YouTube user Dr. Dave reviews a home run ball for MLB 15 The Show. I’m still pretty new to baseball video games, but I’m getting hooked. Every time I go online, and I mean just about every day, I see a new baseball video game has been released. It’s a great time to be a baseball video game fan. With that in mind, I would like to dedicate this article to celebrating the sport of baseball, and, as you will see, I get pretty philosophical. As an experiment in sports science, I’ve decided to analyze the different hitting and pitching mechanics in the newly released MLB 15 The Show (for PS4 and PS3). But first, I want to talk about baseball games themselves, the nature of the game, and what makes it great. What better way to get there than a quick look into philosophy. 1) What makes Baseball Games “unique” I don’t remember baseball being a big deal in high school. I didn’t have an overdeveloped interest in sports then. I still went to school for about 8 hours a day, so I would watch “classic” baseball games like The Little League World Series. But if you watched them closely, baseball is pretty interesting. It is a sport where individual stats are not extremely important. In the Little League World Series, the team scores the most points is the winner. Each team has equal opportunities to score a run. In baseball, a runner on first base has the same opportunity to get to home plate as the runner on third. This means more time is spent on pitching and defense. That means there is room for strategy and for a team to set up plays ahead of time, rather than reacting to plays in real life. This makes the game more like chess than a game of chance. It’s easier to predict, but you can’t count on it, which is why it’s so much fun. Baseball is also a game of strategy. Like chess, it is all about having the best strategy, making good decisions, and using your resources to their full potential. Like chess, it requires focus. You can’t just let yourself be distracted. It requires you to be in the moment. In this way, baseball games are very similar to video games. 2) What makes Baseball Games “fun” The above point is also why baseball games are “fun”. You have a team of players and they need to work together to win, but also play off each other to win. The more a player is involved in the game, the more skillful they are and the more fun they are to watch. It’s also fun to play baseball games because it is complex. It is complex because it involves strategy, a sport is a lot of strategy. There is a lot of interaction between players, and the actions of each player influence others. And it’s complex because each player has their own stats and skills. This makes baseball much more interactive and interesting than sports like basketball. 3) MLB 15 The Show In my experience, MLB 15 The Show feels pretty close to the original baseball games. I was not expecting this. I wasn’t a baseball game fan during the early days of sports video games, so the games I played were more cartoony and played on a 2D plane. I was more into sports like lacrosse. When I first got a controller in my hand and fired up NHL Hockey, I felt like I had come home. But more and more video games are trying to emulate the feel of sports like basketball and football. 4) Baseball as a sport The greatest compliment anyone could give baseball is that it is a timeless sport, or at least as timeless as any sports can get. It’s one of those sports that has such an incredible history and has developed a set of rules so simple, they’re easy to learn, but so complex that they have to be learned and perfected over time. That’s what keeps me going. It’s not just the game that is good, it’s the way that I feel when I play it. It is a game that has taught me perseverance, and being a sports fan is all about perseverance. I believe it’s the reason I am a writer today and not a doctor. So even though it seems easy to play, baseball games are hard to master. And because of that, there is always room for improvement. That makes the sport very open and ever-changing. It allows us to learn something new every day. This is what we call “progress.” 5) Baseball as a sport and as entertainment There are more sophisticated games out there today than ever before. Each of them attempt to be more realistic, more immersive, and capture the essence of sports. But all of the other games I’ve played over the last several years don’t feel “authentic” to the sport of baseball. The best part of being a baseball fan is sitting on the couch, putting on a game, and forgetting everything about the real world. Just playing a baseball game is a great way to relax. It’s a great way to forget about things. One of the major draws of baseball is that baseball is accessible for many people. The average person may not be the best baseball player in the world, but they can play this game. The same applies to video games. A person can sit down and be immersed in baseball without even needing to have any technical knowledge of the sport. It’s something that anyone can relate to. It is in this sense that the video game baseball experience feels timeless. 6) MLB 15 The Show and why it can’t be compared to other games The above point is why it’s unfair to compare MLB 15 The Show to other sports games. It’s the closest baseball game I’ve ever played. It’s as close as it’s going to get. One of the reasons why it feels so real is that it is designed to be that way. You need to know all about the game, and you need to learn how to play the game. But the best thing about MLB 15 The Show is that it doesn’t feel like any other sports game I’ve played. It feels like baseball. I would say it is the baseball game of all time, bar none. 7) Baseball as the essence of life You could say that baseball is the essence of life, or at least it is for me. Baseball is about the struggle. The struggle of a pitcher trying to figure out which pitch to throw, or what pitch to throw, while trying not to tip off the catcher that something is up. Or the struggle of a batter to anticipate the game and react to the pitch and the situation. It’s an amazing experience to take this struggle and push it to the limits. A man, his bat, and a ball. What could be more important than that? When I sit down to play a baseball game, it makes me think about what I am really doing in my life. It makes me think about why I’m trying to make it in life, and why I’m trying to improve myself. Baseball also makes me think of what I can do for my team and my community. When I play a baseball game, the whole world fades away, and I am immersed in the struggle. I’ve never been into sports. I don’t consider myself to be athletic at all. But this is where I feel my “sportiness.” This is why it’s called “sports.” 8) Should I put down the controller? This is an old question, but one that has been debated since the invention of the personal computer. Should people who play video games at work take a break? Should they play the game at all? What are the consequences of ignoring the rules of the game? Should we consider it cheating? But more than that, should I be taking this philosophy and applying it to real life? If I don’t put down the controller, am I not going to get things done? Like I said earlier, I would like to compare baseball to chess. Both are games where you must focus. A game of chess is supposed to be challenging, but there are a lot of times when there are just too many things to think about and not enough time to think. The best thing is to not play. But like I said earlier, it’s a game that you can’t simply “not play.” You can stop and step away from the game, but once you start playing again, you must pay attention and get back to the game. It’s a lot like sports. 9) Is it fair? It’s not all fun and games. The problem with sports games is that you don’t have to go all out. You can play just to get through the week. You can play the game casually, and not put all your effort into playing. It’s like playing a video game that takes practice. You can use games like chess as examples. You could say that one day at school, one kid had played chess and was pretty good. When he went home, he didn’t practice that much, but still played the game, kind of. A few days later he forgot about chess, because he just doesn’t play that much anymore. The point I am trying to make is that it is difficult to play these games for fun. It is not easy. It requires time and effort. So you really have to focus on one goal: to be the best