Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane (left) talks about 'MLB Front Office Manager,' the new stats-based baseball video game that he is promoting for 2K Sports. Beane was chosen as the consultant for the game because he is known as one of the smartest GMs in the game, and an expert at getting the most out of a small-market team.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)OAKLAND, Calif.--For the countless of devotees of rotisserie and fantasy baseball, there's a whole new game in town.
On Tuesday, 2K Sports will release its MLB Front Office Manager, and for those addicted to the stat-heavy pastime of running fantasy leagues, being a Major League Baseball general manager may never get closer.
The new game--which is unlike any baseball video game I've ever seen--has perhaps the perfect pitchman, Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane. For those not familiar with him, the game probably won't mean much, since as the main subject of Michael Lewis' hit book, Moneyball, Beane has long been considered the most cerebral and efficient guy putting contending baseball teams on the field.
There is no end to the roster of baseball video games that pay homage to the complexities of building a team from the ground up. They have mechanisms for relying on stats to determine which players are best in different kinds of situations--and many have had the endorsement of real-life players and the blessing of big league baseball.
But MLB Front Office Manager isn't like any of them. That's because the game is really about the process of running a team rather than the play-by-play action in which gamers have to swing at pitches, try to dive in the hole for sharp-hit grounders, and master all kinds of joystick button combinations in order to steal a base or pick someone off first.
The new 2K Sports game puts all the focus on what it takes to get a major league team going, and operates on a calendar that begins the moment the World Series ends and commences from there. That's because that's how it really is for each of the real-world big league general managers.
Known for his wheeling and dealing, Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane--the celebrity spokesperson for the game--surreptitiously checks e-mail on his BlackBerry during a press event for the game at the Oakland Coliseum on January 22, 2009.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)By bringing in Beane as the game's celebrity spokesperson, 2K Sports is making a big bet that the baseball stat-heads out there will jump at the chance to impersonate Beane, instead of the more common video game proposition of taking on the role of big league players and swinging for the fences.
MLB Front Office Manager is all about trying to navigate the millions of little details that go into the operational side of running a baseball team. From scouting amateur players to drafting them to making trades to figuring out what to do when stars get injured to sucking it up after a losing season and trying again next year.
The structure of the game is to go through a 30-year general manager's career, trying to position yourself as a Hall of Fame candidate. And instead of playing out each individual contest in each season, pitch by pitch, this game is about making the behind-the-scenes decisions that put your team in position to outplay others in simulated game after simulated game.
The 'hub' of 'MLB Front Office Manager' is a screen which gives players access to all the information they need to run their teams, including new scores, player information, contract details, rosters and more.
(Credit: 2K Sports)And that means that the action is entirely about figuring out how to run the front office--something that really hasn't been tried in a modern baseball video game.
"If it's possible, on an Xbox or PlayStation or PC, in a game to re-create the general manager's position," said Beane, "I don't know that you can find anything that duplicates it better than this. This is the ultimate fantasy player's outlet, because every decision, just like as with a real general manager, every decision costs something and is going to prevent you from doing something else. In most games, you draft anybody you want...This actually takes into account the depths of the game."
Part of the task of playing 'MLB Front Office Manager' involves choosing the attributes of your general manager. That includes determining his personal and professional background. The more emphasis he has on amateur scouting, the better he will be at developing a team from the ground up.
(Credit: 2K Sports)Indeed, as with the day-to-day responsibilities of real-life baseball general managers, this game is all about resource allocation. Players have limited budgets and have to decide where, and how, to spend. Every dollar spent on a hot free agent is a dollar less to spend on bench depth, or scouts capable of finding future stars in the sandlots of the Dominican Republic.
"It's a thinking man's baseball game," said Edwin Loo, the game's producer at developer Blue Castle Games. "It's for all those people who play fantasy baseball (and who) spend hours making (their teams and making trades). That's who we made this game for. This game is for those hard-core baseball fans."
Some of the elements of the game involve daily briefs on happenings around the big leagues. Players will see trades made by other teams--simulated in a single-player run-through of the game, or for real in online league play.
They will also be able to examine their own teams' rosters, determine trades they'd like to make with other teams, and then attempt to make those trades.
Of course, as in real baseball, successfully pulling off trades is tricky business. And that's one of the areas where Beane's expertise came into play: helping the game's designers build in an appropriate level of difficulty for achieving things like trades. Otherwise, it would all be too easy.
"A lot of the time (I spent) was really figuring out what would be the verbiage when talking about trades," Beane said. "They aren't as easy as just calling this guy and saying, 'Will this trade work?' It can be a frustrating process, and you can't think of it as a linear process."
Beane said a big part of his job as a consultant for the game was in helping craft the exact language of communications players get from an omniscient faux-Beane that helps out during the course of play with tips and other emails.
(Credit: 2K Sports)The game also offers regular e-mail communications--tips, in other words--from an all-seeing Beane operating behind the curtain. And the language of these communications was another time-consuming piece Beane's role in consulting on the creation of the game.
Beane--who admitted he is a big gamer himself, with a small obsession with games like Call of Duty and Age of Empires--said that he also put a lot of effort into helping to make sure that the game's rules adhered as closely as possible to that of the real big leagues.
Throughout the game, players will encounter situations where they have to use their brains--instead of just the quickness of their thumbs on joystick buttons--to succeed. Whether it's intelligently negotiating a young shortstop's contract, or putting enough emphasis on scouting to be able to draft well for next season, this is not your son's baseball video game. This is, as Loo said, a thinking person's game, and one that evolves slowly, and methodically.
During the event at the Oakland Coliseum, several actual Oakland A's players, including Cliff Pennington and Aaron Cunningham, got a chance to play 'MLB Front Office Manager.'
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)In fact, players have very little control over the actual play-by-play of each individual contest. Instead, they watch as the game's simulation engine runs through, say, a Red Sox-Tigers matchup. There are ways to control some of the action, but there is none of the hitting, pitching, or fielding involved in most baseball games.
That means this game is not going to appeal to a large, mainstream audience. It is definitely a niche title. On the other hand, there are millions of fantasy league and rotisserie players, and MLB Front Office Manager is clearly aiming at picking off their business. Whether that will happen is impossible to know at this point, but if one thing is for sure, it's that those who get a serious kick out of poring over baseball stats, transactions, standings and off season news could finally have a way to dive deep into the fantasy of being Billy Beane.
Of course, there is a cost to playing this game the way the designers want you to, given that it's supposed to be a 30-year career simulation.
"You choose the type of clothes you wear" as a GM, joked Beane, "and you choose who you are. Over 30 years, you lose your hair, and you put on weight as you do this job."
On the other hand, he said, the game is realistic enough, and teaches so much about the minutiae of running a baseball team that, "It wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of baseball general managers grow up playing this game."
San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion capture session for the 2K Sports video game Major League Baseball 2K9. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner. Click the image for a full gallery on the motion capture event.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)NOVATO, Calif.--Sports Illustrated magazine called Tim Lincecum "the freak," and for the motion capture specialists at 2K Sports, getting a good computer model of baseball star Tim Lincecum's unique, and violent, pitching motion presented a special challenge.
Last month, Lincecum, a diminutive 24-year-old whom you would never pick out of a lineup as a superstar ballplayer, won the National League Cy Young award, given to the league's best pitcher. The same day, the San Francisco Giant found out that he'd been chosen as the cover athlete for Major League Baseball 2K9, 2K's hit baseball video game.
Lincecum was on hand at 2K's motion capture facility, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco, for a day of performance: dozens of individual pitching and batting moves that the technicians would lead him through, one by methodical one, all to be used in the new game and all so that the Lincecum character would look and feel like the real deal.
For me, this was not entirely new territory. I came here last May to cover a very similar event, the motion-capturing of Rick Nash, the cover star of NHL 2K9, 2K's hockey game. In September, I also spent an afternoon at Industrial Light & Magic, watching the technicians there put my colleague Kara Tsuboi through the paces of the motion capture experience that Robert Downey Jr. went through while he was filming the blockbuster Iron Man.
So while the specifics of mo-capping a baseball pitcher like Lincecum differ in some ways from what's required for a hockey star like Nash or a movie character like Iron Man, much of what went on Tuesday was familiar ground.
As with the Nash and the Being Iron Man events, Tuesday's activities began with Lincecum donning a spandex suit and technicians placing a series of reflective markers all over his body. These, explained Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, are designed to capture and reflect the light from 56 mo-cap cameras spread throughout the facility so that the computers can record the minute movements of the actor--in this case, Lincecum--as he moves around. This is then translated into a 3D model of his skeletal structure that is used as the base for his in-game avatar.
At 2K Sports, everyone talks about the so-called "signature style" that they build for the real-life stars of their games. Essentially, said motion capture coordinator Steve Park, this means finding the stars' unique and specific motions and movements, ones that would be very familiar to their fans, and building them into the games so that when the fans play the Lincecum character, for example, they recognize his explosive pitching motion and can easily distinguish it from the more pedestrian motions practiced by dozens of other, less stellar, pitchers.
Park admitted that much of what he and his team were doing Tuesday was the same as what I'd seen them do for Nash. But he explained that mo-capping baseball plays does differ in some material ways.
For one, each of Lincecum's moves--and he would perform dozens of them--was a quick set piece that took just seconds and which covered a very small, specific piece of ground.
A computer model of Lincecum during the mo-cap session.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)To be sure, Nash's movements were also set pieces, and lasted just seconds, but they tended to be more free-form, one technician told me.
So the mo-cap team had set up a short pitching mound covered in markers that were meant to be used by Lincecum for specific foot placements for his myriad moves.
"The foot placement is actually pretty important for us," Park said, "for getting the right blend pose."
The blend pose, Park explained, is what happens when the technicians take different recorded motions and blend them together to create a single, smooth move for the game. Because much of what baseball players do looks very similar, even when differing in one way or another, it's crucial, Park suggested, to be able to create smooth blend poses.
It was important that Lincecum's many moves be spot-on, so that the end of one move would look similar enough to the beginning of another--say his wind-up blending into his follow-through--that they could be combined in the game without any jerky transition.
Hockey moves, said Park, are much more free-form and free-flow, and while building an NHL game also requires accurate blend poses, he added that it was much more important when shooting a baseball player that the player hit his foot placements precisely.
That's because, Park continued, baseball motions are very segmented and specific, whether someone is pitching, catching, or swinging a bat.
For Park and his team, having Lincecum be the cover star also was challenging for another reason: while they've done baseball games for years, Lincecum was the first pitcher they've featured. And that meant figuring out how to capture the pitching motion, something that is more important with a player like the Giants star, who, despite being stellar as a college player, scared off many of the pro scouts who watched him play.
"The quickness of Lincecum's small body is what scared off most scouts," wrote Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated last July, "that and what has become something of a trademark, a tilting of his head toward first base in the early phase of his delivery. The scouts equated his body speed with violence. That assessment, however, is akin to watching the Blue Angels air show team and not seeing the precision because of a fixation with the implicit danger. Lincecum generates outrageous rotational power (see video below)--the key element to velocity--only because his legs, hips, and torso work in such harmony."
Or, as the magazine reported, "The normal stride length for a pitcher is 77 percent to 87 percent of his height. Lincecum's stride is 129 percent, some 7.5 feet."
So for some of the mo-cap technicians, the best part of bringing in someone like Lincecum was the opportunity to be able to build a digital model of "The Freak" in motion, something that they see as a very cool piece of digital data.
All of which is to say that even if the mo-cap guys at 2K Sports had had experience with a pitcher, Lincecum would still have presented a singular experience for them.
That said, Park explained that, in fact, pitching is actually easier to mo-cap than hitting.
That's because batters have very distinctive stances that begin with "waggles," or nervous tics they express with their bats, as well as differing stances that can be wide or narrow, depending on the player.
And because Lincecum does take the occasional turn at bat, the mo-cap guys had to film him hitting as well.
I asked Park how many other major league players they bring in for the creation of their baseball game, and he said that, in fact, the number is very small.
"Part of the problem is that our development cycle is actually during the baseball season," Park said, adding that the players are contractually prohibited from doing the kind of extracurricular work that Lincecum was doing Tuesday during the season. "I don't know what our goal is...but it's always a challenge for every sport."
This means that while 2K Sports will bring in a Lincecum or a Nash as their cover athletes, in order to capture their signature styles, most of the players in the games are actually represented by actors, guys who have played their respective sports at probably a high amateur level, such as college, and who can be trusted to look like they know what they're doing.
Back at the 2K Sports mo-cap facility, Lincecum has taken the "mound," and is now warming up for his session.
Soon, he's ready, and after a brief introduction in which Park explains to the gathered crowd what, exactly, is going on, Lincecum begins his series of moves.
Right away, though, he's having a bit of a problem with some of the reflective markers they've put on his baseball glove, which keep flying off during his violent motion.
That's not a problem for the third shot, though, one in which Lincecum is supposed to stand idle on the mound.
He does that, standing totally still, until the director yells, "Cut."
Lincecum grins and asks if it was a good take.
As the crowd laughed, the director fired back, "More emotion."
But once Lincecum continues with actual pitching motions, he continues to have problems keeping the markers on his glove, meaning that after each shot, a couple of techs have to run out and put them back on.
Finally, he's done with his pitching moves, and now it's time for him to pick up his bat for the hitting shots (see video below).
The biggest laugh of all came when the director announced that Lincecum was going to hit a home run.
"He's going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he's ever done that, including Little League," said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports.
"Thanks," Lincecum said sarcastically.
After all the shooting was over, I asked Lincecum--who, by the way, is a big video game player and is currently spending his free time with Gears of War 2--what it was like to be featured in Major League Baseball 2K9.
"It's a one-of-a-kind experience for me," Lincecum said. "That's stuff that kids dream about all the time...You see yourself in the game, and you're like, 'That's me. That's me out there, except in video game form.'"
San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion-capture session for the 2K Sports video game, 'Major League Baseball 2K9'. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)NOVATO, Calif.--We're about to see Tim Lincecum, the 2008 National League Cy Young award-winning pitcher, go deep.
"He's going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he's ever done that, including Little League," said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, who was standing near the pitcher, explaining what he was about to do.
"Thanks," Lincecum said sarcastically.
The San Francisco Giants pitcher was here, at 2K Sports' motion-capture studio on Tuesday, because he's the cover athlete for the publisher's forthcoming Major League Baseball 2K9 game, which is slated to be released in the spring, just before next year's season begins.
And now, after about an hour of throwing all kinds of pitches for the mo-cap cameras, he's got a bat in his hands and, according to the script, it's time for the long ball.
Lincecum prepares for the mo-cap session. His suit is covered in reflective markers used to create a skeletal image of the subject's movement.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Of course, he's not swinging at real pitching, but he takes his swing, and it looks good. It's possible to imagine the ball soaring off Lincecum's bat and clearing the fences, even though he's a pitcher by profession.
For me, this was my second trip to 2K's mo-cap facility, after visiting in May for a similar session in which pro hockey star Rick Nash was filmed for NHL 2K9. But I'm actually a baseball fan and could pick out Lincecum from the crowd, whereas Nash had been an all-new face for me.
Lincecum, however, is tiny, at least as far as pro athletes go. If you didn't know which one he was, you would not have been able to tell he was at the top of his sport.
But once he was covered in reflective markers and began throwing pitches in front of the mo-cap cameras, there was little doubt. The kid--he's 24 years old--has a scary smooth pitching motion and throws heat (see the video below).
To be sure, much of what went on here today was familiar to me, having been at the Nash mo-cap session. But according to several of the people involved in putting this session together, shooting mo-cap of baseball presents specific challenges that other sports don't.
I'll explain all of that in a full story I'll post tomorrow, along with a photo gallery. So stay tuned for that.
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