Offseason Boredom Crushers

So baseball is over.  For those of you people, I'll call you "Normies," who have jobs or families or go to school, or just have anything productive going on in your days, you'll probably just go ahead and do as you typically would, focusing on work, or your kids, or hockey perhaps, or whatever other little projects that you have going for yourselves.  And I congratulate you.

For me though, this offseason is going to be made up mostly of playing poker and marathoning tv shows that I've yet to complete.  To complement that, one of the things I really love about baseball is looking around at the free agent and trade markets and building teams in my mind, or critiquing the moves that GM's make for their teams.

The main problem with having so much fun with that aspect of baseball is that there's so much downtime.  A lot of the offseason is just rumor-mongering and arbitration speculation, and a lot of the free agent signings are pretty minor, like finding out which bench Willy Bloomquist is going to sit on next season.

Well, for those of you who are like me, and have time on their hands, here's what I suggest:  go downstairs, reach in to that old storage closet thingy, and dust off the N64.  Hook that shit up to your flatscreen, and giggle at how terrible the graphics look on a new-ish tv, and then stick in the third greatest video game of all time-- Major League Baseball featuring Ken Griffey Jr.

That's right folks, we're going to spend this winter fantasy drafting our boredom away.  I'll be going through all sorts of games, mostly related to systems that I have access to.  Games include both of the Ken Griffey games, as well as one of the All-star Baseball's for N64, MLB The Show '11 for PS3, MVP 2005 for XBOX, and anything else that I might come across during the winter months, especially if I can find something for the PC.  There are obviously some petty differences between each game, such as budgets and salaries (the N64 games don't have those), ranking systems (ASB uses a letter grade system, Griffey uses a 1-10 scale on multiple stats), and the ever important Dynasty factor, where we need to draft our team not only to win, but to sustain success over multiple seasons.  The easiest dynasties are the MVP ones, especially now that we know the future and can trade for Chase Utley and Joe Mauer with our superior knowledge of the future.

First in line will be the non-Slugfest version of Griffey for 64, mostly because I just did a fantasy draft in The Show for PS3 yesterday (Wednesday) when game 6 of the World Series was postponed and I was jonesing for something baseball related.  Having already done a fantasy draft, I don't remember who I took in what order, plus I made a trade or two when Buster Posey broke his foot (weird, huh?).

I'll stick this to the top of the main page, and throw on links for each game when I finish them.

Major League Baseball featuring Ken Griffey Jr. for N64.  If you don't have an N64, or that game, check out freeroms.com and download the Project64 (PJ64) emulator.  It's not quite the same, but it's still cool.

All-star Baseball 2001 for N64.  I'm pretty sure the Griffey game is from 98, and this one was released in 2000, so there will be some slight differences in the quality of players, a few more recognizable names.

MLB '11 The Show.