My advice to all you people out there in internetland is to pick something weird to follow over time. My entry in this field was working to answer the question of who would be the last active MLB player who appeared in the Nintendo 64 game Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr.
The Yankees and Alex Rodriguez announced Sunday his final game will be on Friday, a vastly shorter timeline than when he said earlier this year he would play through the end of his contract in 2017.
Video game coders have to focus on a lot of details, but it’s the small, random ones that can make players laugh. Or maybe we give them credit anyway when a coincidence happens.
[There is a new post here updating the race following the announcement of ARod’s retirement]
In 2013, I began tracking the dwindling group of players still active in Major Baseball who had appeared in the Nintendo 64 game Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr.
(There is a new post updating the list for 2016. Notes on 2015: Wright did not make an MLB appearance, Hawkins planned to retire after the season)
The competition to become the last active Major League Baseball player who appeared in the Nintendo 64 game MLB Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. took a huge leap forward this offseason with the retirement of half the remaining field.
Gone are Derek Jeter, Paul Konerko, Jason Giambi, Raul Ibanez and Bobby Abreu. That brings the number of retired players in the game to 794 and leaves us with just five.
Still active:
-Alex Rodriguez
-David Ortiz
-Bartolo Colon
-Latroy Hawkins
-Jamey Wright
That’s it. Really it’s remarkable that any of these guys are still around given the fact that the average season the retired players last appeared in an MLB game was 2003 (2002.994962 to be exact).
ARod has the best contractual chance to be the last man standing since he’s currently signed through 2017. None of the other guys has a contract past this season, except for the team options Boston has for Ortiz in 2016 and 2017. Jamey Wright at the moment I write this is in limbo having just been released by the Rangers in the final days of spring training.
Last year I put my money on Ortiz, but somehow I think it would be really fitting if ARod was our final guy. I’ll secretly root for Colon though, since I’d like to see him pitching — and mainly hitting — until at least 2025.
I have a spreadsheet to keep track of all of this, so I can share some other interesting tidbits from the data set.
Of the five guys remaining, two of them were actually teammates in the video game:
In addition to the final season each guy played in, I also track the last uniform they were wearing at the time. I added up the total number of what I’m calling “last stop” players for each franchise from 1998-2014. The teams employing the most guys in their final year in the majors have a lot in common:
You see at the top big market teams that spent a lot of money in free agency as they made the playoffs often, followed by a group that spent money for brief, mild success and a lot of heartache.
You can also pretty well guess the teams that rank at the bottom of this list, employing younger, cheaper guys and not those in their final season:
This group with a few of the lowest spenders in the league has won two World Series titles since 1998. The top five won the championship eight times (obviously not a causal link, and the three Yankees’ World Series in the first three years of the set really skew it).
The only teams to win the World Series without a single player from the video game are the 2012 Giants and the 2014 Giants.
It will be interesting to see how many guys we lose after this year. I would predict three, setting up an epic two-man fight to the finish between ARod and Big Papi as they DH their way to glory.
And in case you want to see some of these guys match up, here’s ARod hitting into a fielder’s choice against Hawkins:
BONUS VIDEO: Griffey using the perks of having his own game (and a simple cheat code) to call his shot off Hawkins:
EA Sports has a feature in its NHL 15 game that allows you to create a player, with the option of starting with either a male or a female. But apparently someone forgot to tell the announcers.
I usually play what they call GM Mode, which allows you to take control of both personnel moves and play the actual games. I wanted to boost our lineup with a new left winger, so I created a female player named Nadja Backstrom, the fictional (as far as I know) younger sister of star center Nicklas Backstrom.
See, clearly female. She doesn’t get a lot of playing time on the fourth line, but she’s easily the fastest skater on the team. That leads to occasional breakaways when she’s on the ice, and in a game I played this morning she managed to score twice.
The announcers though, are locked into male pronouns. When she gets the puck, “he” gets the puck. When they talk about her speed being an asset, “his” speed is an asset.
Even the neat dipsy-do move and game-sealing goal didn’t earn Nadja the basic pronoun respect she deserves. Maybe next time she’ll have to fire a slapshot up into the announcer’s booth the get some results.
Or if EA is going to have the option for female players, it could put more than seven seconds into coding and voicing and add language that actually makes sense.
Technology is amazing.
Yes, we have cars that can drive themselves and we’re driving around a little roving science lab on Mars, but the greater direct impact on my life involves video games.
Back in my youth, if you were playing Nintendo and something amazing happened, the only way you could go back and see it again was if you happened to be running the video through a VCR. This is not a thing people did.
On later systems, sports games got instant replay functions, but if the people you wanted to share a replay with weren’t around there still wasn’t a good way to show them what happened. Even in 2002, the easiest way to tell someone — usually my younger brother — about something amazing was to take a picture on my flip phone and try my best to describe what he was seeing.
(In this case I punted to the Broncos and this guy caught the ball while standing out of bounds, pinning them at the 1-inch line. I was far too excited when it happened.)
Fast forward to now, and we have what would have seemed like something out of the Jetsons in 2002. The other day I was playing a game of hockey on the PS4, and after a whistle I cleaned out the opposing skater. One of his teammates immediately reacted to my late hit by throwing down his gloves and trying to beat in my face:
A slight quality upgrade from that cell phone picture. And really, this was easier for me to do. All it required was pressing roughly three buttons and the system uploaded this clip to my YouTube account while I continued playing.
The other cool thing I can do now is play games on the same team as my brother even while we’re sitting on our respective couches 15 miles apart. We’ve played countless games this way, starting with Madden on Nintendo 64 and continuing with every sports game we’ve had since then.
We’ve long been able to play games against one another, but even that technology was spotty for a long time. With computer games, at first you could only communicate through little chat windows, and no matter what you were playing the game was often choppy as your systems and connections struggled to keep up.
Now the gameplay is great, and we can actually speak to one another through headsets that plug right into our wireless controllers.
So when the whistle blows after I commit a penalty (like hitting someone after a play), I can actually hear him when he says “what did you do?” And he can hear when I laugh and respond with, “my bad.”
(The list has been updated for 2016)
Last year, I compiled a list of all the players who appeared in the Nintendo 64 game Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. and were still on an MLB team.
The idea was to both move us closer to definitively knowing which guy would be the last remaining, and to have a spot where any other similarly curious person could find the answer.
With another season upon us, it’s time to update the list. We’ve had a number of retirements, as well as a few guys stating that 2014 will be their last in the bigs.
So long:
-Mariano Rivera
-Andy Pettite
-Darren Oliver
-Todd Helton
-Mark Kotsay
Still active:
-David Ortiz
-Bartolo Colon
-Latroy Hawkins
-Raul Ibanez
-Jamey Wright
-Alex Rodriguez
-Derek Jeter
-Paul Konerko
-Jason Giambi
-Bobby Abreu
Last year, this list was really simple. Everyone just played baseball. This time, I have to add a bunch of notes.
Jeter and Konerko have both already said this will be their last year. Rodriguez won’t play a pitch this year because he was suspended for the entire season. Giambi is starting the year on the DL and may not actually play in the majors this year, but he’s on Cleveland’s 40-man roster. Abreu gets a major asterisk both because he wasn’t in the league last year, and just got cut from the Phillies. I read an article that said he had potential interest from other teams, so he stays, for now.
So who will be the last one? Both Ortiz and Colon are signed beyond 2014, and given that all he has to do is DH, I’m putting my money on Big Papi.
Unless of course Griffey makes a comeback…
**UPDATE**
The Indians activated Giambi and the Mets called up Abreu before their respective games on April 21, putting both in the majors in 2014.
It seems like at this point in the human experience there’s nothing a quick Google search can’t answer.
But every once in a while, you have a question nobody has tackled on the Internet. Usually there’s a good reason for that, as in the case of a question my brother and I had: How many players from the Nintendo 64 game Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. are still playing today?
Well, world, I hereby present to you the answer: 14. Somehow half of them at one point played for the New York Yankees. Also, six of them play first base. Here’s the full list:
-Alex Rodriguez
-Derek Jeter
-Jason Giambi
-David Ortiz
-Todd Helton
-Mark Kotsay
-Paul Konerko
-Raul Ibanez
-Bartolo Colon
-Darren Oliver
-Andy Pettite
-Jamey Wright
-Latroy Hawkins
-Mariano Rivera
I made a spreadsheet to figure this out, and while it took far longer than I care to admit, it does give me an easy way to slice up some data about the roughly 800 Major League players. The “average” player on this list last played in 2003 for either the Expos or the Cardinals.
The team most often the last stop for a player was the Boston Red Sox, which had a whopping 40 compared to the average of 26. Players were least likely to end their careers playing for the Twins or Marlins, with 14 each.
How did those teams perform? The seven teams with the most such players finished Nos. 3, 8, 2, 8, 12, 20, and 1 in terms of regular season winning percentage between 1998-2012. The bottom seven teams finished at Nos. 17, 26, 18, 6, 10, 13 and 22. Of course there’s no way I would call this a causal link.
Here’s a chart showing those two data sets plotted together. Across the bottom you see the teams ranked by their cumulative regular season records for those 15 years. The blue lines show the number of last-stop players each team has had during that time.
(Click for a larger image)
Having a lot or a few of these last-stop players doesn’t seem to make a difference at all when it comes to winning championships, though. Nine different franchises have won the World Series in this era. Their ranks among the most last-stop players: 1, 4, 7, 14, 15, 23, 24, 28, 30.
But that’s not to say there’s nothing to learn here. I see a case for a moderate approach that can lead to the ultimate success. If you look at the Giants and Cardinals, they’re in the middle in terms of being a last stop, at Nos. 14 and 15, and at the same time rank fourth and sixth in regular season wins. Most importantly, they have combined to win four World Series titles since 1998.
I think we already knew this, but doing what they do seems like a good path to success. Now there’s narrow data from a 1998 video game to further make that case (again while ignoring a million other factors).
I’ll keep track of the list going forward, and will note when we get to the last player. Any bets on which guy it will be? Should he win a prize or something?
(Shout out to baseball-reference.com for making it super easy to look up each player’s bio in a simple, clean format.)
Last week, video game maker THQ filed for bankruptcy. To most of you, this news is completely irrelevant, but to me it immediately triggered a flood of memories from the summer of 2000.
My younger brother Pat and I took all of our old original Nintendo stuff and traded it in for two Nintendo 64 games, one called Perfect Dark and the other, made by THQ, called Wrestlemania 2000.
Neither of us were major wrestling fans, but the game was extraordinarily fun. The main feature though, is that it allows you to edit any of the dozens of characters. You can change the name, their moves, and most importantly, their appearance. The result: an entire fleet of wrestlers from our own imaginations, including some inspired by real life.
Some were very simple, like taking The Rock, shrinking him down to a 5-foot-tall version and changing his name to The Pebble:
Others were more involved, but the ability to customize their face, hair and clothing from many options yielded some impressive look-alikes, such as Michael Jackson (one glove is not an option):
One thing we discovered is that if you set every option to 0, you end up with a crash dummy, which we naturally called Crash Dummy:
At the time, we created a guy named Jimmy Dean who today would clearly be called Ron Swanson:
Each of us had “our” guy we used when we played. Mine is a giant, glasses-wearing, blue-haired behemoth named Dr. Pain, Ph.D.:
My brother branched out a bit, but one of his main guys was Disco Stu:
There are so many others it would take me forever to post individually, so I’m going to just show them all in a nice little montage. You’ll notice some thematically similar characters appearing together — we tried to give each guy a tag team partner. Also note that some of the personas are complete inside jokes that will likely be incomprehensible. Enjoy:
If you’ve never seen Michael Jackson hit Mr. Clean with a chair, you’re missing out. And call me. We can make this happen.
