Top Five Sports Video Game Countdown # 2

I was s'posed ta have a ticket to see tonight's Detroit-Baltimore game at Comerica but the guy that we bought the tickets from ripped us off and never showed with the tickets. Naturally the Tigers went on to score 17 runs in one of the most lopsided defeats in Comerica's history. It's for the best, however, as with the way my luck has been going and with my uncanny ability to jinx every sporting event I attend, the game probably would have been a 1-0 Baltimore win and over in about an 1 hour and fifteen minutes. We ended up missing the entire game as, after getting shut out from the game, we headed back to my friend Matt's place and watched "The Inside Man" (which sucked, but maybe I was predisposed to not liking it based on the events of the evening up to that point) because he didn't have cable to tune in the game. So now it's a little after 3 A.M. and I'm writing this as I'm watching the replay on FSN at my apartment. To help kill time between the scoring outbursts I decided to pick up with my video game countdown that I started nearly a month ago. Also I haven't had an original idea since I started back at law school around the same time and am using this countdown as an excuse to continue not to think. So without further adieu..........# 2 (oh crap I only get to write one more of these posts.......time to start thinking again.)

# 2 R.B.I. Baseball (NES, that's Nintendo Entertainment System for all of you dorks.......yeah, (whimper))

Last summer, a time when this blog was still in its pink, slimy, infancy and I wasn't sure what the hell I was writing about with topics ranging from a diatribe about why Patricia Heaton was responsible for everything that was wrong with America (seriously, if you want to lose all respect for me go read it.........What's that? You don't respect me now? Why....let me at him), to a 4 A.M. live-blogging of B.E.T. Un-Cut, to following another disappointing Tigers season, I attempted to break down each team and every player in R.B.I. Baseball and anyone who is a longtime reader of this site (I think that list begins and ends with myself) knows I have a hard time sticking to a task that demanding. I was putting in a couple of hours writing these breakdowns and getting only four page hits a day unlike now where after over a year of hard work I have increased my readership to a whopping 20 a day (Why do I do this again? That's right for you the fans.........Hello). Also I found out that there is a website called Dee-Nee which had already broken down the teams and is much more professional and in-depth than anything I could put together so I quit. Anyways I'm not going to do any in-depth analysis tonight, just a short post mostly bragging about my exploits against my friends while playing this game, namely Bill and Josh, so if they are reading I'm sorry...........that you guys suck so bad in R.B.I.

I never really played the original R.B.I. until about 7 or 8 years ago and it was my friend Josh who introduced me to it. Up to that point my friend Kevin and I played R.B.I. 3 roughly 3,680,147 times over the years pitching straight down the middle game after game after game after game...... which may have been the most mindless, IQ dropping activity imaginable and also actively contributed to neither of us having a girlfriend almost all the way through high school, (however if you mention not having a girlfriend to Kevin he would bristle and say something like "Maybe Andy didn't have a girlfriend but I had X amount, including so and so, who grew up to be way hot years after we dated." He's lying, I was there. The closest thing he had to a girlfriend was the few seconds in which my sister would dare to walk into the Nintendo room and make sure we were alive and that the smell coming from the room was only farts and not rotting corpses. So there. The game devolved into me playing small ball with the Cardinals against Kevin hitting tape measure shots, with the roided out Bash Brothers including a 490 foot Mark MGwire blast off Tom Niedenfuer that I'm still not ready to talk about.

Then Josh reluctantly introduced me to the original, which I had never really liked because of the fat players and it only 10 teams to chose from, but I agreed to play and selected the Cardinals, my team from R.B.I. 3, and was introduced to two names that would change my life forever (I know this is sad and I'm using a lot of parentheses) John Tudor and Danny Cox. No longer being neutered by having to pitch strictly down the middle Tudor and Cox unleashed the filthiest duo since the days of Koufax and Drysdale. After getting my brains beat in over the first few games I started to make some adjustments and mastered John Tudor's sweeping curveball and changing speeds enough to keep Josh and Boston's mashing lineup off balance. The offense came along slower but in a short while I was back to swiping bags with Vince Coleman and Ozzie Smith, legging out infield hits with Willie Magee, and getting the occasional bomb from Jack Clark. I was hooked. I also started to branch out and discovered that if Tudor/Cox was Koufax/Drysdale then Krukow/Reuschel were Johnson/Schilling and the Mets lineup was probably more potent than the '27 Yankees.

It wasn't until I played my friend Bill that I reached my peak as an R.B.I. player. The first time I played him I was genuinely disappointed that I didn't pitch a no-hitter. Bill took that as cocky boasting but it wasn't, it was the truth, I had reached the "I'm Keith Hernandez" moment while playing with a pixelated Keith Hernandez, and it nearly melted my brain. I would later put together a scoreless innings streak with Tudor and Cox which had me breathing down Orel Hershiser's neck before it finally ended in the 46th inning. I was genuinely upset over a scoring decision that charged Doc Gooden with a hit instead of a Danny Heep error ruining a perfect game, going so far as to blame it on a sympathetic hometown official scorer. Basically I was accusing a game that couldnt program African-American players of going out of its way to change a scoring decision in the home teams favor. I was insane and arrogant and I don't know why Bill continued to play against me, especially with the way I was handing him his ass every 15 minutes, but he did and eventually I cooled off and the games became competitive again. However I would go so far as to say that my 6 week stretch of nonstop R.B.I. playing was one of the best stretches by anyone playing any video game ever, and thats why R.B.I. Baseball for the NES holds such a lofty standing in the rankings.