Tag: baseball

Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds

Here’s a really different post on something that only borrows the aesthetics from video games, but does so in an entertaining way. It’s the Youtube series Baseball Bits on the channel Foolish Baseball, which makes explainers about a lot of different topics related to baseball. Not video baseball; real, Major League Baseball. As such I normally wouldn’t be too interested, but they do a good job of their explanations, and it’s not difficult to follow along.

As an example, here is their recent 19-minute piece on controversial baseball superstar and incredible hulk Barry Bonds, that distills the essence of his long career into four plate appearances.

If this is of absolutely no interest to you, believe me, I understand. I don’t intend to turn this into a real-life sports blog any time soon. But I thought the use of 16-bit video game aesthetics to talk about something that has nothing direct to do with video games is interesting. It’s possible that this pixel-art kind of vibe has staying power, and people will still be referring to it, making it, enjoying it decades to come. Hey I can dream, right?

If you want to find out more about this “Barry Bonds” person, it’s even further afield, but Jon Bois at Secret Base did a great demonstration of the fear he projected upon the sport of baseball in his own video asking: what if Barry Bonds played baseball without a bat? (13 minutes)

Now that that’s done, I’m going to play video games for a while, and try to forget that there ever was such a thing as professional sports. Ta!

Sleep Baseball

We here at Set Side B are about computers, and we’re about games, and we’re about the intersection between the two, which happens by accident to include Northwoods Radio Sleep Baseball, available as individual files, and also through Google and Apple‘s podcast systems.

People have remarked about the powerful soporific effects of having a baseball game playing on the radio when you’re trying to fall asleep at night. But there are several difficulties with using baseball for sleep-producing: there’s not always a game on, when the game’s over there could be any loud thing on afterward, and there’s always the chance something exciting might happen that would rouse you from your repose and briefly cause you to care.

Sleep Baseball solves all of these issues. The games played are not on a radio but on your phone or computer, as audio files. The Sleep Baseball league is entirely fictional, so there is no actual drama. And the announcer is pretty relaxed and low-key, as are all the ads (for fake products and businesses), so you don’t have to worry about sudden bursts of interest.

If you’ve followed Sleep Baseball before, you should know now that they have recorded their third game, and have recorded some new ads. If you had gotten tired of the same game and events between the Big Rapids Timbers and the Cadillac Cars, it might be of interest to you to give the new recordings a try. Sweet dreams!