My favourite batter to play with was either Eric Karros or Eric Davis, can't remember which one, because he always held his bat upright with his hands at his waist rather than over the shoulder as nearly everyone else did ! I always seemed to get more hits with him. I didn't know too much about the intricacies of baseball at that time and it took me ages to hit the ball but I wasn't as clueless as the guy on this video, undoubtedly the funniest video I've seen for a long while [video=youtube;wEFaE-VshYI]
By now computers were starting to be affordable to the masses and along had come Chamionship Manager 2, the real start of the successful long running Football Manager (FM) series I bought all of them from CM2 to the current day FM14 and they were great, they were football but they weren't very stat based just as football isn't. The stats don't really matter at the end of the day - it's all about the ball in the net. My first real breakthrough on a stat based sports sim came when somehow, I can't remember how, I discovered OOTP 6 / 6.5 I still didn't really know what I was doing as I experimented with a few online leagues but soon dropped out as finances, options, waivers and other things were a complete mystery to me. Gradually I learnt myself what things did and meant and by 2008 I was ready to take the step back into the online world. I flitted through many leagues, not finding what I was looking for. Participation was still limited in those days, forums were very impersonal and I was conscious of being quite a bit older than your average American online player. Eventually I came across the MBBA just re-booting with 1995. No fancy webpage just forums but the commish was good and the GM's were a solid crew. I stuck there and despite a few gaps I am now on my fifth franchise there in (game date) 2015. They required a certain amount of writing, a few paragraphs here & there, which helped in the immersion but at the pace of three 10-day sims a week quite often was to much for me. In 2010 I took the plunge and applied to get into a league I had always admired, the PEBA. I had always thought that the amount of creative writing was beyond me but with a bit of friendly coaxing from founding commish John Rodriguez I managed to prove I could do it and they became my main league. The forums there are immense and I learnt lots of previously hidden intricacies from the friendly forums which really are a community with over 81,000 posts to date. The slower pace of two 7-day sims a week helped me to produce better writing but even that was a struggle at times with shift work. I got my reward last year in my fifth game year in the PEBA when I won my first ever online OOTP championship This year, having taken early retirement in late-2012 and struggled with time management initially, I began to look for something different and found it I think in One Day at a time sims. The slow pace is perfect for me to slip some writing in and I find the chat box a wonderful thing. I was never a fan of instant messenger things as my time on the computer was generally limited, snatched in-between work, meals and sleep. A message always popped up as I was rushing off but now I answer to no-one I find the chat box great to dip in & out of. So that's my life story of sports video games which kinda degenerated into my ootp history lol