The End of the Baseball Season... wait, it's December
When this season started I decided I was going to draft a team of backups and play the season with them (in MLB 07 The Show-which might be the best baseball game I ever played) . A full 162 game baseball season. For the first few months of the season I was keeping pace... then the summer started.
With planning a wedding, working on a major work project (damn calendar), and just the general craziness of life, I fell a bit behind... make that a lot behind. All of which led me to the discovery last week that I was only 4 games from the end of the Team Scrub season. I was going to put the pedal to the metal and finish up the season.
I thought the game was incredibly realistic (with actually very simple gameplay), I found that I was able to dominate the game by learning how to pitch very well. It was all about angles and breaks of different pitches, but if you can pitch well in this game, you are practically unbeatable. Which I quickly learned because my offense was pretty anemic.
While the team had an overall high average, I only had 1 player knock in 100 runs. No other starter knocked in over 81. The same player that did knock in 108 also hit 43 homers and hit .406... thank you Craig Wilson (exactly, the star of Team Scrub is someone few people have actually heard of). Besides Wilson the only other power threat was Carlos Pena who hit 24 homers. He happened to be a mid-season replacement at DH for Wily Mo Pena (he hit 17 homers in a little less than half a season) who spent most of the season on the DL. I had 4 starters who had less than 50 RBI's for the season (Jamey Carroll, Chris Gomez, Mike Lieberthal and Frank Catalanotto). My outfield consisted of speedy interchangeable parts Melky Cabrera, Matt Murton and Rocco Baldelli. They each hit over .300 and have over 30 steals each. Speed kept me in a lot of games (it also ran me out of lots of innings, but thats what you get when you run a lot).
The stars of the team were easily the pitching staff, led by Mark Prior. He was 23-4 with a 1.63 ERA. He was simply superhuman. The same could be said about the whole staff. Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Tim Wakefield and Roger Clemens (with some spot starts by Jon Lester) all had more than 15 wins. The bullpen was also quite stellar. Geoff Geary, Jimmy Gobble, Rafeal Betancourt, JC Romero, Scott Proctor and Kerry Wood pitched wonderfully all year. I could pitch any of them in any spot with confidence. Like I said earlier, I learned how to pitch really well and easily dominated the regular season.
All in all, I heavily enjoyed playing this game for a full season. I love baseball and love playing with a team of relative no-names and playing them into contention. I had originally only planned to play the regular season and then jump into my long forgotten Madden 08, but now I think I will play the playoffs. I need to know if this squad can beat the Yankees in a 7 game season. I'll update when that series is done.
With planning a wedding, working on a major work project (damn calendar), and just the general craziness of life, I fell a bit behind... make that a lot behind. All of which led me to the discovery last week that I was only 4 games from the end of the Team Scrub season. I was going to put the pedal to the metal and finish up the season.
I thought the game was incredibly realistic (with actually very simple gameplay), I found that I was able to dominate the game by learning how to pitch very well. It was all about angles and breaks of different pitches, but if you can pitch well in this game, you are practically unbeatable. Which I quickly learned because my offense was pretty anemic.
While the team had an overall high average, I only had 1 player knock in 100 runs. No other starter knocked in over 81. The same player that did knock in 108 also hit 43 homers and hit .406... thank you Craig Wilson (exactly, the star of Team Scrub is someone few people have actually heard of). Besides Wilson the only other power threat was Carlos Pena who hit 24 homers. He happened to be a mid-season replacement at DH for Wily Mo Pena (he hit 17 homers in a little less than half a season) who spent most of the season on the DL. I had 4 starters who had less than 50 RBI's for the season (Jamey Carroll, Chris Gomez, Mike Lieberthal and Frank Catalanotto). My outfield consisted of speedy interchangeable parts Melky Cabrera, Matt Murton and Rocco Baldelli. They each hit over .300 and have over 30 steals each. Speed kept me in a lot of games (it also ran me out of lots of innings, but thats what you get when you run a lot).
The stars of the team were easily the pitching staff, led by Mark Prior. He was 23-4 with a 1.63 ERA. He was simply superhuman. The same could be said about the whole staff. Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Tim Wakefield and Roger Clemens (with some spot starts by Jon Lester) all had more than 15 wins. The bullpen was also quite stellar. Geoff Geary, Jimmy Gobble, Rafeal Betancourt, JC Romero, Scott Proctor and Kerry Wood pitched wonderfully all year. I could pitch any of them in any spot with confidence. Like I said earlier, I learned how to pitch really well and easily dominated the regular season.
All in all, I heavily enjoyed playing this game for a full season. I love baseball and love playing with a team of relative no-names and playing them into contention. I had originally only planned to play the regular season and then jump into my long forgotten Madden 08, but now I think I will play the playoffs. I need to know if this squad can beat the Yankees in a 7 game season. I'll update when that series is done.
Labels: Video Games
posted by LEV at
10:37 AM
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