MLB 09: The Show

I recently started playing MLB 09: The show. I love this game. It's a lot of fun. I went through about 5 years in franchise. Three years with the Brewers, One with the Pirates, and one with the Nationals (wanted a challenge). The Nats I took to the playoffs and lost in the first round. The Pirates I didn't finish. The Brewers my first year I took them to the NL championship game and lost. The second year I took em to the World Series and lost to the Yankees (bias game) and the last year I was out in the first round again. For whatever reason I am the Chicago Cubs of MLB 09 players. I can't win the big one. But I'll keep trying, even if it takes me 100 years.

So I decided to take a break from the GM side of things and partake in a little mode known as Road to the Show. In this mode you take one guy that you create, and either get drafted or chose your own team to play for, and you try and make the roster. Now, You start out as the worst player on the team. I found this a little odd. No matter what difficulty you set it to, you always start out sucking. My first go around with this was as a third basemen. I'm terrible at pitching in real life but I'm not to bad at hitting. This was a disaster. You only get three or four shots a game to do anything. Since you have such low attributes your not going to hit it outta the park, so you have to manufacture some runs. I'm not the best hitter in the game because even on Rookie it's hard to hit a slider. So every time you strike out you lose 10 points. Every time you make it on base you get 5 points. Every time you hit the ball but get caught out you gain 0 points. You can see where this is going. I couldn't get any points. Now points go to training sessions. But you need 40 points to even get into a session. So now, I cannot get any points to get better because I'm so terrible. Really strange that it is almost impossible to succeed at this. After spring training is over you get offered a contract (or not). My contract had me as a AA bench player. Now I'm not even starting. So now I get maybe one at bat every other game. You can see what the end result will be.

I gave up on the notion of that. I restarted and began to play as a Starting Pitcher, thus guaranteeing me at least 5-6 starts in Spring Training. My first game I walked away with 70 points. More than I did in the 30 games I tried as a starting 3B. I really like the pitching mechanic in this game. But again, you start out with only 3 pitches (of your choosing) but you gain points for strikeouts, and for little challenges the game throws your way. 10 points for "getting ahead in the count" 10 points for "getting a ground ball out". I tend to only do about 3 or 4 innings before I am pulled. Not for lack of productivity, but because it's Spring Training. I ended my spring training at 2-2, with 26 innings pitched, a 3.23 era, 26 hits, 3 home runs (two that aramis Ramirez got off of me), and 15 strikeouts. I was happy. I had the 4th best ERA on the team. Contract offer comes......30K for a bullpen job in AA. What? I did good! I did better than good! Still only a AA contract? So I excepted it, because you don't have much of a choice. Boy did I make the wrong choice. The Huntsville Stars (brewers real life AA team) is atrocious. I ended my first bullpen game with 2 innings pitched and 6 runs scored. Yeah. That's bad. But not my fault. A double play ball was dropped by the second basemen to put two guys on. A grounder to SS sails past because instead of crap hopping over to wrangle in the ball this guy suicide dives after it. Now the bases are loaded and I'm pissed. I take the count to 3-2. The next pitch is low and outside. The batter makes contact with it, ball sails to shallow right field. And my RF watches it drop. He doesn't even try to run toward it. He coulda got it. A run scoring double. The rest of the game went this way. 2 runs in the 8th and 4 runs in the 9th. My stats look like I'm the worst player in history when I just play for the worst team in history.

I'm going to keep trying, as I've never walked away from a game just because it's hard, but my shining optimism at the chance to live the life of an MLBer is a little less shiny. But the game goes on.