I’ve Been Playing MLB The Show Wrong This Entire Time

Pretext: this may be the most philosophical article you’ve ever read about a sports video game. It’s a love letter of sorts.

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I’ve been all about trying new things lately across all facets of life. I decided to extend that into the video game realm and it so happens that MLB The Show 24 is my main boo right now.

For the most part, I’ve approached MLB The Show with a competitive mindset. I hate losing and I need to win. Anytime a negative outcome affects me I hate the game. Whenever I benefit from the exact same circumstance, I display zero emotion toward the game at all and celebrate the positive outcome because of whatever great thing I did that resulted in the outcome.

Ain’t that somethin’? When something bad happens, I blame “the game” and often my frustration boils over into my performance as a negative distraction. When something good happens, it’s because I did it. I’ve had zero reflection on this because why would I – it’s a video game. It’s a “thing” and it’s a “hobby.” What’s a “thing” or a “hobby?”

Stay with me.

I’ve always preached about perception in my life but I feel like I’m learning that I’ve had it wrong all along – I wasn’t defining perception with my beliefs. I lost the excitement in life and “things” didn’t make me feel anything. You know, textbook crippling anxiety and depression. Luckily, I appear to have woken (waken?) up recently and it’s kinda rad. Seeing the world in a new way feels crazy. Like, actually crazy. Colors seem brighter, the world seems smaller and more connected. I’m dealing with some physical pain right now and I feel like that helped my mind focus more. I was in immense mental and emotional pain for so long that I was able to ignore physical pain. I’ve slowly, painfully and damn near impossibly clawed my way out of the darkness and I’m seein’ the light now, baby!

I digress. Simply put, I’ve been through some thangs and in a blink of an eye I feel like I processed it.

Well, what does this have to do with MLB The Show you didn’t ask? Well, I mean…I guess I’ll tell you since we’re both here.

Trying New Things

That whole “trying new things” thing has been going great for me and as I said – I decided to extend that to my gaming time.

I’ve been playing The Show for so long now that I’ve just gotten accustomed to playing the same way I always have. After all, that’s what we do. We gamers are the best.

Which is ironic, because in my personal life I’ve often silently (or loudly) judged someone for being stuck in their ways. I’ve been in some form of management since I was 20 years old, which means I’ve been “in charge” of adults since I was a kid. As I got older, more experienced and more authority, I’ve lamented that these old-heads can’t get out of their own way and just change.

I’ve been playing video games so long in a cloud of depression, anxiety and thisshitsucksness that I’ve forgotten how to appreciate them. I pretend like I’m smarter than old-heads that can’t appreciate how things work – I’m the oldhead.

I’ve been locked in this weird competitive mindset while playing The Show which is reflective of my outlook on life. I want to be better than everyone else at all the things I like and when I don’t feel like I am, I learn new things because I want to be better than everyone else at something. Or something. I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. This entire time I’ve felt like I’ve grown into an understanding person that might actually be smarter than everyone else in the room. Then I had the arrogance to say that I’m not arrogant.

I haven’t been just arrogant, I’ve been the literal dumbest fucking person that exists.

I’ve been in quite a bit of physical pain lately. The actual most pain I’ve ever been in in my life. Nothing catastrophic, nothing any worse than anyone else but I’m feeling pain for the first time.

I’ve been so fucked up for so long that my mental pain was vastly more impactful on my conscious mind than anything physical. For the last couple years, I’ve been working on the mental health stuff and like the Big Bang, I processed all the negative, ridiculous, fucked, stupidly idiotic, youcan’tmakethisshitup bullshit while playing MLB The Show 24 and felt a whole new reality explode forth.

Blinded By the Dark

I changed up all my settings on a complete whim. I mean, it started with a camera view change but I’ve done that before. Then I turned the PCI off but I’ve done that before. I changed things I change all the time when I’m being an arrogant asshole and lying to myself that I’m playing the game the best way better than all you nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

I booted up a Play vs. CPU game with the mega-dude-bro Cruz/Verlander hybrid build I wrote about the other day, Legend difficulty, Pitcher View camera, Strike Zone camera, no visual aids at all to the point that I didn’t even see where the ball crossed the plate, no swing feedback, no timing feedback. I turned off Zone hitting and switched to Pure Analog where I was moving my right-stick up or down and focusing on timing.

In other words, I removed the need to focus on anything other than picking up the release of the ball, looking for spin, timing my swing and just fuckin’ lettin’ it rip. I’ve been playing MLB The Show wrong this entire time because I’ve been more focused on the numbers and the distractions and the gimmicks. I rejected reality and let numbers and graphs tell me what I saw. I’ve been looking at this video game as “just a video game” and treating it like a remorseful chore rather than an amazingly fun experience. I play because I’m a gamer and I have to play or I fall behind and then I bitch about how behind I am in this thing I can literally choose to stop playing and feeling bad about but keep playing anyway because I mean what else am I gonna do except literally anything else I want?

What an arrogant prick.

MLB The Show is utterly fucking amazing.

Instead of seeing Pinpoint Pitching as of course I’m using this it’s the best interface in the game and if you wanna get gud you have to use it because it’s real skill – yeah ok.

What does skill mean in a video game? It’s a simulation, jackass. Yeah, there are mechanics and the games work a certain way but it’s literally an alternate universe where you get to do cool shit you’re probably too chickenshit to try to strive for in real life or maybe you can’t because of reasons but then you actually get to kinda in a video game because it’s a simulated reality?

Having skill in a simulated reality is super dope. Be proud of being skilled mastering a game or it’s mechanics. Be proud of performing better than others if that’s you’re thing. But don’t forget why you became obsessed with this shit to begin with. When you were 8 years old, standing in front of your TV in your underwear on Christmas Day, blowin’ shit up or winning races or saving the Goddamn princess again. Back when you didn’t know what the “real world” was and all you knew was baseball, Pokemon, video games and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Back when school sucked because the other kids made fun of you because you were overweight because you ate too much because your parents never told you what moderation was. How could they? They were too busy screaming at each other, which you didn’t understand as a kid because they love each other, ya know? So while they’re screaming at each other and not paying attention to you, you distract yourself with really cool shit that you lose yourself in. For me, that was baseball, music and video games because I could always turn them up just loud enough to drown out my mom telling my dad she was going to kill him and take me and my brother and run away with us. And all types of other shit I’m not going to rehash because I’ve processed my childhood trauma by being able to use that singular example and leave it at that. And then any reasonable, caring person of which I’ve learned there are a metric fuck ton of despite being raised to think they all suck and are out to get me and think I’m all the things I hate about myself will understand.

People are fuckin’ cool. You’re all different than me and that never bothered me until others made me feel like I was bothering everyone with what I like. Then I pretended and missed out on sharing experiences with people who were like me that would probably like me a bunch just so I could seem “cooler” by not having friends.

Arrogant, stupid sad little confused boy that didn’t know better and never knew how to be himself because he had parents that hated themselves and hated each other and hated you for reminding themselves of the person they hate the most – themselves.

*This is an article on a website dedicated to a baseball video game, right?*

Yeah, yeah.

After stripping away all the feedback and taking away the need to feel like I need to be perfect, I saw cool shit. I focused on finding the release of the ball out of the pitcher’s hand and it was dope as fuck. I started focusing on trying to pick up the spin on the ball to identify the pitch and I could. Then I focused on timing when to swing, because I’m controlling the guy with the bat in the world I don’t exist in and not actually holding the bat myself. I was so focused on analyzing feedback in a video game world who’s mechanics I don’t actually understand despite living in a physical world where NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK ABOUT ANYTHING AND JUST GUESS A LOT AND CONVINCE OTHER PEOPLE IT’S TRUE AND THEN PEOPLE SAY “oh that seems right” AND THEN ARGUE ABOUT SHIT THEY DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT.

….

Fuck.

How fucking cool is it that I’m playing a simulated baseball world and when I focus on what I actually see for myself and react to it, pretty cool shit happens. I actually acknowledged how they programmed into the game that contact swinging does this and power swing does that and this interface represents this. We’re not holding the bat, dummies. We’re controlling the guy that is holding the bat.

Holding the bat in italics is lowkey crazy.

Anyway, we’re controlling a fake baseball guy based on a real guy with attributes based off arbitrary formulas that decided arbitrary ratings that led to an arbitrary “consensus opinion” on what cards are good or bad even though there’s no possible way anyone has enough personal time to use all the fake baseball men a reasonable number of times to actually make a valid estimation of its literally not real performance in a simulated baseball video game that talks about “cards” you can’t physically hold.

I’ve felt like SDS really nailed the stadium aesthetics, felt like the uniforms were cool and yeah sure that’s easy. Except it isn’t. It’s not easy to create a painstakingly realistic virtual simulation of a real place in the world. Yet, SDS fucking crushes it because the only criticism you see is from people saying “yeah it looks literally like the thing in real life that i went to once but seat 14 in section 113 has a blue screw on the right in real life but they have it the same color as all the other screws in the stadium and yes I spent 15 days consecutively combing through replay footage and it’s plain as day. Why has this happened? Why does SDS hate baseball?”

If the biggest criticism you can levy against a video game developer for the virtual world they created is that extremely specific details that very few people would even pick up on are slightly incorrect, then they’re doing an impossibly amazing job.

That was me, except instead of criticizing stadium details I was criticizing feedback systems created by the same people that created the shit I was claiming didn’t make sense to me. I said the gameplay didn’t make sense because the feedback didn’t make sense. It’s all made by the same people.

Arrogant prick.

It didn’t make sense, not because SDS sucks and are the literal embodiment of evil, but because I don’t know shit about shit.

It’s hard enough to create a painstakingly detailed virtual world. Creating a system within that system that attempts to explain the shit you’re seeing in a virtual world probably isn’t easy either.

But that feedback is what we always crave, us gamers. We want all the cool worlds, all the cool characters to make us feel feelings that we might not have been lucky enough to experience in the real world. We want the controller layouts to be perfect for our liking and then bitch when they aren’t because why can’t the game devs just get it right? Thinking this without any intent to invest our time, energy and literal soul into learning how to do this cool shit because it made us feel amazing as a kid and dream of making others feel the same.

Only to be criticized by a string of sentences on a shiny screen that’s powered by literal fucking magic energy that’s coursing across the entire planet through cables and shit. And those words on the magic screen thing? On a forum page, or a phone screen or some other cool tech shit where that communication was transmitted through the fucking air.

Seriously. Think about that. We have our lives in the physical world then turn to video games to distract us, then get caught up in discussing our favorite fake worlds and arguing about it and bashing it despite not actually understanding it.

Hello, it’s me.

When I stripped away the lens of negative criticism to the point that I could only experience what was actually happening in front of me, I felt like a kid again.

On Legend, the hardest difficulty with the fastest pitch speeds, I played the most enjoyable version of virtual baseball I’ve ever had. Going all the way back to when I was a kid, locking into the world of All-Star Baseball, MLB Slugfest, Triple Play Baseball before it became MVP Baseball and MLB before it became MLB The Show to distract me from my parents screaming at each other non-stop before turning their attention to my brother and I only to criticize because they’re unhappy. To fill the massive void I felt as my father slunk into a deep depression that killed our bond over baseball that began in tee ball until I stopped playing when I was 16 out of spite of my parents fighting all the time. I didn’t know how else to get their attention other than to quit the one thing that seemingly brought them together – me and baseball. I thought I was the worst player on the field every game because my dad’s way of pushing me to be great was to point out the flaws and hardly celebrate the victories unless it was a literal victory. But then I watched him have me sign every home run ball, every game ball from a pitching performance and display them in the corner of our living room. I never understood why. I sucked. I struck out that one time because I didn’t listen to my dad even though I didn’t remember actually having a conversation about what he supposedly told me. I did a couple good things and there’s a shrine built in the corner, my own budding memorabilia collection.

My dad was proud of me but didn’t know how to tell me. So he did that instead. Through baseball.

I don’t have a relationship with my parents anymore because they haven’t been able to admit when they’re not being honest or genuine. It’s taken me an incredibly long time to process so much shit that I’ve been missing out on all the crazy cool details in the world. It’s so easy with social media to get caught up in crazy shit and it’s just a perpetual storm of negativity. It feels like everything sucks because you’re reading about and spending all your energy on negative shit.

I just went on my first real vacation with my family. My amazingly perfect, imperfect shit-talking psycho sweetheart that would do anything for me except let me call her ladybug smokin’ hot girlfriend bought me tickets to a Braves game in Atlanta. That was my bucket-list. That was literally the thing I wanted to do most in life that was pretty easy to do, I just had myself convinced I couldn’t do it. My I can die now thing was driving 12 hours to a different state to watch a group of dudes I have zero personal relationship with perform manual labor for 2.5 hours and then internally criticize choices they made with minimal time to process a lifetime of training into one singular moment. And I was convinced I could never do it.

Until I did it.

I cried on that trip because I subconsciously (or was it) packed a custom made Tim Hudson jersey my dad got me for Christmas one year. I’m still convinced I’m the first person that ever had a Tim Hudson Braves jersey since I had it ordered within days of the trade. I wanted to believe that because it was a positive memory I associated with my dad. I cried because I haven’t spoken to him in years. He’s been pretty sick the last couple years and I still haven’t spoken to him. Some heavy duty shit went down between us that I’m not getting into here, but it led to me cutting him out of my life so – pretty bad. He never made a real attempt to reconcile. He expected me to. Because I always did. I always raised my parents. I always gave my mom money for cigarettes and lottery tickets that she promised she’d give back but rarely did. She once begged me to let her hold onto my birthday money, which I thought was strange even as a 12 year old kid, then successfully guilted me into giving it to her to “hold onto.”

We went to a card shop so I could buy a box of 2002 Topps because I loved 2001 Topps. To this day, 2001 is my favorite year for baseball cards. I never understood why and convinced myself it was because I really dug the art styles. Which were all super cool because really cool people did an awesome job, but realistically it was because it was the last time I remember being happy. I’ve spent the last 23 years trying to recapture the energy from that year. When I still felt happy. I had my parents, I had my brother, I had baseball. I had all the other stuff too, but that’s what made me happiest – my parents, my brother and baseball. I was so fucking angry at the world for no reason because I was conditioned to believe that everything was my fault by two incredibly toxic people that didn’t care about themselves enough to ever be capable of caring about their own children like they should. And I’ve been distracting myself from that this entire time by letting negative emotion create my reality. I always understood there was good in the world, but had myself convinced I’d never seen it. Because I was too busy assuming the worst in the people around me, even if they were people I trusted because the two people I should have been able to trust the most treated me worse than any stranger I’ve ever met in 33 years.

I’ve been the guy writing shitty comments about a virtual world because I was unhappy and only saw negative. I rarely, I mean rarely ever acknowledged the positive things about the game. Two years ago was the absolute worst, literal rock bottom time of my life. I thought that was 2014 when I was trying to drink myself to death at 23, rarely sleeping and being completely trapped in my own mind full of negative energy. Energy that had been accumulating since I grew up as a neglected child. Energy that accumulated so strongly, so cosmically dense that I basically became another person. I remember that guy but I can’t believe we’re the same dude. I was so fucked up I awkwardly convinced myself I was in love with some chick I worked with when the reality was I just thought she was hot and felt like I needed a “reason” to experience emotion. I didn’t know how to just “like” someone or find them attractive. I gaslit myself into thinking I had to have reasons to experience positive feelings toward others. You don’t need physical or emotional reciprocation from people to share energy with them. I didn’t know that because of childhood trauma. I just didn’t know it. You can like people for whatever reason you like them; it’s because they’re rad! She was really pretty and liked cool music. Everyone liked her. I felt like I needed a complex explanation for why and then decided she should hear about it….?

Remember that episode of The Office where Jim tells Pam he’s in love with her? Didn’t they kiss, and then Pam is all like “hmmmm but I love Roy or some shit?” Yeah, it went nothing like that. I literally told her I was in love with her because I watched that episode the day before or some shit. I was so fucked up that a scene in a TV show made me go “YES THAT IS SIMILAR TO THE FEELING I THINK” and then I attempted to manifest it. Alcohol addiction and negative energy aren’t the ingredients for a good time.

Oh, yeah. Baseball.

Literally What is the Fucking Point?

This screen means nothing to anyone but me. I’ll explain why it’s important to me.

This is the game I just played with completely revamped settings, stripped away feedback overlays and a completely new perspective on life – trying to appreciate the small details.

It was the best fucking time of my life. From the release of the ball, to the spin of the ball, to the arc of the hitter’s swing as I told him to swing and watching the ball off the bat. Judging for myself, not relying on a bunch of numbers and pictures attempting to explain what I just saw with my own eyes. I made pitch decisions based off if I felt they were early, on time or late. Instead of viewing the CPU as some low-IQ opponent, I viewed it as a mirror image of myself in terms of ability and thought process. Instead of getting mad that I “gave up a homer” to not-a-real-person, I treated it as a moment to reflect. What was the count? Did the batter flinch on his takes? What did my input look like? By taking away the feedback percentages, the only way to judge was what I saw. And if the amazingly talented people that created this virtual world, that poured their hearts and souls into recreating this impossibly immense world of baseball fandom are good enough to make virtual stadiums look unbelievably real then maybe they’re really fucking good at coming up with a way to virtually represent the whole damn thing?

I think that’s what they refer to as code. And the folks at SDS are remarkably, unmistakably amazing at their chosen craft because their hard work gave us a universe to lose ourselves in. A world where we can see our favorite childhood players all on the same team, allowing us for a moment to pretend we’re them.

I hit that homer. I dotted that fastball. I did that thing.

Yeah, you did. You did do that thing. And you fuckin’ crushed it. And you’re gonna keep on crushing it because you’re a ball of energy in this insane reality we share where we can foster all kinds of positive shit just by giving each other positive energy. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on all this shit my entire life.

If you’ve read this far, you know me better than anyone ever has. Because this is the first time I’ve been completely honest with the world. This is the first time I’ve released a lifetime of negative energy at once with such force. This wall of words will reach whoever it’s meant to reach. It will resonate with you or it won’t.

But for the first time in a very long time, I am aware of the universe’s vibration. It’s been drowned out for so long by negative energy that I haven’t been able to enjoy my favorite things. And after a long journey of self healing I’ve realized it’s because I associate my favorite things with my least favorite thoughts, which are nothing more than memories of traumatically negative energy.

That’s why I wrote this. Because the fine folks at SDS made me feel like a kid again because they’ve put so much love, care and soul into recreating what they love – the same thing I love.

The same thing you love if you even know what MLB The Show is.

Up to this point, I’ve spent more negative energy on being frustrated at something meant to make me happy. Because I haven’t been as happy playing as I remember being when I was a kid. That was never anyone’s fault at San Diego Studios. It was my fault for giving into the negative energy and missing out on all the positive things. I got off on waxing poetic about all the things I thought would be cool in the game, ways to make myself happier that I just assume would make everyone else happy too – because I’m so smart.

Arrogant prick.

It was just pure jealousy. Absolutely unchecked jealousy that a group of people have a super cool opportunity to spend their time working on something they love – the same thing I love. Baseball.

And I’ve been jealous because I have no control over it. And why should I when I haven’t been able to control the way I see the world because I have mommy and daddy issues?

MLB The Show is fucking rad. Baseball is rad. Video games are rad. Being wrong is rad. Admitting you were wrong and growing because of it is better than sex. Feeling excited about shit again is rad.

For the first time since I can remember, I think I’m pretty rad, too.

And so are you.