MLB Off-Topic

[DrJones]

Quote: Originally Posted by Blzer

No need to apologize! That was a wonderful read, and this is my favorite broadcasting duo of all time. It saddened me that we never got an "OUTTA HERE!" home run call, and in some ways I'm surprised to hear that they actually got to ad-lib some because a lot of it sounds like they're reading off a script (specifically Kuiper).

I remember being surprised as well that the "OUTTA HERE!" HR call was never recorded. (Or perhaps it was recorded, but the audio triggers didn't work.) And yeah, a lot of Kuiper & Krukow's lines would've written for them (probably by Ben Brinkman, aka Anthony Friese, who was production liaison at the time), but ad-libbing was always encouraged.

I never met Kruk and Kuip, as their recordings were done in California, and Ben (being a California native) was the natural choice to work with them. Each recording session typically included one EA producer (to work with the talent, make sure we got all the takes we wanted, player name pronunciations, etc.) and one EA audio engineer to deal with tech issues, etc.

I did work with Jim Hughson and Buck Martinez and wrote the majority of the dialogue for Triple Play 2001, including the goofy HRD stuff in the living room, etc. (They recorded their dialogue in Vancouver.) Also wrote a fair amount of Sean McDonough and Harold Reynolds' stuff in TP (no year) Baseball. Never met McDonough, but I worked with Harold in both Vancouver and Bristol, Connecticut (Harold gave me and an EA audio guy a tour of the ESPN campus, met Buck Showalter, Karl Ravech, and a few non-baseball folks like Mike Tirico, Steve Levy, Tom Jackson). I remember the exact date - October 21, 2001 - because it was Game 4 of the Yankees/Mariners ALCS and an Eagles/Giants SNF game. Bristol is a weird place.

Also worked with Bob Costas once in St. Louis. Costas is extremely guarded when it comes to his image. Rather than directly writing dialogue for him, I worked with his personal script writer (nice guy) instead. When it came to player names, he refused to record any names unless I was 100% certain of the pronunciation (with Hughson and McDonough, we'd often record multiple pronunciations for rookies & cup of coffee guys, then choose the correct version once we ascertained the proper pronunciation - this'd be easy today with MLB TV, more time-consuming 20-25 years ago). Sometimes I'd be questioned on certain things: "Are you sure about this, Jon?" and uh... well, I'm usually pretty confident in my baseball knowledge (or at least I was back then), but not at a "Bob Freaking Costas is calling me out" level of confidence, if you know what I mean. Kinda intimidating! Oh, and we were paying him 175K US for 5 days of work, LOL.

Quote: Originally Posted by Blzer

That's awesome that you were the one who signed the ball, too.

Yeah, that was fun. According to Ben, Kruk and Kuip enjoyed playing pranks on Barry.

[slickdtc]

So when’s the podcast coming out? Because this behind the scenes storytelling is gold. Got me feeling like a youngster again. I remember where I was when I got my hands on a copy of some of these old baseball games so to hear the background behind some of my favs is a sweet nostalgia trip.

[DrJones]

Quote: Originally Posted by slickdtc

So when’s the podcast coming out? Because this behind the scenes storytelling is gold. Got me feeling like a youngster again. I remember where I was when I got my hands on a copy of some of these old baseball games so to hear the background behind some of my favs is a sweet nostalgia trip.

I did a podcast a couple years ago with some Red Sox guys (one of them was Steve Perreault or something?) after they found out I was a "real person". Feel free to ask me Triple Play/MVP questions if you want.

[Speedy]

Quote: Originally Posted by DrJones

I did a podcast a couple years ago with some Red Sox guys (one of them was Steve Perreault or something?) after they found out I was a "real person". Feel free to ask me Triple Play/MVP questions if you want.

What did you work on with the game, Doc?

[DrJones]

Quote: Originally Posted by Speedy

What did you work on with the game, Doc?

The fun stuff, mostly.

My main responsibility was the player database:
- player rosters (lineups, bench, rotation, bullpen)
- player ratings (Contact, Power, Speed, translating splits into hot/cold zones, etc.)
- pitcher repertoires (pitch type, velocity, break, etc.)
- player "attributes" (jersey number, batting stance, bat/glove colour, skin tone, etc.)

Basically anything to do with players that was editable, the default came from my database (a couple dozen sheets in a gigantic excel file). This includes all the fake players on the minor leagues, the 1000+ placeholder guys with generated names (Ichiro Sheffield, etc.) and the custom fake players who were the Baseball America Top 100 prospects. A lot of the top prospects were named after dev team members or friends/relatives of mine. For example, the Smallenberg triplets (Chris, Mark, Dick) were named after one of my high school friends, his brother, and his dad, all of whom were/are huge Yankees fans.

I was also the one who got to choose which star players received non-generic faces, which batters and pitchers warranted signature stance/windup animations, which alternate and retro uniforms for each team got included, stuff like that. Verifying that all the logos and uniforms had been updated to the current style guide (our actual artists tended to know little or nothing about baseball, and the style guide itself often contained errors) and tediously recording or screenshotting stuff like this for MLB to sign off on.

Lots of dynasty minutiae. I created 6 custom MLB schedules (including a 30-team ASG rotation), 1 schedule for each of the minor leagues, made sure all the minor league playoff formats were true to life, etc. I worked on logic tables for CPU players - pitch selection/location, when to bunt, steal, issue intentional walks, etc. Trade logic, free agent logic, draft/development logic. I'm not a programmer, mind you - I worked with a database SE (software engineer, who was thankfully also a baseball fan) on a lot of this. I wrote up the bios for all the Cooperstown players and did their player ratings as well. A lot of formatting, a lot of data entry.

This is in addition to playing the game constantly, testing gameplay features, verifying bugs (the downside to making a baseball game in western Canada: very few of our testers were baseball-savvy, so producers like myself would have to go through the thousands of entered bugs to make sure they were legit: if so, we passed them off to the appropriate programmers/animators, etc.)

I had other tasks on earlier titles (like the pbp scriptwriting I mentioned earlier), but pretty much just the above for MVP 2005 because I was worked double duty on NHL 2005 at the time for a few months (a much less memorable game, LOL, but it was fun as a hockey fan!)

[l3ulvl]

Quote: Originally Posted by DrJones

I did a podcast a couple years ago with some Red Sox guys (one of them was Steve Perreault or something?) after they found out I was a "real person". Feel free to ask me Triple Play/MVP questions if you want.

Quote: Originally Posted by Speedy

What did you work on with the game, Doc?

Spoiler

Quote: Originally Posted by DrJones

The fun stuff, mostly. My main responsibility was the player database: - player rosters (lineups, bench, rotation, bullpen) - player ratings (Contact, Power, Speed, translating splits into hot/cold zones, etc.) - pitcher repertoires (pitch type, velocity, break, etc.) - player "attributes" (jersey number, batting stance, bat/glove colour, skin tone, etc.) Basically anything to do with players that was editable, the default came from my database (a couple dozen sheets in a gigantic excel file). This includes all the fake players on the minor leagues, the 1000+ placeholder guys with generated names (Ichiro Sheffield, etc.) and the custom fake players who were the Baseball America Top 100 prospects. A lot of the top prospects were named after dev team members or friends/relatives of mine. For example, the Smallenberg triplets (Chris, Mark, Dick) were named after one of my high school friends, his brother, and his dad, all of whom were/are huge Yankees fans. I was also the one who got to choose which star players received non-generic faces, which batters and pitchers warranted signature stance/windup animations, which alternate and retro uniforms for each team got included, stuff like that. Verifying that all the logos and uniforms had been updated to the current style guide (our actual artists tended to know little or nothing about baseball, and the style guide itself often contained errors) and tediously recording or screenshotting stuff like this for MLB to sign off on. Lots of dynasty minutiae. I created 6 custom MLB schedules (including a 30-team ASG rotation), 1 schedule for each of the minor leagues, made sure all the minor league playoff formats were true to life, etc. I worked on logic tables for CPU players - pitch selection/location, when to bunt, steal, issue intentional walks, etc. Trade logic, free agent logic, draft/development logic. I'm not a programmer, mind you - I worked with a database SE (software engineer, who was thankfully also a baseball fan) on a lot of this. I wrote up the bios for all the Cooperstown players and did their player ratings as well. A lot of formatting, a lot of data entry. This is in addition to playing the game constantly, testing gameplay features, verifying bugs (the downside to making a baseball game in western Canada: very few of our testers were baseball-savvy, so producers like myself would have to go through the thousands of entered bugs to make sure they were legit: if so, we passed them off to the appropriate programmers/animators, etc.) I had other tasks on earlier titles (like the pbp scriptwriting I mentioned earlier), but pretty much just the above for MVP 2005 because I was worked double duty on NHL 2005 at the time for a few months (a much less memorable game, LOL, but it was fun as a hockey fan!)

you were dying for someone to ask lol

[Blzer]

Quote: Originally Posted by DrJones

The fun stuff, mostly. Spoiler My main responsibility was the player database: - player rosters (lineups, bench, rotation, bullpen) - player ratings (Contact, Power, Speed, translating splits into hot/cold zones, etc.) - pitcher repertoires (pitch type, velocity, break, etc.) - player "attributes" (jersey number, batting stance, bat/glove colour, skin tone, etc.) Basically anything to do with players that was editable, the default came from my database (a couple dozen sheets in a gigantic excel file). This includes all the fake players on the minor leagues, the 1000+ placeholder guys with generated names (Ichiro Sheffield, etc.) and the custom fake players who were the Baseball America Top 100 prospects. A lot of the top prospects were named after dev team members or friends/relatives of mine. For example, the Smallenberg triplets (Chris, Mark, Dick) were named after one of my high school friends, his brother, and his dad, all of whom were/are huge Yankees fans. I was also the one who got to choose which star players received non-generic faces, which batters and pitchers warranted signature stance/windup animations, which alternate and retro uniforms for each team got included, stuff like that. Verifying that all the logos and uniforms had been updated to the current style guide (our actual artists tended to know little or nothing about baseball, and the style guide itself often contained errors) and tediously recording or screenshotting stuff like this for MLB to sign off on. Lots of dynasty minutiae. I created 6 custom MLB schedules (including a 30-team ASG rotation), 1 schedule for each of the minor leagues, made sure all the minor league playoff formats were true to life, etc. I worked on logic tables for CPU players - pitch selection/location, when to bunt, steal, issue intentional walks, etc. Trade logic, free agent logic, draft/development logic. I'm not a programmer, mind you - I worked with a database SE (software engineer, who was thankfully also a baseball fan) on a lot of this. I wrote up the bios for all the Cooperstown players and did their player ratings as well. A lot of formatting, a lot of data entry. This is in addition to playing the game constantly, testing gameplay features, verifying bugs (the downside to making a baseball game in western Canada: very few of our testers were baseball-savvy, so producers like myself would have to go through the thousands of entered bugs to make sure they were legit: if so, we passed them off to the appropriate programmers/animators, etc.) I had other tasks on earlier titles (like the pbp scriptwriting I mentioned earlier), but pretty much just the above for MVP 2005 because I was worked double duty on NHL 2005 at the time for a few months (a much less memorable game, LOL, but it was fun as a hockey fan!)

[DrJones]

Quote: Originally Posted by l3ulvl

you were dying for someone to ask lol

Sure. I like talking about this era. This being a sports gaming site, I thought some would find it interesting. Most of the games I made were either junk or ethically dubious, so I enjoy reminiscing about the one game I worked on that's remembered fondly.

Beats me complaining about what the Blue Jays and Canucks are doing.