So I was watching X Games Aspen the other day and it struck me how impertinent it is to have a made-for-TV competition featuring largely made-up sports so close to the Winter Olympics. It’s like running a “Mythbusters: David Blaine” episode right before Blaine vanishes Wichita. After four score and seven years' worth of coverage of obviously made-up X Games events, people might think there’s no purpose to biathlon and team handball and yachting and short-track speed-skating and rhythmic gymnastics and all the other, older made-up events that comprise an Olympics. I realize there was a time when shot-putting got soldiers ready for war, but those were the days when warfare consisted of lobbing pots of boiling oil onto hordes of Gauls trying to scale the walls of a dung-daubed castle. Now, of course, drones do it.
It also marginalizes
snowmobile-flipping. Call me revisionist, but I maintain that cranking a
Ski-Doo up to 90 miles an hour, propelling it off a ramp and spinning it three
complete revolutions before landing is every bit as much of an athletic feat as
sliding on your belly down a glorified toboggan run. The only difference is the
motor and the three complete revolutions, and those are way cooler than
anything the luge track has to offer unless A) you really like the sound the
word “luge” makes in the back of your throat or B) you like plastic-coated
Austrians.
(I sent this to Jim McLauchlin
because I was kinda proud of what I had written, and as always he had a retort.
It goes like this: “My favorite sport is always biathlon, which should be
retitled, ‘What The Finns Have To Do Every 40 Years When The Russians Invade.’
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that EVERY biathlon medal ever has been won by a
Finn, with the exception of like, maybe one by a Russian who was a particularly
good shot and was kinda hungry. Here's an idea: Loose three Ivans and three
Finns in the woods with rifles and skis. The three who make it out get medals.”
So naturally I went back and checked. A Finn has never won gold in the biathlon,
but a lot of Russians have – and the Russians have dominated the pursuit
competition. McLauchlin might want to double-check the over-under on the
Ivans.)
I don’t know where exactly I’m
going with this, other than back to sport. The Olympics and the X Games remind
us what the Super Bowl doesn’t: all sports are made-up. No sport serves a
purpose other than to institutionalize play. Nothing wrong with play, by the
way; I’m a huge play fan. My life has been spent making everything seem like
play and so far, so good.
Taken from that standpoint, though,
sports cards are sort of ridiculous. Why would you take a picture and put it on
a piece of cardboard to heroify someone playing a game? My kids built an igloo over the weekend, and I didn’t feel like
I had to put them on a card for that, even though igloo-building shares its
chassis and other important bits with playing in the Super Bowl.
(I’m allowed to say “Super Bowl,”
right? Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl. I guess I can.)
I never knew a single person in the
trading-card industry who wrestled with this ethical dilemma any more than they
wrestled with Hacksaw Jim Duggan. They would have let Larry Zybysko put them in
a figure-four deadfall in return for a baseball license, but alas, Zybysko was
all tied up with Gorilla Monsoon, and the licenses were all tied up with Upper
Deck.
However, a few enlightened trading-card
folks did realize that as the price and sophistication of sports cards
increased their play value decreased. They also saw their lunch being eaten by
Starmies and Hitmonchans and all the variegated witches and wizards of Magic:
The Gathering. These were cards you could play with; they were cards you had to
play with, because taken at face value they were as engaging as a subway pass.
And they sold. God they sold, and
they cost next to nothing to make. Some cardmakers got mad at their success;
others tried to get even. If they can sell the excrement out of made-up-cards
of made-up things used to play a made-up game, they reasoned, we should be able
to sell quadruple the excrement out of made-up cards of real players used to
play a made-up game. And so it came to pass that Topps, Donruss, Fleer, and
Upper Deck, in addition to longtime baseball-game maker APBA, came out with
sports cards that were gamified to one degree or another.
Of course, these days everything
from your colonoscopy to your taxes are gamified, and we expect it. Figurative
millions are buried casketless each year because online casket sites don’t give
out extra lives. Well, 20 years ago sports cards were being gamified, and no
one found it novel. Or compelling or entertaining, either, but we’re getting to
that.
Upper Deck affixed sort of a game
border to the Special Edition chase in its 1995 baseball. The game was of the
one-action-per-card variety, meaning it would take a whopping pile of cards to
play and the desire to crease and dog-ear to death what ostensibly were
added-value cards. It was a half-hearted nod in the direction of games, and it couldn’t
have been less of an empty gesture if it had been endorsed by Joe Montana and Martha
Stewart.
(Conceptually the Upper Deck game
was identical to the winner-and-still-champeen of baseball-game trading cards, the
1968 Topps Baseball game set, albeit at 400 times the per-pack price. The ’68 game
cards were awesome. The art was spectacular, the player roster couldn’t be
beat, and the game played like butter. I played the World Series over and over
with those cards for years afterwards, almost always pitting the Phillies
against the Brewers. The Brewers usually won, in spite of the heroic efforts of
Phillies pitcher Ron Diorio. I had a Ron Diorio thing going on for years, and I
have no idea why a Alaskan kid transplanted to Wisconsin would get so far
behind a Philadelphia pitcher with a whopping 25 major-league games and no
decisions.)
I guess you could say Top of the
Order was realistic in that regard, but I’m not looking for realism when I sit
down to play a baseball card (or board) game. I’m looking to have fun playing a
game. Any resemblance it bears to real baseball is a bonus.
That may be why the ’68 Topps
baseball game is so much fun. It follows the basic rules of baseball – three
outs, nine innings, team with the most runs wins – but doesn’t go much deeper
than that and doesn’t care to. It’s made for nine-year-olds. You just flip
cards and let wang chung. Sometimes it chungs your way and sometimes it doesn’t,
and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t mind that lack of control; it
makes me feel like I’m nine years old again, and any sort of caloric intake I
can dream up is A-OK.
Back to Top of the Order. The cards
were color-coded with actions that came into play when you spun a play wheel.
Dice were involved, too, and I believe a specially licensed magic 8-ball. In
the end, taking a turn involved implementing an action, spinning a wheel,
drawing a card, implementing another action, consulting the magic 8-ball, doing
a couple of battements, and pinching yourself hard to wake up.
Realistic, right? The only thing
missing that would make this just like real baseball is the hot dogs. And the
baseball.
Top of the Order plays only
slightly less ponderously than Pursue the Pennant, the sports-simulation game most
popular with tree sloths and woolly mammoths, though PtP rewards the extremely
patient and clinically dead with some highly realistic outcomes.
We’re going to be spending some
time with these sports-cough-simulation games over the next several weeks, and
we’ll come back to this point many times, but just to get this out there, the
reason why something like Pokémon got the popularity and sports-simulation card
games didn’t is because there are no preconceived notions in Pokémon and
baseball is nothing if not preconceived. There was no way Kevin Stocker could
be the big hero in Top of the Order because we already knew Kevin Stocker the
human being from his performance in Major League Baseball: Human Being Edition,
and he was no hero. And if he perchance was exposed to a special Top of the
Order chemical cocktail (including gummies) that transformed him into the TOTO
version of Elastic Man and he took Eric Gagne deep downtown and became the hero
of heroes, we’d say the game’s wacked. On the other hand, your Venusaur can
play Vine Whip for 25 straight turns and no one thinks it’s a flaw. It’s what
Venusaur does – and even though it’s just freaking Vine Whip, it’s still more
compelling in the artificial realm of the game table than a 100-mile-an-hour
Randy Johnson fastball.
That’s the long, master’s-thesis
way of saying that baseball simulation games that try to simulate too much are
a bad idea, though so are baseball games that don’t simulate enough. We’ll look
at another failure to learn that lesson next time.
