Jolt Country

I wrote a scene in Fallacy of Dawn where the player is expected to give horrible games to a clerk that is a bit of a gaming elitist. The clerk can’t BELIEVE you came to the counter with a few gems from the bargain bin, and… okay, it isn’t the best puzzle in the world. 

My brother gave me Battlecruiser: 3000 AD for Christmas one year. This is because he is the greatest brother, ever. (He also played Delarion Yar, the main character in Fallacy of Dawn, and doing that even though it greatly annoyed him also makes him the greatest brother, ever.) The idea of a bunch of people going to work and finshing up with something that is truly miserable does sort of fascinate me in a perverse way.

There really is a sort of “classic” list of the worst video games in the world. I’ll try to list them below. They are the ones that always seem to show up on lists like “The 20 Worst Games of All-Time” and such. Annnnnd, because I am an enormous dork, I can’t help but read every “Worst Games Ever” article ever made. It’s a curse.

The list: Pac-Man, E.T. and Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600. Superman for the Nintendo 64. Battlecruiser 3000AD, Extreme Paintbrawl, Daikatana* and Outpost for the PC. Rise of the Robots for the Amiga. Finishing up is Sewer Shark and Night Trap for the Sega CD.

I mean, that is a fairly standard list. Season to taste, certainly. You can’t go wrong with those. A list generated by a group of game journalists would probably include those games (although PC Gamer was good enough to give the completely unfinished Outpost a 93%). Sprinkle with something acerbic regarding the Virtual Boy and you have yourself an article. Gamasutra could turn the above list into 33 pages and then remove the “print” option so they can level up their Adsense account. 

… And personally, hey, I never questioned those choices. I certainly did not feel that E.T. and Pac-Man were terrible games when I was growing up, but that’s not been a fight I felt passionate about. They didn’t seem any worse than many other 2600 games, and I did not spend a terrible amount of time in arcades when I was like seven, so the “real” Pac-Man was not burned into my memory. And in all honesty, they are usually included because what they represent, which was the temporary death of the domestic gaming industry.

(I began a thread on my BBS about the worst games ever, and I was trying to limit it to games I actually played and personally detested. Pac-Man, E.T. and so forth weren’t going to be on it. The thread sort of stalled because I promised myself that I’d go back and re-play every single game… and honestly, it’s just been a little difficult finding the time to play in irony the last couple of months.) 

But here is the reason I am writing all of this. Tonight, I was sent a Youtube video that shows the final scene to Night Trap. I am actually angry about this - I am smiling in anger.

At the very end of the video, you imprison some… well, I don’t know what they are specifically, a vampire or shadowbitch or something. (The last girl on the screen before Dana Plato is one such monster.) And then Dana tells you what a great guy you are for solving the game and saving all the girls you could. Right on. 

She turns to leave, walks down the hall and says, “Nah, you wouldn’t.”

At this point in the video, it appears that the same trap was triggered for her, the protagonist, as was triggered for the vampire a moment earlier. And I just assumed that the ending of the game was like that. But my friend said, no, you can actually press the “trap” button there. You have to press it for that to happen.

That’s when everything I thought I knew turned false.

What? What the — what? That is unbelievable! That totally gives the player a chance to - in NIGHT TRAP OF ALL GAMES, it — all right, I am going to try to compose myself here. It’s amazing and unepected.

OK, first off, letting a trap be invoked right there messes with the player/player character relationship. That is supposed to be one of the big “things” you can experiment with in text adventures, and here is a wholly miserable and unloved FMV game pulling it off. And it’s our thing! Not Full Motion Video’s thing! It’s IF’s thing! Secondly, it allows for a meaningful moral choice right at the end of the game. Yes, it is a binary decision, and those can be as lame as they were in BioShock, but in Night Trap, it’s fast, it’s quick - you’re deciding what to do in a split second and the real-time nature of Night Trap actually works in its favor, to its credit. (Believe me, when I woke up today, I didn’t think I’d end it complimenting frigging Night Trap.) 

Lastly,  even in a game with universally terrible acting like Night Trap, Dana Plato is good enough to act distressed for three seconds. Admittedly, the laughable CGI effect that follows ruins the moment, but for a few seconds there is an actual bit of negative feedback as the PC screams and pleads for her own life.

And this is supposed to be one of the worst games of all-time.

I played Night Trap once, briefly, when it was new, and yeah - it sucks. Totally and completely. The writing is terrible, the acting embarrassing, and the gameplay kind of stale. I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But I can safely say that this “twist,” or this last-second player decision saves it from the rep it got over the years. I used to believe that there was no point in continuing to play a horrible game after a couple hours, but for the first time, Night Trap has me thinking, maybe, otherwise. It’s a total revelation. And in my opinion, it should be more famous for that.

*I purchased Daikatana last year, from a vendor on eBay. I had to know if it was as terrible as everyone says. It’s not great, but again, it’s nowhere near one of the “worst games of all-time.” And getting mad at John Romero is like getting mad at Manny Ramirez for something. You know what you’re in for, and Ion Storm the company was probably as bad an idea as Manny being allowed to manage the Washington Nationalsin 2014. But no, Daikatana wasn’t that unpleasant. If I get on Youtube tonight and find that the ending of Daikatana has you making a choice about the fate of Hiro Miyamoto, I am going to hang myself.

If you’re at all like me, you listen to three or four songs in constant rotation. You’ll get sick of them after a month or so - maybe! - but also maybe not. When I wrote Revenger, I placed the following into the credits:

I wrote this game unable to get that freaking Meja song out of my head. I am not proud of that fact. “Sucked Out,” by Superdrag, “Alright Again” by Sadie Hawkings, “Changes” by 2PAC, that Rockwell (who doesn’t, by the way) song and “Sick of Myself” by Matthew Sweet rounded out the woefully short WinAmp playlist I heard like 40,000 times while writing this game.

And that is unfortunately all too true. The Meja one really hurts, sort of considering another revision of the game over that one. But yeah, I wrote Revenger in a single month, and there were literally just six songs in rotation for that month.

(That being said - 2PAC!!! I don’t think I have thought of Tupac Shakur for more than two or three minutes since I wrote that game. Nothing against him, he’s just not done faking his own death yet. We’ll have a lot to catch up with.)

Up until recently, as in, last night recently, my playlist was even shorter. There were three songs by the band Mae, and then “Jenny” by the Click Five. You know what, I apologize for telling you that, as that’s pretty goddamn soft-serve of me to relate that information. I really don’t want it destroying the rest of my position here - I hope we can all still be friends. But you like what you like, when it comes to music, right?

I was on the ifMud last night when Jason Scott mentioned the MC Frontalot song “Diseases of Yore.” I went to Frontalot’s website to listen to the song. It is at this point that I have to paragraph break, smile, and compose myself before licking the wick of how MC Frontalot distributes music in 2008.

If you’re in your mid-thirties, like me, and spend most of the day computer programming / shopping for Roombas, then you are totally happy to support the artists that bring you joy. You want to give them money. I mean, yeah, fuck Lars and everything, but otherwise you feel good about supporting the artist. Frontalot’s site lets you do this. You can download MP3s of his singles right from his site. He has a new album coming out and lets you preview the songs that are on it. And that is where I became officially introduced to “Diseases of Yore.”

It is a really catchy song. Extremely catchy. I mostly listen to pop punk and the reason I do it not because I live in my mother’s basement or anything (although, boy, getting introduced to vacuums that don’t pick up cat hair as part of home ownership was baffling) (thus the, you know, browsing of Roombas) but because it is a catchy genre. And “Diseases of Yore” is certainly that.

You get about a minute of the song on Front’s site, and it will definitely be stuck in your head, like it is mine. I eventually noticed that Jonathan Coulton also performs on this song and the two of them really make a great team.

After about twenty plays of the cut-short demo, I was determined to get the actual thing. And MC Frontalot makes that very easy, as well. You can pre-order a physical copy of his CD and get instant access to the album in MP3, AAC and FLAC format. So at work today, I did just that.

And I have not played a single song since.

(I chalk half of that up to the fact that Coulton and Frontalot use more chords in just the chorus of this song than the entirety of pop punk, but that’s this whole other thing.)

Kudos, you talented fuckers - this is the best song in the world right now.

(Link to Diseases of Yore, and the other tracks on MC Frontalot’s new album, Final Boss.) 

Pinner wrote the article with that very title on Caltrops, which I will link to … here! 

(OK, the link works now.)

I have reduced my gameplaying activities to virtually nothing but “galactic conquest games”.

Last time, you heard me speak about Mayhem Intergalactic, a small indie title which takes the space 4X game and reduces it to its base elements, providing a galactic conquest experience in under 30 minutes, sometimes even under 15. A far cry from the hours-long commitments required by “deeper”, more complex 4X games.

Today I present to you a game that takes the experience offered by Mayhem Intergalactic, removes the “Next Turn” button, cranks it up to real-time, and distills the 4X experience even further, down to an explosion of action and, yes, strategy which takes less than 5 minutes, and often much less than that.

That game is: GALCON!

The description of the game is not unlike that of Mayhem Intergalactic, or of any other space 4X game. You start with a planet, and try to expand your empire to other planets, each of which offers a different production potential, building a space army of space ships and space lasers to send to your enemy’s space planets to try to conquer them. But whereas 30 seconds into your normal 4X game you would still be scrolling around the screen, getting your bearings, your first tenuous thoughts of overall strategy just barely forming in your mind, and maybe you’ve moved your cursor over to your home planet and are considering pressing the “build a ship” button.

30 seconds into a game of GALCON, the screen will be engulfed in the FIERY FLAMES OF SPACE ARMAGEDDON, with hundreds of little Asteroids mans coursing through the galaxy, exploding in droves as they attempt to conquer the opposing players’ empires.

It’s often exhilirating and even hilarious to watch, as it embraces glorious excess, and the “explosion” sound (which is the sound of someone making an “explosion sound” into a microphone) rattles around as the rhythmic undertone of the whole undertaking.

It sounds, and often feels, ridiculous. But really, when you get down to it, it still manages to be a strategy game, even as your mouse is flitting frantically around the screen trying to launch your armadas one second to the next.

When you win, you really feel like you executed a superior strategy, not that you just were able to drag and drop ships faster. And when you lose, you feel like you could do better the next time, not by mousing quicker, but by making better decisions.

So either it’s a tremendously strategic action game, or just the most frantic damn strategy game you’ll ever see.

It offers online multiplayer play, so if you happen to try the single player version out and are as charmed by it as I was, and want to try it online, I will meet you there.

I remember reading the Saints’ schedule at the beginning of the year. It’s soft-serve ice cream. This was the weakest schedule I’ve ever seen them with.

I’m not going to blame Ed Hochuli for a miserably-officiated game. The Saints beat themselves. I’m not going to blame all the turnovers or Martin Gramatica. Antoine Winfield was the best player out there tonight, if you subscribe to the theory that the MVP of a game should come from the team that won.

What gets me is just how much of the joy I seem to be missing from sports.

When Reggie Bush took back his first punt, I was screaming at Pinback in Google Chat. He almost broke the next punt, and I flipped my shit when he took the punt after that back for a touchdown. Because, this was going to be a special game for Saints fans. This was going to be the game we describe for years as, “The game where they fumbled four times and were saved by Reggie Bush.”

Of course, it wasn’t that. Bush is an amazing player who doesn’t fit the mold of a normal running back or wide reciever. I guess he’s become my favorite player because, unlike Brees or Deuce, I never had to hear that they were horrible “busts” for years on end, by terrible sportswriters. (An aside - the terrible sportswriter known as Rich Tosches has started having Yahoo delete the mails that Pinback writes that clearly explain how horrible he is. Delete this, Tosches: YOU’RE WORTHLESS.) To me, when you take the fact that the guy is rich, he’s a young kid that had most of the press in this country saying how much he sucked in 2007. That stirs sympathy in me, I suppose.

So when he took the second punt back, to give the Saints the lead, I thought that this was going to be one of those games I’d always remember, fondly. It isn’t, of course. It won’t be. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Saints beat the Vikings. No matter how shitty they are, the Vikes find a way. It’s be admirable if it didn’t make me sick.

A few years ago, the Saints needed one win in their final three games to go to the playoffs. They were playing three of the worst teams in the NFL to finish up - Minnesota, Cincinatti and Carolina. The Vikes were hopeless that season. They scored late and normally, a team would have kicked the extra point to put the game into overtime. Instead, head coach Mike Tice realized he had nothing to lose, so he went for two.

Daunte Culpepper took the snap. He fumbled the ball. He scooped it up. He ran into the end zone. Two points. Game over.

(The Saints would then lose to the Bengals and Panthers, end up 9-7 with a three-game losing streak, and miss the 2002 playoffs.)

That’s the kind of football I’ve tortured myself with.

WHEN DOES IT EVER GET BETTER?

Not tonight, that’s for damn sure. I honestly didn’t feel bad after the Broncos loss. Now I feel like I’ve wasted, what, 16 weeks x 30 years = 480 football weeks, or 9 years? 9 years of my life, worrying about this nonsense?

Okay, maybe it didn’t ruin my life when I was *five*, but still. I need a new hobby. Something.

It’s been a while since we had a hot sauce update. The truth is, I was totally out of the game for a while, but I’ve begun to enjoy hot sauces again.

Not in the same way as before, though. I’ve calmed down quite a bit since those hazy, crazy days of rampant, sometimes dangerous, experimentation. I don’t have a huge collection anymore. I don’t order $100 worth of new, weird sauces every two weeks. I don’t go for the craziest, scoville-drenched extract sauces anymore.

I just keep it simple, with a few favorite sauces at the ready for when it is appropriate to provide a little extra kick and flavor to whatever I’m having.

So, with that in mind, let’s just take a look at what sauces we got around lately, and my thoughts about them.

SAUCE: Waha Wera Kiwi Habanero sauce

This is a most delightful sauce, with plenty of yummy fruit sweetness, and enough habanero kick to cut through and stand up to it. Perfect balance of all ingredients. Favorite use lately was actually on a hot dog! Took a dog, slathered one side with mustard, and the other with Waha Wera? Best hot dog I ever had!

SAUCE: Mango Meltdown X-Treme

Same idea as the Waha Wera, except with mango instead of kiwi. Just as perfect balance, a real winner. Favorite uses are pizza and chicken.

SAUCE: Habanero Sauce
(No image. I can’t find the sauce because I don’t remember who it’s by or what it’s called, cuz I think it just has a picture of a habanero pepper on the label, and “Habanero” written above it.

This is a highly-vinegar based sauce, and tastes just like a kicked-up Tabasco! Perfect for eggs, tacos… Anything!

This has been Ben’s “Keepin’ It Real” Hot Sauce update, where we’re KEEPIN’ IT REAL! Real reasonable, as far as heat content and experimentation are concerned!

My pitching has been pretty terrible in my first two seasons. I think my team was letting up like five runs a game. Some of this was due to my park (I played in the 2005 version of the Skydome, which was a rocket launching pad) and some of it was because the pitchers I had were just not that good. I was also trying to “develop” a few pitchers for later. By “develop,” I mean:

Let’s say I am about to play the 2006 season. I know that Shaun Marcum had a lousy 2006, but had a promising 2007. In order to ensure that Marcum is on my team for 2007, I need to play him at a 33% clip for the 2006 season. He needs to face 33% of the batters he faced in the real-life 2006 (keeping in mind we only play 82 games).

This results in me throwing out a hilariously bad pitcher for many innings. But the benefit is that I can, thereafter, enjoy his really good seasons. Of course, he just recently had Tommy John surgery in real life, meaning he will be useless to me when we play the 2009 season. So I am having second thoughts about snapping up pitchers in the hopes that they develop.

Here’s what my rotation and bullpen look like for 2008:

 Scott Kazmir, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays. 12-8, 152 IP, 3.49 ERA, 125 ERA+, 1.267 WHIP

Absolutely dominated left-handed bats. Actually, in terms of just batting average, he was great - righties hit .227 off him, and lefties hit .198. He let up more home runs in 2008 than he did the year before, and that’s with pitching 44 less innings. He missed a bunch of time at the beginning of the year, but with how my rotation went, I am just glad he’s not having a combo Tommy John surgery / torn labrum stay in Alabama. Kazmir was inexplicably terrible for me when we played the 2006 Diamond Mind baseball season, and I never really figured out why. I was skipping his starts at one point. Infuriating.
 

Shaun Marcum, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays, 9-7, 151 IP, 3.39 ERA, 127 ERA+, 1.163 WHIP

I don’t have a lot of insightful things to say - he looked dominating for most of the year. He was sent down to Syracuse when he started getting rocked, and the story has it that the Chiefs pitching coach figured out a problem with his mechanics in a single pitch. He came back up, was dominant again… and then had to shut it down for TJ surgery. He’ll miss the entire 2009 season. I get the trifecta here: he’s gonna be gone from my favorite real-life team (Toronto), he was going to be a keeper on my fantasy baseball team, and he was supposed to anchor my rotation for my DMB team. Also, he was going to help me move a few arcade cabinets downstairs next month, and I guess that’s cancelled, too. (/shakes fist)

Felix Hernandez, RHP, Seattle Mariners, 9-11, 200 IP, 3.45 ERA, 121 ERA+, 1.385 WHIP

He walked more batters per inning in 2008, and he also drilled 8 guys, which will be fun to see during the season. “Fun,” as in, at least he can’t hit my own batters.  Left-handed batters hit .275 off him, which won’t be fun, so I should probably make some kind of effort at picking up some in DMB, instead of having them dispersed through the other 7 teams. I have to assume he’ll stick with the Mariners as they rebuild, but he does seem to be the kind of guy whose concentration and ability to not balloon up you worry about. He’s kind of chubby, in that pick, isn’t he?

Gil Meche, RHP, Kansas City Royals, 14-11, 210 IP, 3.98 ERA, 114 ERA+, 1.317 WHIP

I have received an EARFUL all season long about Mr. Meche, since I subscribe to Rany Jazayerli’s blog about the Royals. I don’t even like the Royals, but I read that blog because the writing is very insightful. I’ll happily throw Gil out there every five days because it takes a special brand of person to sign a $55 million contract, understand the world is giving you shit about it, take 55 as your uniform number, and then go out and earn the money.

Josh Beckett, RHP, Boston Red Sox, 12-10, 174 IP, 4.03, 114 ERA+, 1.187 WHIP

I was just going off ERA here, really, in terms of the makeup of my lineup, but Beckett had a better season than Meche, I believe. He’s also my hammer when I play the 2007 season in a bit. I know that Beckett had some trouble with his oblique muscle(s) this year, and it is amazing to me how hitters will jump on a guy with the slightest amount of weakness. When Roy Halladay had his appendix removed, we could tell there was something wrong as fans - we were RELIEVED that it was just that. Beckett is the sort of guy that’s safe to draft in our AL-only league: he’s not leaving Boston unless he sucks, and if he sucks maybe I didn’t want to play him anyway.

Justin Speier, RHP, Anaheim Angels,  2-10, 68 IP, 5.03, 87 ERA+, 1.412

I’ll kill myself before keeping Speier on my 2008 team. He’d need to put up Cliff Lee num… no, fuck that, he’d need to put up Sandy Koufax numbers in 2009 for me to play him at a 33% clip for 2008. He’s gonna be a solid, solid player in 2007, though - what happened to this guy? Did he just get old?

Dustin McGowan, Toronto Blue Jays, 6-7, 111 IP, 4.37 ERA, 99 ERA+, 1.374

Well, after my horrendous trade (may I mention that I am never trading away draft picks again?) I absolutely have to keep him and hope that he makes a full recovery in 2009. What he did to right-handed pitchers in 2007 showed a complete lack of respect for hitters, and frankly, I’d say that the MLBPA should have gotten involved and asked him to take it easy, but fuck me, he’s like the 80th injured Blue Jays pitcher that I have.

Casey Janssen, Toronto Blue Jays, Did Not Play in 2008

Janssen had surgery to repair a torn labrum in 2008. He was nails in 2007 - I’ll be carrying him over in the hopes that he becomes a “free,” quality starting pitcher in 2009.

So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to the bullpen in 2008… I could use some help.

Guys: You make women feel terrible about how they dress and act 364 days a year. Especially if you’re on the Internet. Don’t you monsters DARE try to “recognize the irony” in the whole sexy bumblebee, sexy witch, sexy Princess Toadstool, sexy Female Arnold Rimmer phenomenon. You are all fucking retards for doing this. And almost all of you are doing this. I can hear your face screwed up in a wad of irony-recognition from here.

“Ewwwwww!!! Every costume for women is sexy this or sexy that! Ewwww!”

No shit, you dumb bastards. Yes, we live in a post-irony world where nobody tries to be genuinely funny. However, I have had more potential and realized dates come out of Halloween than any other holiday or gathering combined (except Rosh Hashanah, but that’s because technically, on that day, I don’t mind doing all the work). You’re not ruining this for me, you’re ruining it for yourselves. This loathing towards women on Halloween has been going on for a few years now. Your stupid “awareness” is not necessary and it is ultimately self-defeating.

While we’re here, those of you still going as the people from that Beastie Boys video: stop it. Every one of you after the first threesome to do it looks like fucking idiots. The rest of you aren’t remotely clever, and this is coming from someone who’s gone as the Joker four times. I eventually stopped though, because Jesus Christ. You’re not interesting or original, just go as the fucking Mario Brothers or, if you must, the Clockwork Orange guys. That’s still acceptable.

(I am okay with girls going as sexy Alex, sexy Georgie and sexy Dim.)

So, no, I am not okay with angry, aspie men telling women to not dress like strippers on Halloween. I am okay with me telling angry aspies what to do. Halloween goes in three phases, the Chocolate Candy, the Eye Candy, and the You Are All My Candy, and if we are going to make women feel bad about their choices in dress on that magical day, then I will turn you into my bitch, and not stop skullfucking you until all that is left is a small smattering of bone, brain, blood, good and plenty.

Also, enjoy the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition, everybody. 

The last couple of years, I have been in an AL-only Diamond Mind computer baseball league with seven other guys. I have finished in 7th place both years. 

During last year’s draft, I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to grab both Delmon Young and Dustin McGowan, so I traded my second round pick in this year’s draft, for Neil deMause’s third. Now, of course, this looks like a terrible trade because:

1) Dustin McGowan was shut down for much of 2008
2) I finished in frigging 7th place, thus making the pick the 9th of the draft.

In other words, since neither McGowan nor Young would have been picked 9th during our draft next month, it  was strongly not in my favor. Lesson learned! 

One note about how we pick - we’re going to play our season with 2007 stats starting in November of 2008. So you always know how a guy did for the next two seasons before the draft. We keep 20 players, so I am going to run down how my current roster looks for 2008. 

 Placido Polanco, 2B, Detroit Tigers (Role on my team: 2B). BA: .307 OBP: .350 SLG: .417 OPS+: 102

He played in 141 games in 2008, which means I have to watch how much I use him for just a bit. He was destroying leftys for most of the year, but came back to earth the last couple of months. His defense should hopefully be rated “Excellent,” again, which would be great if I had more than one left-handed starting pitcher on my roster, I suppose. I am most excited about what 2007 Polanco is going to do, as his on-base percentage was frigging .388. So, that will be a treat.

 Vernon Wells, CF, Toronto Blue Jays (CF) BA: .300 OBP: .343 SLG: .496 OPS+: 120

Vernon missed time with wrist and hamstring injuries, and had a complete power lapse in June. He really, otherwise, played pretty damn well, and I don’t think I can say he didn’t earn his salary this year, since I am not going to count his injuries against him. In Diamond Mind, he’ll be splitting time at CF with B.J. Upton (we play 82 games, and we can only give a guys who appeared in less than 145 games 60% of his plate appearances). Gaston and John Gibbons had some weird obsession with batting Marco Scutaro second all year, but Wells is a perfectly fine #2 for my team.

 Manny Ramirez, LF, Los Angeles Dodgers (DH). BA: .332 OBP: .430 SLG: .601 OPS+: 164

Manny started the season with the Red Sox, so I can use him in 2008. If he doesn’t sign with an AL team, he won’t be on my team for our 2009 season. I am really, really, really hoping that the Dodgers just go for this picks with him. Come on, no NL team is going to put him in the field for a four-year deal. Are they?

It’s amazing just how obviously he was tanking it in Boston, too - his OPS+ was 213 in L.A. I know they say the NL is a little easier, but there ain’t that much difference. Since I had been tracking him all year, I thought he had the NL MVP all locked up, and then I saw what Pujols had been doing. There is actually discussion of someone other than Pujols for NL MVP, which should acquit anyone from shooting a baseball writer if they vote for somebody else. (You can MAYBE make an argument for C.C. Sabathia in the NL since the Brewers made the playoffs… maybe. Sort of.) Anyway, my 2008 Diamond Mind goal is to get Manny the most at-bats in the league. If I have to bat him lead off, I will - it’s likely that I will never have a guy with a season this good on my team ever again.  

 
Alex Rios, RF, Toronto Blue Jays. (RF) BA: .291 OBP: .337 SLG: .461 OPS+: 110
 His OPS was down from 122 in 2007 (by all accounts, he had an excellent season) to 110 in 2008. And this is basically because he forgot how to hit left-handed hitting. Come on, Alex!! He perked up almost immediately when Cito Gaston was hired. I would expect Rios to bounce back in 2009, for whatever it’s worth. I don’t exactly have a lot of cred as a baseball writer. Rios also grabbed a lot of time at centerfield when Vernon Wells was hurt. That would be great if I didn’t already have Wells and Upton competing for time there.

It’s sort of retarded to put him at the cleanup spot, but I really wanted to have Polanco and Wells on base for Manny, and I absolutely want Manny appearing in the first inning no matter what. 
 

 B.J. Upton, CF, Tampa Bay Rays (1B??) BA: .273 OBP: .383 SLG: .401 OPS+: 111

All right, I have no idea where to play him - I have an outfield of Delmon Young, Vernon Wells and Alex Rios as it stands, and Delmon gets so many frigging plate appearances that he needs to be in left field constantly to get him to 33% usage. On the other hand, not knowing where to play Upton is part of the B.J. Upton experience, I GUESS. I’ll tentatively put him at first and see how Diamond Mind ranks everyone’s defense. 

 Delmon Young, LF, Minnesota Twins (LF) BA: .292 OBP: .338 SLG: .407 OPS+: 101

The theory, in ensuring that I had Delmon (and making a lousy trade to do so), was that the Rays would never, ever trade him, and I’d suffer through his age 21 and 22 seasons while he figured out the game, and then enjoyed a player who was most like Roberto Clemente until I got thrown out of our Diamond Mind League for having an unstoppable juggernaut. Yeah, NONE OF THAT SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING. Thank Christ the Rays traded him in the AL. I really dodged a bullet there. I got lucky, that’s all it was. Anyway, Delmon got hot before the All-Star break, and heated up towards the end of the season as well. I just knew that the three days off he got for the AS break was going to result in him having a shitty month (and it did). If I knew that, and I’ve never seen him play except against the Jays, then how did - whatever. He had like 3,000 plate appearances this year as well, even when dropped to 7th, so I don’t think I can ever take him out, at any point, in DMB. I just keep reminding myself that this is for the future. 

 Eric Chavez, 3B, Oakland A’s (N/A)

Yeah, I’ve got problems. He’s the best third baseman on my team for 2008, and he didn’t play. I assume I’ll get something in the draft. But putting him here, I hope, shows what a better hitter he’d be than my catcher and shortstop.

 Gregg Zaun, C, Toronto Blue Jays (C) BA: .237 OBP: .340 SLG: .359 OPS+: 87 

Zaun’s walk-off grand slam towards the end of the season was one of the highlights of the - oh, right, MLB.tv crapped out on me and I couldn’t see the thing leave the park. What garbage. Anyway, I like Zaun and he has plenty of use to me in 2007, so I am sure he will make my team for 2008 as well, even though I will need another catcher since he only played in 86 games this year. 

 Yuniesky Betancourt, SS, Seattle Mariners (SS) BA: .279 OBP: .300 SLG: .392 OPS+: 85

All I am going to do is say that at more than one point in the season, his batting average was greater than his on-base percentage. I know you don’t walk off the island, but they do walk places in Cuba, right? Sometimes? Do fathers walk their daughters down the aisle?  Do people take short walks off long piers? Do they cook chinese food in a round metal bowl? 

All right, there is one other hitter on my team that will be available for 2008. Paul Konerko played really, really poorly for most of the year. He flipped a frigging switch towards the end, and actually got his OPS back towards 100. It was amazing, like night and day. Oh! It was the worthless kind of amazing, for someone playing text baseball, but amazing nonetheless. So I am not sure what I am going to do with him.

Up next time: the pitchers! EVERYBODY DIES!

Ahhh… the weekend! Another stressful week complete. Relax as I did, won’t you? …By heading over to The Post-Pessimist Association!