Out of the Park Baseball 22
With alternate universes all the rage lately, I decided to sweep up the bitter ashes of my adolescence and take over as General Manager of the Red Sox in 1987 and try to beat the real-life team to a World Series title, which it did finally win in 2004. For those who don't follow baseball, it has a weird tradition of separating the player-acquisition and roster-creation side of managing a club from the on-field, in-game decisions. I think it's the only sport that does it that way. So by taking the role of GM but not that of manager, I'm somewhat at the mercy of what my on-field manager does with the team I hand him. If you've seen
Moneyball (2011) you might remember Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman arguing over which players should be in the lineup, until Pitt's character, in a fit of pique, simply trades away the player that Hoffman's character likes. In this scenario, I'm the Pitt character, and the real-life Red Sox manager, John McNamara, is my foil in the Hoffman role.
It turns out the '87 team was pretty decent, on paper. IRL the team and the city had a hangover it couldn't recover from, and they skidded to a sub-.500 record and didn't win another pennant for nearly two decades. Obviously, I wasn't going to stand for that. One of the first things I did was sign Dave "Hendu" Henderson, Wade Boggs and Bruce Hurst to decent, 5-year contract extensions. Then I acquired some promising minor leaguers: Walt Weiss, Sandy Alomar Jr, John Jaha, and Kevin Tapani, to go with Ellis Burks, Curt Schilling, and Brady Anderson, who were already in the Sox' minor leagues in '87. The team got off to a flying start, leading the AL East by 5 games at the All-Star break, so the fact that I couldn't get any good middle infielders or another starting pitcher wasn't killing me. For some reason, McNamara decided to shift Wade Boggs to 1B - we can imagine Spengler and McNamara growling at each other in the corridors like Pitt and Hoffman did in
Moneyball - but it turned out to be okay in the end. At the trade deadline, I pulled the trigger on sending Oil Can Boyd, Marty Barrett and 3 prospects to the Cubs for Ryne Sandberg, without knowing whether I'd be able to sign him to a contract after the season. I couldn't get the starting pitcher I wanted, but I did pick up Steve Bedrosian and Paul Assenmacher for the bullpen (although both of them got thrashed). I promoted Schilling and Weiss at the end of the season, and while Schilling was overmatched and got clobbered, Weiss did pretty well and took over as my everyday SS. We ended up scoring over 1,000 runs in the regular season, with Mike Greenwell batting .389/.474/.680, which he certainly never did in real life, and Roger Clemens winning the "pitching triple crown."
The ALCS was a rematch with the California Angels, which we won 4-3. Then the World Series was a rematch with the dreaded Mets, who'd won 110 games in the regular season, behind a nasty pitching staff that swept the Reds out of the NLCS in 4 games. The Red Sox won the first 3 games, but then the Mets came back to win 3. When Gary Carter hit a 2-run homer in the 2nd inning of Game 7, I thought, "Oh [fork]. Not only am I going to lose to the Mets again, they're going to do to us what the Sox did in real life in 2004, coming back from a 3-game deficit." But Roger Clemens bit down on his mouthpiece and struck out 9 batters in the next 6 innings without giving up another run, and we won, 3-2. Funnily enough, as I was watching Game 7 through my fingers, I had some random music playing; just as Clemens started mowing people down, Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some!!" came on, which is a great stadium-rocker. So I've decided that, in this alternate universe, "Everybody Wants Some!!" has become the Fenway rally song instead of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." (Did I mention that this Game 7 was at Fenway? I can imagine the noise, with Clemens pitching and the K-cards piling up on the back wall of the bleachers.)
Meanwhile, in Queens, Doc Gooden, Daryl Strawberry, David Cone and Keith Hernandez are seething, and Sox-Mets has become a genuine Boston-New York rivalry rather than just another sad chapter in the "Curse of the Bambino."
Everybody wants some
I want some too
Everybody wants some
Baby, how 'bout you?
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), and as there was no news of PC port I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore the dumb camera positioning (I absolute LOATHE this "cinematic camera" sh*t, threw God of War in the garbage bin right in the first hour because of this).
