releases of such bangers like Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., Triple Play 2002 , and the glorious trilogy of MVP Baseball 2003 through and especially 2005 brought together two of my great loves: sports and gaming. I remember spending a big part of a month in Venezuela one summer just playing Triple Play 2002 for days on end, only coming out for air to eat, and sometimes not even that. I also remember learning every single starting lineup and rotation in MVP Baseball 2004 , while trying to keep my defending champion Marlins at the top of the league. I remember all of these things because they made me grow closer with the sport, and made me understand what I wanted to get out of being a baseball fan.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and baseball video games fell off rather quickly, as did, and perhaps not coincidentally, my love of the game. Part of that is that the Marlins did what the Marlins do, and traded away Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis and a bunch of other stalwarts from the 2003 World Series team, but I also went off to college in 2007 and had other things on my mind. I've tried since then; I briefly got into the MLB 2K series before that went kaput, and once I made the swap from Xbox to PlayStation, one of my first purchases was whatever year of MLB The Show was out then (14 , if memory serves). I did love the latter, but it never held my attention quite like the games of my teen years did.