Collection essentials #587: MVP Baseball 2005

Say hello to my favorite baseball video game of all-time, and possibly my favorite sports video game period, a sentiment shared by many. 

EA Sports was one of the most recognizable sports game brands back in the day, so of course they had plenty of experience making baseball games by this point. For years they developed the “Triple Play” series which started in the later days of the Sega Genesis and was best known for its entries on the original PlayStation. While this series was reasonably successful, it declined in its later days and did not make the transition to the following console generation well. EA decided to “retire” Triple Play and start a new series of games as a fresh start, called “MVP Baseball”. When the first game proved to be a success, EA continued it the following two years, culminating in MVP Baseball 2005 as their magnum opus.

What makes MVP Baseball 2005 so good? Well, one thing is the wide variety of modes and options. There are two different “franchise” modes where you take a team through however many seasons you’d like. 

“Dynasty” mode is a little more traditional. The amount of stuff you have to manage is sort of up to you, since you can “simulate” certain things you don’t want to deal with. For example, you have the freedom to play all the games of your team’s (real-life) minor league affiliates, but most players probably don’t want to do that and all they have to do is hit a button and a result is automatically generated instead. You can even do that with your major league games for any reason. You can even “simulate” a game inning-by-inning, and jump in and play as normal at any point that you want to. A player draft of the entire league from scratch is possible at the start of dynasty mode, which was hardly new by this point but is still a great inclusion.

The more unusual franchise mode is “Owner” mode where you, as the name suggests, take the role of an owner. This involves you constructing and running your own stadium, and a lot of gameplay involves managing finances properly as you set prices and spend your earnings. The goal is to wind up with as much money as you can after 30 years.

Of course modes don’t matter if the game isn’t fun to play, and MVP 2005 certainly is. The controls are very good, and let you do pretty much anything you’d want to be able to on a baseball field. Pitching involves using the joystick to aim the ball, and when playing against a human opponent you can make the ball cursor invisible so they can’t see where you’re going to throw it. The controller will vibrate once you’re aiming outside of the strike zone. When you select a pitch, you have to hold down the button to charge it up, then you have to release and press the button again when the meter hits a certain zone in order to throw the pitch how you intended. Messing up a pitch will telegraph to a batter where it’s going to go, giving them a big advantage. 

Hitting in this game is pretty great too. One thing that’s neat is that a pitcher’s hand will emit a streak of a certain color depending on what kind of pitch is coming, so hitters have a brief little clue to help them decide whether or not to swing and when. It’s not TOO much of a clue to make hitting too easy. Players don’t have to manually aim where their swing goes like in some baseball games, so they mostly need to focus on timing. What’s neat is that you can use the left joystick to influence how your hitter hits the ball. Holding upward makes you more likely to hit a fly ball, downward makes you more likely to hit a ground ball, and holding the joystick left or right makes you more likely to hit the ball in that direction. Not a lot of baseball games have a feature like this. 

There are options that let you tinker with all kinds of little variables to change how the game plays, including player performance. Once I had fun with making player parameters the lowest they could possibly be except baserunner speed, then putting all fielders out of their normal positions, and it was hilarious watching them be pretty much incapable of getting anybody out!

The graphics, sound and presentation may be slightly dated compared to newer baseball games in the last couple decades, but they’re still very good. The announcers are Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow, real-life broadcasters for the San Francisco Giants, which they still are over 20 years after this game’s release. The commentary isn’t perfect, with occasional lines that may not make perfect sense in context, while sometimes they can just be annoying (Krukow, you don’t have to CONSTANTLY suggest that I bunt!), but it’s still well-done on the whole. 

There are some cool unlockables that will be appreciated by fans of the sport. You can unlock two teams full of old Hall of Fame players. It seems a little bit odd at times who they did and didn’t choose…for example, Willie Mays is mentioned by name by Kuiper in one line, but he doesn’t actually appear in the game despite being one of the best and most famous baseball players who ever lived. Old stadiums are also available to unlock, as well as various classic uniforms for each team from throughout their history.

The MVP series unfortunately came to an end before long, since after this game, exclusive rights were signed that prevented EA from making a baseball game with real MLB teams and players. A little ironic, since EA themselves had done something similar with the NFL so they wouldn’t have any competitors to their Madden series. There would be a couple more MVP Baseball games using college baseball teams, but they weren’t very successful. 

I’ve always had a fondness for baseball, but I really exploded into a total baseball nut in early 2006. In the past I had enjoyed collecting the cards, playing the video games, going to games and occasionally watching the playoffs a bit, but I never really “followed” a team and watched them regularly throughout a whole season. But in the spring of 2006 I decided to really watch and follow the Boston Red Sox in a way that I hadn’t before, and I got totally hooked. For the next couple years baseball was equal or greater than video games in terms of my hobbies. This prompted me to go out and get one of the quality baseball video games that had been released in the last couple years, and I had heard good things about MVP 2005 so that’s the one I went with. And I played it to DEATH. I think I played roughly three full seasons in franchise mode (skipping just a handful of games), and spent a lot more time than that just goofing off and having fun in various ways. I didn’t even do everything there is to do, as I barely touched owner mode for example.

I spent hundreds of hours on MVP Baseball 2005. I can’t really quantify how many, but I would guess that it must be in my top all-time top five for number of hours I’ve put into a video game, or at least top ten. It’s a little unfortunate that I haven’t had too many opportunities to play with other people, as I didn’t subscribe to Xbox Live for online play back when I was playing this game and didn’t usually invite people to play it even though I know I had friends and family who had. Sadly, my old save data is gone too. As an adult I haven’t played much MVP 2005, perhaps since I just already have so darn much. But every time I’ve gone back for a little bit, it’s been very pleasant. It’s a game that just feels really good to play. 

There’s a lot more that could be said about it, but I only want these blog posts to be so long. If you like baseball video games at all, this is one that you’ve got to consider trying. As a fan of both video games and sports (baseball especially), this game is a quintessential essential in my collection.