Dudes Remembering Some Guys: MLB Franchise Mode Edition

I don’t know how all of you talk about sports with your buddies, but whether it’s sports or movies, sometimes when I’m hanging with my friends it devolves into “dudes just remembering some guys.”

I won’t claim to have coined that phrase as one of my favorite podcasts, The Athletic Football Show, is where I first heard it years ago — Robert Mays and former host Nate Tice loved to say it on the pod — but the phrase nails exactly what I do with my friends all the time.

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When it comes to movies, it starts out simply enough, one person says a quote from Step Brothers or whatever, then you have to follow it up with another quote from Step Brothers, and then dudes will be dudes and it turns into a little mini-competition to see who runs out of movie knowledge first.

This is also why I think Cine2Nerdle is one of the most ingenious competitive games to play as it’s movie trivia where the only goal is to remember more people than your foe. It’s the ultimate form of this phenomenon.

With sports, it’s the same thing for me. You start talking about a certain season and then you say “hey you remember so and so” and it devolves into a 10-minute conversation about Jarrod Washburn and how he won you your fantasy league in 2002.

And why I bring all this up is because the other thing that’s a little more specific about me is I have always kept a copious amount of notes (to a shameful degree) that detail my old franchise mode playthroughs. Long before there was a spot to post your franchise mode runs on OS, I kept track of them in a notebook as a kid.

I didn’t track everything, and I’ve lost most of the handwritten stuff from way back, but at a certain point I started tracking things in documents that I’ve now usually been able to save online and look back on for years and years. This leads me to today’s newsletter topic.

I want to go down memory lane and remember some dudes from some of my MLB franchise mode seasons through the years. My goal for as long as I remember has been to finish one 162-game season each year in an MLB game. This is my personal definition of a franchise mode playthrough (at least in MLB games), even though it’s obviously more a season mode playthrough.

I’ll do random offshoot franchise playthroughs during the same year that are more sim-heavy to build squads, but my “main” franchise is essentially a franchise mode where I seek to play every inning of every game for one season and that usually is enough for me until the next version.

Those who make it through multiple 162-game seasons playing every inning are champions, but outside of football games, most of my franchise modes are ultimately season modes in sports games since there’s just too many damn games to play in a single league year.

At the end of this, I hope you get a kick out of it enough to maybe share of some of your own memories on the Discord (or the OS forums), but either way, let’s have some fun with this.

Triple Play 2001 (2000)

I’m going to start back in the year 2000 with Triple Play 2001. My team of choice was the Mets. Piazza was on the cover, and I was a massive Edgardo Alfonzo fan at the time because, yep, you guessed it, I had just discovered fantasy sports and Fonzie had carried me the year prior.

Do you know how hard it was to find home runs at 2B even during the Steroid Era? It was like Roberto Alomar, Jose Vidro, and Jeff Kent along with Alfonzo for a couple years there before Bret Boone started to take over. So he was my guy, and I also loved Rey Ordonez at shortstop since he was a Web Gem HOFer.

But Alfonzo wasn’t the star of the franchise, and I guess I shouldn’t say franchise either because I’m pretty sure we still only had season mode in this game.

But no, the true star of the franchise was none other than Benny Agbayani. He was the Hawaiian hitting machine for me, and he outpaced Piazza, Alfonzo, Ventura and all the rest. He hit .388 and had 34 home runs as I coasted through to the World Series. I don’t know who I beat, but I do know Armando Benitez closed out the final game, and Al Leiter, Mike Hampton, and Glendon Rusch all got wins in the series.

This was also probably the year I played the most amount of video games ever in my life since I had a really bad injury right before summer break so couldn’t do squat during most of summer vacation. It’s why I almost got through seasons in two different games.

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