I was in a single-season fantasy baseball league filled with text adventure creators like Jon Blask, Lenny Pitts and Neil deMause in 2005, and from that I was invited to play an online baseball video game that a few fellas were playing. It was through a game called Diamond Mind Baseball, and I have been playing it regularly since 2006. I am in three leagues of 10, 10 and 24 people and it is probably the computer game I have played the most in my life.
My father loved baseball, though his interest permanently crated for the major leagues when the New York Giants moved to San Francisco. He had his two sons playing little league, one (my brother) extremely successful at it through high school. We collected baseball cards and the sticker books as a kid. We ate a lot of bad pink gum. I followed the Blue Jays every day and read the statistics on the weekends that had batting averages for ALL of the players, not just the top 10 ones in each league. My parents would go to our little league games to watch us play, and it seemed like that was multiple nights in a week. Baseball was always there, almost woven into our family.
Baseball video games were always around, too. I remember playing Micro League Baseball on an Apple // at elementary school, and we had Major League Baseball for the Intellivision, but when we got a Nintendo and started playing Bases Loaded, I learned how to use Lotus 1-2-3 to keep stats of my players on it. This segued to playing Hardball 4 on the PC. Did you know that in Bases Loaded, if you used all of your hitters on the bench and then had a batter get hit by a pitch and charge the mound – thus getting ejected – that the game would not continue because there was no one to replace him with? I’d like to say that was one of the first bugs I ever found leading to a long employment history in software quality assurance, but no, all software has been suspect forever. Er, regarding HardBall 4 – my brother and I drafted players from the entirety of baseball for our teams, essentially giving us the 50 best players on our team, and then we demolished the rest of the league. And we had a feature called “pitch to center” on, as well. This meant that pitchers could only throw the ball down the middle of the plate. This was very cheesy and I lost to my brother in the World Series for the season we played. I think Mike Piazza hit .725 for me, though. I think knowing how to work a spreadsheet because I wanted to save fake baseball stats helped me with computer literacy.
All of these games except for Micro League have you controlling the players, but Diamond Mind is a simulation. In fact, you can barely say that there are graphics at all. The graphics you get are purely functional and informational. I have described the game to my wife and friends as “text baseball.” Where all sports games eventually fall down, though, is in learning how to defeat the computer and I have to give Diamond Mind credit: through almost 20 years, I haven’t found anything cheap that will let you win against the computer and it sure doesn’t seem like anyone else has either. The tenacity of the computer playing the other team when you can’t meet for online play keeps the game fair and interesting.
But let me back up. The leagues I am in have a group of other guys like myself in them, and in the smaller leagues, the player pool is made up of American League or National League players. (The 24 man league has a player pool of the entire MLB.) After the initial drafts, you can keep 20 guys on your team for the next season. This means that we have a draft in each of these leagues where we draft another 14 players to make up our squads. The AL and NL-only leagues mean that some degree of your drafting strategy has to involve whether or not the real life team the player plays for is likely to keep them. The Athletics don’t really sign anyone to a second contract. A good young player like Wander Franco, whom the Tampa Bay Rays signed to a 11-year, $182 million contract makes him a really attractive pickup with no downsides. Hmm? Ah.
The drafts, which take place without DMB at all are fun, but once we all have a full team, there is a 54 or 162 game schedule to be played! The shorter leagues aim for head to head play, and it happens less often in the longer league.
Since there is no arcade element to the game you have a few instructions you can offer your players for each plate appearance. You can tell your batter to swing away, bunt or take a pitch. If someone is on base, you can instruct your players to try to steal or try a hit and run. You can tell your pitchers to pitch around a batter or go after a guy. You can issue intentional walks, try a pick off play and set your fielders a little bit – you can guard the lines or have your infield play in. You cannot instruct your pitchers to intentionally hit other players. The game doesn’t include photo packs on its own – you can get them, and dedicated people find the player pics and make the packs each year – so this really is a low fi version of baseball.
And somehow it all works. I have some guesses on how the underlying engine might work, but it offers the most realistic version of pretend baseball I’ve experienced. The critical thing for making the leagues work is that if a person can’t do head-to-head, the computer running the team can’t be that poor at decision making. I would say that the computer doesn’t always pinch hit to exploit the handedness of the other team’s pitcher, but honestly, that is also a slider you can also control. The game being fair and civilized has meant that for me, lasting friendships have been made. Alternatively, I’ve had cruel racial epithets screamed at me in almost every other online game I’ve played by strangers, and I am an extremely white person.
The drafts are an “outside” gameplay element, and so is just following along to real baseball. DMB has me doing the thing that text adventure games did in the 1980s before every puzzle could be looked up. I used to think about Zork I and II a lot while nowhere near a computer before I solved them – and that is the same deal with Diamond Mind. When building a team there are a lot of factors to think about – what new rookies have a pedigree that indicates that they will grow into stars? Is it better to take a guy came out of nowhere to have a good season who is a little older, or do you go with a younger guy that will PROBABLY be the better long-term selection? Looking at year end stats, did a guy show a lot of promise at the end and is that the version of him likely to be seen in the following year?
I know more players than I should, I am aware of more statistics than is healthy. Over 300 players get drafted in the larger league and many more are available but not selected. I genuinely think that in research I have a casual awareness of 200 of them by the time the draft starts. This information doesn’t stick in my brain permanently, but I find it enjoyable to learn about the different players that are available in an attempt to make a good team. I have made some horrible trades. I traded a 4th round pick for the tall lefty Boston Red Sox pitcher Henry Owens, just because I thought he might be a good player in the following season. I traded Aaron Judge for the right to select Bo Bichette in the next year’s draft. Blunders! Mistakes have been made, but at the same time, after two decades of doing this, everyone’s decisions are more or less defensible. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. I had once drafted Yordano Ventura, who died at age 25 in a car accident in the Dominican Republic. I took Julio Urias, who had a crippling shoulder injury – I traded him, and then he left Major League Baseball due to an arrest in a domestic violence case. I took Cubs shortstop Addison Russell, who – jesus, maybe the problem is me.
While you can’t use a gamepad or joystick, the game is not totally strategy-based. There is a very small amount of skill involved. You do have to correctly click on the right buttons to do things. There was a game a few years ago where Reggie, my now 22-year old cat, was on my lap as I was playing. You can use the mouse to issue commands, but also if the mouse pointer is hovering over a box that issues a command and you hit the space bar, the game will interpret that as a desired left click. I had a guy on third in a close game and I was going to have my dude at the plate swing normally. However, I had the mouse hovering over the “steal” button, when Reggie reached a paw out and struck the keyboard for some reason. There is no confirmation dialog box in DMB. The runner went and as you might expect, was thrown out by 30 feet. There are also a few times on my own where I simply clicked on the wrong button, it is one of the few games that I try to make sure I am sitting up for.
Joe Posnanski has said that baseball is a game for fathers and sons, I don’t have children but I have enjoyed throwing a ball around for all of my nephews to hit. I enjoy going to games – the Rockies, the local team, is bad, but the night out at the park is always fun. In the three leagues I have been in, I have won a championship three times. The last time was a couple of years ago and I had my blood pressure monitor nearby. The final game came down to the wire, and I took a reading of my pulse afterwards. I forget the exact number, but it was racing. 130 beats a minute or more. If good video games make you feel something, Diamond Mind Baseball is a good video game.
Baseball is designed to break your heart. A. Bartlett Giamatti said that and he was also speaking about the seasons in North America, mostly, but I would maintain that it breaks your heart on account of three teams winning a combined 47 championships. It is, for most fans and followers, a truly rare thing to see a championship and the 162 regular season games and multiple playoff rounds make it an extremely difficult thing to accomplish. As an adult, it’s not exactly easy to follow all the rounds of the playoffs, either. DMB has kept me connected and helped me appreciate and understand baseball more. It’s a source of happiness in my life.
(It also has some of the worst UI/UX decisions I’ve ever seen in my life, I desperately wish they would overhaul the game and at least allow you to completely pick fonts that work for men in their 50s, but I am going to let that go for now.)