Triple Play 96 All-Star Lineups
I’ve played my share of baseball video games over the years. I am currently on the Road to the Show in MLB The Show 21, where my alter ego Krys Regnom just started his THIRD straight year in Double-A, the game’s lowest level of the minor leagues. (Just because I log a lot of hours doesn’t mean I’m any good.) I played MVP Baseball 2005 until my PlayStation 2 wore itself out. And my overall obsession with the sport is largely due to my obsessions with All-Star Baseball 2000 and 2001 for the Nintendo 64.
But the very first baseball video game I ever played was a little number for the Sega Genesis called Triple Play 96. Due to the naming conventions of baseball video games, this title was released for the 1995 season, which means the players were based on statistics from 1994. This fact was probably lost on 8-year-old me, as I played the game – my friends and I just enjoyed using the general manager feature to create lineups with our favorite players. We would have Rickey Henderson bunt down the third base line every time, and then scream hilariously at the TV if the umpire had the audacity to call him out.
As luck would have it, at some point I copied the default lineups from this game into an old-fashioned composition book… because that’s just the kind of childhood I had. In addition to the projected 1995 lineups of all 28 (at the time) Major League teams, it also included a lineup for the AL and NL All-Star teams. A cursory glance shows that the rosters are not the same as the actual 1994 All-Star Game, but they’re close enough. And in any event, they show a good cross-section of the top players in each league, from which we can draw some astrological conclusions.
First of all, because of the lineup construction used by the game engine, each roster was given 15 batters and only 10 pitchers. So these numbers will be skewed offensively, with position players occupying 30 of the 50 available spots. The relative majority of those 50 – by a slim 7 to 6 margin – were Leos, as were actual 1994 All-Star starters Barry Bonds (2,270 / 20.3) and Gregg Jefferies (1,441 / 14.0). Incidentally, Jefferies was the cause of an alteration I recently made to Leo’s 1994 point total. After examining his career defensive profile, I decided it would be OK to have him play third base, where he had 277 career games, only 6 of which came after 1992. My incomplete understanding of him as a first baseman/left fielder was one of the downsides of doing this project reverse-chronologically.
The next-most commonly represented sign, Sagittarius, had the most overall points of any sign in the league in 1994. Their real-life All-Star starters were Matt Williams (1,896 / 16.9), who might have had a shot to set a single-season home run record had the season not ended prematurely, and Ivan Rodriguez (1,291 / 13.0), who is likely the best Archers catcher of all time. Virgo, Scorpio, and Libra were tied with five each – Mike Piazza (1,628 / 15.2) and Cal Ripken Jr. (1,511 / 13.5) represented Virgo in the real 1994 midsummer classic, with Ken Griffey Jr. (2,277 / 20.5) the lone Scorpio starter, and no Libras making the starting lineup for either side.
The rest of the signs shake out like so: Aries, Capricorn, and Pisces had four players each on the video game rosters. Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer had three apiece. And Aquarius, as usual, brings up the rear with just one. That one happens to be Roberto Alomar (1,455 / 13.6), whose generic batting stance you see in the above screenshot. Conclusions we can draw from this grouping is that signs in the middle-t0-late end of the Zodiac Wheel were having a good run in the mid-1990’s: positions 5 thru 9 all had at least five players, while no sign outside that range had more than four.
Of course a handful of All-Stars doesn’t make a great team, just as a sampling of a video game’s All-Star rosters doesn’t truly express the greatness of that game in general. It might not look like much by today’s standards, but I have to give a lot of credit to Triple Play 96’s intuitive gameplay, generic pixelated graphics, and catchy organ jingles in between innings for making me the baseball fan I am today.
Next time, we’ll march ever further back into the past with the 1993 season, a year of notable firsts and lasts in baseball history.