The Wonder of RBI Baseball

My first baseball video game was RBI Baseball for the NES. Wasn’t it yours? If not, we’re sure that once you hear that horrifying background music you will remember the game soon enough. Fittingly, the team in the video above, the 1986 Mets; well they were the team I always played with on the game. I loved Tim Teufel. I loved Gary Carter. Doc Gooden threw absolute smoke. Mookie and Backman were spectacularly solid on the game even though they had shitty stats. Lenny ‘Dyrksta’ as I remember it was the best leadoff hitter on the game. Most of all they had the black Babe Ruth– my main man Darryl Strawberry. I actually was a little stathead even back then. My mom had given me a bank check book as a kid to play with. I began to keep track of Darryl Strawberry home runs that I hit on the game. I had already hit a shitload when I decided to keep track. So I didn’t want to be cheated. I wrote this gigantic number, probably like 2,340. Then from there every time I would hit a bomb with Darryl (and there was no regular season or postseason on the game, each game was an exhibition) I would erase the last number in the total and add a +1.

Give me a break. I was like, seven.