Good morning and welcome to episode 427 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

Baseball Prospectus presented by the baseballreference.com play index. I am Dan Lindbergh, joined as always by Sam Miller, and today we have a guest. He is Owen Good. You may know him from his work as the little long time weekend editor at Kotaku, where he wrote the stick jockey column about sports games and once made my year by publishing something I wrote. And you might know him from Deadspin, but you should know him now also from Polygon, where he is the senior reporter

and sports columnist, and we are going to talk to him about the new baseball video game of the year and baseball video games in general. So, hey Owen. Hey Ben, thanks for having me on. I'd also like to point out I am a lifelong play index subscriber. I love it.

I gave it to my father for father's day once too, so I love to play index. And it's been helpful to what I write too.

Yes, make sure that you use the coupon code every time that you re-subscribe now, BP. All right, so there's a new game out MLB14. The show is out now for PlayStation 3. It'll be out next month for PS4. You reviewed it for Polygon. One of the most interesting things about your review.

You start off just sort of using on whether whether baseball is a good video game sport, basically. And you you draw this analogy, which I love. And I'm going to going to steal in the future between baseball and turn based RPGs, basically.

And you know, I'm a gamer, but not so much a sports gamer. But when I have dabbled in sports games, it's been in sports that I know nothing about really. I tend to if I'm going to pick up something and play it, it'll be an NHL game or FIFA or something.

Do you think that baseball is a good video game sport? I think it is. And this will get in a little of why I praise the show this year so highly. It's, you know, it's a game of set pieces.

Obviously, it has no clock defense possesses the ball, that weird, uncommon stuff. But it's in the individual interactions, the things that I describe, I don't think are strikes against it or bad things.

You know, as I did mention, you know, the similarity to like a turn based combat in a Japanese role playing game, but people play the hell out of that and enjoy that. And, you know, they have varying combat systems of varying quality.

Just like there are quote combat systems, I'm very in quality, unquote, in baseball video games too. But, you know, I think for, for fans of the sport or for people who, who like the tension or the strategy or want to see, you know, do I really set up the hitter in this matchup, you know, I do most of my gameplay in pitching, whether that was road to the show in years past, and that's the career mode in which you are just a single player.

Or now what you can do, and we'll talk about it, I'm sure in a second, is something called player lock, which is you effectively possess for lack of better term. One of the guys on the diamond, and you can do it, you can do it between at bat, I mean, in the middle of an at bat, if you want.

But I'm usually playing as the pitcher, because that's just a little bit more intriguing to me, and it's got a little bit, I mean, hell, we all remember literally when we're standing out there and right field, you know, either a waiting for the ball to be hit to us and it never was or be praying that it wasn't.

So, and you can do that if you want, but you'll just be, you know, people tend to automate forward through all that stuff. So, baseball, I think what the show is doing is it's understanding what really is entertaining about it.

And for the longest time, you know, we would hear like, you know, the pitcher hitter matchup has really got to be highlighted and the strategy there has got to be brought to the fore, and it's like, no, actually, I mean, that's great that you can do that.

But what people really need is a more compact experience where they can come in, they can put 20 minutes into a game because the season is 160, there's 162 games long, and still feel like they had a fulfilling experience.

And I think that's what the show has gotten this year because, you know, up to this, it was, it was the domain of the hardcore that you would play even the majority of a full season in one of your franchise modes.

And even then, if you were bulk simulating games, you always felt like you were robbing yourself of something.

If you're, you know, if you're sort of a baseball perspectivey person who is into stats and simulating and outcomes, I mean, there are many, you know, as you said, hardcore options out there, you know, you could play something like out of the park or, you know, one of those really simulation-based games.

And I know, you know, a few years ago, there was that attempt to make that more mainstream, I guess, with the Billy Bean branded MLB front office manager game, which was not well received at all.

I mean, is there an element of that? Can you enjoy the show in that way? Also, or is it, you know, more just you're there for the gameplay more so than the stats or the strategy?

I think in a roundabout way, not truly too much for it, but it's not going to be a management simulation like out of the park or Sega's baseball manager.

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