I don’t think this was the baseball news most expected to come out of Boston this off-season.
I am apt to scouring the Hot Stove reports to see what new moves had been made, if any, when baseball free agency starts (always during my lunch break, of course). Imagine my shock when David Ortiz’s name came up, though, in my feeds. But it hadn’t been because the infamous Red Sox slugger had been shipped from Beantown. Instead, he was still entrenched in Fenway Park—200 years from now.
Richie Branson, an independent game developer out of San Antonio, Texas, decided he wanted to put his skills to good use and make the post-apocalyptic Boston setting of Fallout 4 feel a little more authentic. Fenway Park was already a central part of the game—its ruins house one of the largest survivor settlements in Fallout 4—but Branson felt it was missing something. So, like many fans do with immensely popular games, he created a mod.
In this case, his mod inserted Boston Red Sox uniforms into the game, allowed players to dress up like Big Papi, and he could swing a massive baseball bat to defend himself from the dangers of the Wasteland. Maybe it was a bit of virtual karma for Ortiz, who now could be attacked by big green monsters after spending the better part of his career pelting a Big Green Monster with line drives (and yes, I understand that most of Ortiz’s batted balls actually go to right field because he’s a power-hitting lefty, but you get the idea). It was a fun little add-on, given to the gaming community for free by Branson, to be enjoyed by all, and which you can see in action in the video at the bottom of this article.
As reported originally by Steve Annear of the Boston Globe, however, not everyone did enjoy the mod—specifically, Major League Baseball. “The use of these marks is an infringement of our rights. We plan to enforce those rights,” a MLB spokesman said in an e-mail Thursday in a curt statement to the Globe.
This shocked Branson, as it would any sane person.
“I’m not trying to sell this counterfeit Red Sox jersey. I’m putting a free Red Sox graphic into a game that already insinuates the Red Sox are in the game, at Fenway Park,” Branson told the Globe.
Major League Baseball would not elaborate further on what action it would take, but frequently in cases like this, cease-and-desist orders are issued, and as Branson admits, he’d begrudgingly have to comply. Thus denying everyone Branson’s hard work.
It is the opinion of this gamer that if Major League Baseball knew what was good for them, they’d reconsider any action against Branson. Not only does this come off as another overly sensitive knee-jerk reaction that has become commonplace nowadays, but it further perpetuates the idea of how out of touch baseball is with the world around them.
As revealed earlier today, Fallout 4 had not only the best launch for a game in publisher Bethesda’s history, but one of the best overall launches in history, making $750 million dollars in just a couple of days, and shipping around 12 million copies worldwide. Instead of embracing this pop culture phenomenon, especially amongst a demographic that baseball is slowly aging out of as it continues to find it difficult to connect with young potential fans, MLB is trying to bully someone for having fun. Great way to show you’re exactly what people want to sign up for and be a part of, Baseball. Then again, this is the sport that still vilifies gambling more than drug abuse. Someone should let baseball know that it’s 2015, not 1915.
Fallout 4 is available now for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. But if the numbers above are any indicator, you probably knew that, and are unlikely to be a part of Major League Baseball.
RayCarsilloWrites.com 