A fan-made Prospi player database
Many nights I wander the halls of my lonely abode, turning the same question over and over in my head: Won’t someone please make a searchable database of player attributes for old baseball video games? Must this task fall on my slumping, over-worked shoulders?
Praise be, at least for the first good chunk of Konami’s Prospi series and its bizarrely-titled The Baseball predecessors, this work has already been done. Want to see what Yu Darvish’s attributes were in his last year in Japan? Here you go:
This even includes stats for the “awakened” versions of the players, since these games let you spend points to level everyone up. I can’t imagine the amount of work that would have gone into this.
The pages can be machine translated with any browser, though the column of names on the right is going to be butchered by any machine translation as it will try to interpret most of the names literally. Maybe a good idea to click onto the player page you want before you hit translate.
The plespi.in website only goes up to Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2015, unfortunately, so we’ll have to look elsewhere to get a sense of Roki Sasaki’s attributes. There is this site for more recent player data (2019 through today), but it’s all made out of game screenshots so it’s not machine translateable. Not quite as nice.
Eikan Nine Crossroad release date
Just a quick note, we talked about Eikan Nine Crossroad last week and now we have an official release date for Japanese smartphones: September 20th.
Joey Gallo has some valid points
The above clip is ancient history but resurfaced on Reddit’s r/baseball this week and I enjoyed it.
Between that and Wil Myers getting in trouble one time and Blake Snell’s “slapdick prospect” clip, shouldn’t it be somebody’s beat to just watch MLB players’ streams and clip out the interesting stuff? I’m sure it would be twelve hours of straightforward boring nothing but there’s got to be at least some blind items about other players that leak out during these things and nobody’s paying attention to.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Kovox Pitch (PS4) Gameplay – I want this site to cover games with heavy baseball themes as well as just “baseball games,” and this is definitely an example of that. Kovox Pitch is a Taiko Drum Master-like rhythm game where you’re a baseball kid taking batting practice to the beat. Best of all, the soundtrack is all Eastern European shoegaze? Is baseball more popular in Europe than I thought it was?
- Super Baseball 2020 (Neo Geo CD) Gameplay – There is no greater joy than the Neo Geo CD core for MiSTer FPGA. And there is no other baseball game with a land mine mechanic besides Super Baseball 2020.
- Pro Yakyuu Netsusta 2006 (PS2) Famista Mode Gameplay – Been meaning to get around to this for a while, something of a progenitor to MLB The Show‘s Retro Mode. Within Namco’s realistic PS2 baseball game, there was a mode letting you use the current players in a recreation of Famista AKA R.B.I. Baseball. Weirdest of all, these rotund little sprites can play on a big .jpg of the 3D-rendered real parks, giving the presentation a little bit of a Cool World or Roger Rabbit aesthetic.
- Baseball Stars II (NES) Gameplay – Finally my tour of different versions of SNK’s Baseball Stars 2 has taken me to its darkest chapter, and tragically the most well-known one in the west. The version that isn’t called Baseball Stars 2 and isn’t actually by SNK. Romstar of Nolan Ryan’s Baseball fame(?) made this NES port that’s a disappointing follow-up to the fantastic original NES Baseball Stars and has none of the charm of the Neo Geo version.