Fighting Baseball

Fighting Baseball

JP Title	ファイティングベースボール
Release Date	Japan: August 11 1995
Adapted From	MLBPA Baseball
Platforms	Super Famicom
Developer	High Score Productions, Visual Concepts
Publisher	Coconuts Japan
Team Names	City names only
Player Names	Fictional names

Adapted from MLBPA Baseball for the Japanese market, Fighting Baseball replaces the original game's roster of real MLB player names with an internet-famous roster of jumbled versions of real athlete names.

Roster

Because the original release benefited from an MLBPA license, it contained rosters full of real MLB players. But the game did not benefit from that same license when it was released a year later in Japan as Fighting Baseball. So the players needed new names.

There is a long tradition among Japanese baseball video games of rosters with “parody” names, usually replacing one consonant or vowel with a different consonant or vowel in each name, like Ogawa -> Okawa. Fighting Baseball opted for something a little more extreme, creating whole rosters of chopped and screwed versions of real athlete names. Plenty of names are recognizable shuffles of existing players on the team (For instance, the Atlanta roster includes Blavine, Redrosian, and McSriff, all playing different positions than actual Braves players Glavine, Bedrosian, and McGriff).

The strong minority of Russian-looking names reveals that the source for these names included hockey players as well as baseball players, and you may be able to pick out some football names as well. A popular tweet screencapped a page full of these names:

fighting baseball for super famicom. some japanese guy had to come up with a whole league of fake american names pic.twitter.com/4lwzoBpg9f — Largemann (@lrgmnn) December 27, 2016

Among a certain crowd, Bobson Dugnutt and Todd Bonzalez are famous names thanks to this tweet. The commentary database in MLB The Show includes most of these names, so you can hear Matt Vasgersian introduce your create-a-player as Willie Dustice. You can even buy a Bobson Dugnutt t-shirt. Miketruk.com, created by @HexyLilith on Twitter, randomly generates more fake names like the Fighting Baseball roster screenshot, combining real MLB player names.

External Links

• A Google Sheet with the full rosters from the game
• A mod for Out of the Park Baseball 24 that will add Fighting Baseball's rosters and logos to the game